Introduction to This Volume
How this book is arranged
This is the hundred and sixth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. The first volumes of the series follow the writers in order of date; this volume belongs to the later part of the series, which gathers the apocryphal and pseudepigraphal writings: the gospels of Christ’s birth and childhood, the stories of the Virgin Mary and the cycle of the Acts of Pilate. This volume holds the fragments of lost gospels, the gospels of the infancy of Jesus and of the birth of Mary, the accounts of the death of the Virgin, and the Gospel of Nicodemus with the other writings about Pilate.
Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.
The translations
The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations. The Ante-Nicene translations of Alexander Walker were transcribed by the volunteers of English Wikisource. The translations of M. R. James and A. Mingana were read by machine from scans of the printed books and have not been proofread against the pages, so a misreading may remain. Page numbers and footnotes are left out. Greek, Hebrew and Latin words in the editors’ notes are left out or, where a Greek word occurs in the text itself, given in Latin letters.
In this volume
The gospels of this volume are not the lost gospels of the first century but the legends that grew up after it. They tell of the childhood of Jesus, the birth and early life of Mary, the carpenter Joseph, and what Pilate saw and did. Most were written between the second and the ninth centuries, and they were widely read and often copied, and they filled the churches with feast days and paintings.
The Acts of Pilate, which also carries the Descent of Christ into Hell, was the most influential of them in the Middle Ages. It is given here in its Greek and Latin forms, with the reports and letters of Pilate that were attached to it. The translations are those of Alexander Walker in the Ante-Nicene Library, with M. R. James for the earlier fragments.
Dates and authorship
None of these books is part of the Bible. Some were written by Jews before the time of Christ, some by Christians in the first centuries, and some much later, and many carry the name of a patriarch, an apostle or a Father who did not write them. Some of them contain stories that the Church never received and teaching that it rejected. They are printed here so that a reader can see what they say and judge them against the Scriptures, as the Fathers themselves did. The books in this volume range from the second century to the ninth; the Gospel of Nicodemus and the Pilate legends grew over many centuries.