St Neots Parish Church

I’ve just been to London to see an exhibition of old copies of the bible. There was a copy of the gospels dating from around the year 250 AD and a whole New Testament from around 350, still perfectly legible – for those who can read Greek – and in the same words as in my Greek bible at home. Most fascinating of all, however, was a small fragment from an unknown gospel. The text tells mostly the same stories as in the gospels in our bibles but includes two stories which are not in our bibles at all. It is dated somewhere between 100 and 150 AD.

We have been used to all sorts of wild tales that the church has conspired to conceal the real truth about Jesus, which is supposed to be very different from the story told in our gospels. That could be the case, but the evidence is not there. For the interesting point about that earliest unknown gospel fragment is how similar its contents are to the bible on my shelf; it has not subversive stories at all.

Apart from those very early documents there are also examples of extraordinary skill in the production of breathtakingly beautiful works, all executed by hand by monks; pages of fine decoration, made by those who wanted to delight the eye as well as stir the heart by the words that they believed told them the truth. When I think how carelessly we read the words of Scripture, I remember how they attended to every word.