What happened to the gospels that were left out?

In his Church History, Eusebius divides the writings in circulation into the accepted, the disputed and the rejected. Accepted: the four Gospels, Acts, the letters of Paul, 1 John, 1 Peter and, "if it really seem proper", the Apocalypse of John, which he lists again among the rejected. Disputed but widely known: James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John.

Then a fourth group, set apart from the rest, which he says he is listing so that these books can be recognised: works "cited by the heretics under the name of the apostles", among them the Gospels "of Peter, of Thomas, of Matthias", and various acts.

One of his reasons is literary: the style is "at variance with apostolic usage". It arrives alongside a doctrinal one, in a sentence that ends by calling them "the fictions of heretics", so the argument a reader can weigh and the accusation are the same sentence.

This is a work of history, copied widely enough to survive in numerous manuscripts and in early Syriac and Latin translations, naming the books it excludes. Some forty years after it was finished, Athanasius does the same thing from the other direction, listing what is in and adding a second group that may be read but is not canonical.

Whatever else the process was, it was not conducted quietly. The names of excluded books survive in the lists of the people who excluded them.

Some of the texts Eusebius names can now be read, not only listed: the gospels of Peter and Thomas are among the non-canonical gospels scholars study today. One large modern find of such writings is the thirteen codices recovered in Egypt late in 1945, which took another thirty-two years to reach print in full.

So the twentieth century did recover texts of this kind. It did not discover that such books had existed, which had been on the record for sixteen hundred years.

They are not a single suppressed alternative Christianity. They range from sayings collections, the Gospel of Thomas among them, to infancy gospels, including later compilations. Some elaborate older traditions and others dissent from them, and what they have in common is mainly that they did not become canonical.

Dating is contested and matters enormously. A text from the early second century is evidence about early Christianity; one from the fourth is evidence about the fourth. The Gospel of Thomas is the standing example: scholars have still not settled its date.

One account has bishops with growing institutional power closing down a diverse movement. Another has congregations converging on what they were already reading and the lists ratifying it afterwards.

The evidence supports parts of both. The manuscripts themselves are the part of it usually ignored, and Hurtado, reading them alongside what other early writers say about these books, finds them circulating among interested readers rather than serving as the scriptures of separate churches.

Eusebius names what he knows about. A text that circulated in one region, was never copied widely, and never provoked anyone into writing about it can leave nothing at all: no manuscript, no title in a catalogue, no quotation by an opponent.

The rejected books that can be counted are the ones prominent enough to be rejected by name, or lucky enough to survive in a copy. How much was written and simply dropped is not a knowable quantity.

For some readers the sheer number of gospels shows that the canonical four are a selection among competitors, and their authority a matter of who won. For many Christians the same evidence shows a church able to tell the difference, using criteria it stated.

Both are looking at one list. The disagreement is about whether the sorting was discernment or power, and a list of titles does not settle that.