Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament

Bart D. Ehrman's Lost Scriptures, Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament, published by Oxford University Press in 2003, is a scholarly anthology of annotated translations of non-canonical early Christian gospels, acts, epistles and apocalypses, texts that circulated among early Christian communities but were ultimately excluded from the New Testament canon. Ehrman is a widely published specialist in early Christian textual history. Its strength is that it makes primary non-canonical texts, otherwise scattered across specialist editions, available together with Ehrman's own scholarly introductions. Its limit is that Ehrman's framing introductions represent his own interpretive positions on contested questions of dating and authorship, positions not every specialist shares, so a claim about a specific text's date or authorship drawn from this volume should be checked against the wider scholarship Ehrman himself is in dialogue with.