In my 2015 book The Many Faces of Christ, I challenged what I called the mythology of the lost gospels, the view that they represented any kind of more authentic Christian truth, one suppressed by later institutional bureaucracies. In most cases, I suggested, the lost gospels were far later than our canonical texts, and had no special claim to historical authority. But I also argued that few of those gospels ever had been truly lost, in the sense that the great majority continued to be read and used long after that concealment at Nag Hammadi, around 380 AD. However inconvenient that might be for the attractive myth of a Sacred Truth long hidden but not found, most of those lost gospels enjoyed a long afterlife, and that is even true of the now-venerated Gospel of Thomas. The evidence has always been there for anyone who cares to look for it.
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