The Gospel of the Savior

On March 20, 1967, the Berlin Egyptian Museum acquired a collection of thirty-three parchment fragments written in Coptic. There they were given the simple designation P22220 and stored unceremoniously in paper folders. Almost thirty years later, two American scholars working independently of each other--Charles Hedrick and Paul Mirecki--began to study these forgotten fragments. What they found were pieces of a previously unknown gospel, a gospel composed perhaps in the second century and written down sometime between the fourth and seventh centuries. This new gospel text contains sayings of a speaker identified as "the savior" and dialogues between the savior and "the apostles." While it shares some sayings with the canonical gospels, there are remarkable additions: To the familiar "You are the salt of the earth" (Matt 5:13), for example, is added the phrase "you are the fire that illuminates the world"--a saying unknown in the canonical gospels. In this first-ever publication of The Gospel of the Savior, the scholars who discovered and reconstructed it provide a translation and critical original language text, along with illuminating introduction, commentary, and Coptic/Greek indices. This volume also includes complete facsimile reproductions of the fragments.