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The
lost(or missing) books of the Bible
are
those documents that are mentioned in the Bible in such a way that
it is evident they were considered authentic and valuable but that
are not found in the Bible today. Sometimes called lost books, they
consist of at least the following: The Book of the Wars of the Lord
(Num.
21:14);
Book of Jasher
(Josh.
10:13; 2 Sam.
1:18);
The Acts of Solomon
(1 Kings.
11:41);
The Book of Samuel the Seer
(1 Chr.
29:29);
The Book of Gad the Seer
(1 Chr.
29:29);
The Book of Nathan the Prophet
(1 Chr.
29:29; 2 Chr.
9:29);
The Prophecy of Ahijah
(2 Chr.
9:29);
The Visions of Iddo the Seer
(2 Chr.
9:29; 12:15; 13:22);
The Book of Shemaiah
(2 Chr.
12:15);
The Book of Jehu
(2 Chr.
20:34);
Sayings of the Seers
(2 Chr.
33:19);
The Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians,
earlier than our present 1 Corinthians (1 Cor.
5:9);
possibly an earlier epistle to the Ephesians (Eph.
3:3);
The Epistle of Paul to the Laodiceans
(Col.
4:16);
and some prophecies of Enoch known to Jude (Jude
1:14).
Discovered:
1) The Shepherd of
Hermas, considered a valuable book by many Christians, and considered
canonical scripture by some of the early Church
fathers such
as Irenaeus.
The Shepherd was very popular among Christians in the 2nd and 3rd
centuries. It was bound as part of the New
Testament
in the Codex
Sinaiticus,
and it was listed between the Acts
of the Apostles and
the Acts
of Paul in
the list of the Codex
Claromontanus.
2) The Epistle of
Jesus Christ is
a reply to a letter reportedly written to him by King Abgarus of Edessa .
It was known
to Eusebius and available ever since.
3) The Acts of Pilate,
(also known as The
Gospel of Nicodemus)
Epiphanius refers
to an Acta
Pilati
written about 376 AD),
but a later Greek text shows evidence of later editing.
4)
Epistles of Paul and Seneca.
Generally thought to be a fraud.
5)
Paul’s Epistle to
the Laodacians,
It
is meantioned in Colossians 4:16.
Oldest known copy of this epistle is in the Fulda manuscript written
for Victor of Capua in 546 AD. It is mentioned by various writers from
then onwards. There is also another spurious Book of Jasher, published in 1750, in
which Jasher is treated as the name of the author. There is a Hebrew midrash also
known as the Toledot
Adam and Dibre
ha-Yamim be-'Aruk.
Translated (1840),
6) Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians
Clement was Bishop of Rome, from 88 AD to his death in 99AD . The oldest
document to contain the Epistle of Clement was included in an
ancient Greek Bible given by the Patriarch Cyril
of Jerusalem to
KingCharles
I of England.
7)
Epistle of
Barnabas Barnabas was a companion of Paul. Though known of since the fourth
century. The complete
Greek manuscript was discovered by Philotheos
Bryennios at Constantinople .
8) The Nag Hammadi Library,
a collection of Gnostic
texts discovered
near the Upper
Egyptian town
of Nag
Hammadi.
Twelve leather-bound
papyrus codices buried
in a sealed jar were found by a local farmer named Muhammed
al-Samman. The writings in these codices comprised 52 mostly
Gnostic treatises,
but they also include three works belonging to the
Corpus Hermeticum and
a partial translation/alteration of Plato's Republic.
The early texts included are:
9) The Dead Sea Scrolls,
a collection of some 981 different texts were discovered
(1946—1956) in eleven caves in the immediate vicinity of the Jewish
settlement at Khirbet
Qumran in
the eastern Judaean
Desert..
The scrolls date from the last three centuries BC
through to the first century AD and contain parts of all of the
books of the
Old Testament
except Esther and four of the 15 books of the Apocrypha. In addition
to one or more copies of these books, the Dead Sea Scrolls also
contained:
10) The Gospel of
James,
a papyrus dating to the third or early 4th century, is kept in the Bodmer
Library,Geneva. Some
suggest the original may have
been written as early as 145 AD
11)
Secret Gospel of
Mark
Morton Smith,
a professor of ancient history at Columbia
University,
found a previously unknown letter of Clement
of Alexandria in
themonastery of Mar
Saba on
the West
Bank transcribed
into the endpapers of a 17th-century printed edition of the works
of Ignatius
of Antioch.
12)
Jordan Lead Codices
a collection of Christian
writings on lead and copper plates allegedly
found in a cave in Jordan Possibly dating from the first
century
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