What do the apocryphal gospels say?

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The apocryphal gospels, which proliferated in the Church in the s. II and later, there are fundamentally of three classes: those of which only some fragments written in papyrus and quite resemble the canonical, those who they were preserved complete and narrate with pious sense things about Jesus and the Blessed Virgin, and those others who put under the name of an apostle strange doctrines different from those the Church believed for the true apostolic tradition.

The first ones are scarce and they hardly say anything new, perhaps because little is known about its content. To them belong the fragments of the "gospel of Pedro "who narrate the Passed

Among the seconds the oldest is the one called "Protoevangelio de Santigo" that narrates the permanence of the Blessed Virgin in the temple since I had three years and how was San José appointed widower to take care of her when she turned twelve.

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The priests of the Temple gathered all the widowers and a prodigy in José's rod consisting of that a dove came out of it made him the designated. Other later apocryphal that collect the same story, as the "Pseudo Mateo", tell that the rod miraculously flourished. I also know stops the Protoevangelium in telling the birth of Jesus when Saint Joseph went with Mary to Bethlehem.

It tells that the patriarch saint sought a midwife which He was able to verify Mary's virginity in childbirth. In a line similar to other apocryphal ones like "the Nativity de María "stops to narrate the birth of the Virgin of Joaquín and Ana when these were already elderly. The childhood of Jesus and the miracles he did as a child the "Pseudo Tomás" counts, and death de San José is the main theme of "José's Story The Carpenter". In the Arab apocryphal of childhood, and later, attention is focused on the Magi of which in an Ethiopian apocryphal even the names that have become so popular. A reason very dear in other apocryphal, like the one called "Rest Book" or the "Pseudo Melitón" was the death and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, narrating that she died surrounded by the apostles and that the Lord He transported his body in a celestial car. All these pious legends circulated profusely in the Age Media and they served as inspiration to many artists.

Another type of apocryphal are those who proposed heretical doctrines. The Holy Fathers quote them for them and they are often appointed by the name of the heretic who had composed them, such as of Marcion, Basilides or Valentine, or by the recipients to whom they were addressed, such as the Hebrews or the Egyptians. Other times the same Holy Fathers accuse these heretics of putting their doctrines under the name of some apostle, preferably Santiago or Tomás.

The informations of the Holy Fathers have been confirmed with the appearance of some forty gnostic works in Nag Hammadi (Egypt) in 1945. Normally they present alleged secret revelations of Jesus that are lacking of any guarantee.

They usually imagine the Creator God as an inferior and wicked god (the Demiurge), and the acquisition of salvation by man to from the knowledge of his divine origin.

DM