What Books Were Removed or Rejected From the Bible?

How did the Bible's canon actually form?

Slowly, and by inclusion rather than subtraction. For roughly three centuries Christians had scriptures but no fixed list: communities read what they trusted and argued about the edges. Lists were written down to record that usage, and the first to match today's twenty-seven New Testament books exactly is Athanasius's Easter letter of 367 CE.

The inventories along the way show the edges moving. The Muratorian fragment — usually dated to the late second century, though some scholars argue for the fourth — accepts most of today's New Testament, but also the Wisdom of Solomon and the Apocalypse of Peter, and allows the Shepherd of Hermas for private reading only. Eusebius, writing around 320 CE, sorts books into “accepted,” “disputed,” and “rejected” writings (Church History III.25, in McGiffert's 1890 translation) — and parks the Revelation of John in both the accepted and the rejected columns, “if it seem proper.” Councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) then ratified lists that, for the record, include Tobit, Judith, and two books of Maccabees. Nothing was cut from a finished Bible at any of these moments; a boundary was drawn around a collection that had been forming for generations. What happened to the books outside the boundary is the interesting part.

Removed, never included, or rejected: which is which?

Three different histories hide inside the question. A small group really was removed: the Old Testament apocrypha, dropped from Protestant Bibles after centuries inside. A second group never got in, though several came close. A third was rejected outright and then suppressed: the gnostic and other heterodox gospels. Sorted honestly, the three lists look like this.

Which books were actually removed from the Bible?

The Old Testament apocrypha, which Catholics call the deuterocanon: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, 1–2 Maccabees, and additions to Esther and Daniel. They stood in Christian Bibles for over a millennium. Protestant reformers set them apart in the sixteenth century, and nineteenth-century Bible societies stopped printing them altogether.

Their place was never unanimous, and the record says so. Athanasius's letter of 367 ranked Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, and Tobit among books “not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read by those who newly join us” (Festal Letter 39, in the 1892 Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation), and Jerome, translating the Latin Bible, likewise ranked them below the books of the Hebrew canon. Yet the Greek and Latin Bibles carried them, and the African councils listed them as scripture. The Reformers took Jerome's side, and the quarrel turned practical at the Leipzig debate of 1519, when Johann Eck cited 2 Maccabees' prayer for the dead in support of purgatory and Luther answered that Maccabees was not in the canon.

What followed was a removal in stages, carried out in print shops and committee rooms. The Protestant Zürich Bible of 1529–30 had already moved the apocrypha to an appendix; Luther's complete German Bible of 1534, the famous case, gathered them into a separate section between the Testaments, headed as books not held equal to Holy Scripture yet useful and good to read. The Council of Trent answered in 1546 by defining them as canonical for Catholics. The King James Version of 1611 still printed them between the Testaments, and English Bibles printed before 1629 all included them. The British and Foreign Bible Society left them out of its English Bibles from 1804 and, after a bitter controversy, resolved in 1826 to stop printing them at all. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles keep them today. That — not a smoky council chamber — is the one documented mass removal in Bible history, and it was done by Protestants, in print. One New Testament oddity went the same way: the short Latin Epistle to the Laodiceans, a patchwork of Pauline phrases copied into more than a hundred surviving Latin Bible manuscripts from the sixth century on and into Wycliffe's English Bible, was left out of Luther's Bible and out of the canon Trent defined. The ancient side of the story is in who actually decided the canon.

Which books were never included, but nearly were?

Several early Christian books were read in churches for generations and still missed the New Testament: the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Didache, 1 Clement, and the Apocalypse of Peter. Codex Sinaiticus, a fourth-century Bible, binds Barnabas and the Shepherd right after Revelation. These are the truest “rejected books” — rejected gently, by demotion.

The demotion happened by degrees, and each step is on record. The Muratorian fragment accepts the Apocalypse of Peter while admitting that some will not have it read in church, and bars the Shepherd from public reading because it was written too recently. Tertullian, in the early third century, claims that church councils had judged the Shepherd apocryphal and false again and again — rejection as a local, repeated verdict, not a single vote. Eusebius lists the Shepherd, the Apocalypse of Peter, Barnabas, and the Teachings of the Apostles among his “rejected writings,” a label he used for books most church writers knew but did not accept as scripture, not for heresy. Athanasius in 367 still commends the Shepherd and the Teaching of the Apostles to new converts, below the canon, and the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus binds in 1 and 2 Clement. The line hardened slowly.

The Old Testament has its own famous near miss. 1 Enoch is quoted by name in the letter of Jude and cited as scripture in the Epistle of Barnabas, yet it never entered the rabbinic Hebrew Bible or the Greek and Latin lists; only the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches keep it as scripture, and Ethiopia's Beta Israel preserve it too. “Removed” is the wrong verb there too — here is why the Book of Enoch was never really removed.

Why were the gnostic gospels rejected?

No council voted them out. Bishops rejected the gnostic gospels one verdict at a time, between about 180 and 350 CE, because they failed the working tests: no credible apostolic author, composition after the fourfold gospel hardened, claims of secret teaching, use by groups bishops opposed, and theology that demoted the creator God or denied that Christ truly suffered.

These are the books people usually mean by “rejected” or “removed”:

• The Gospel of Thomas — 114 sayings of Jesus, no narrative
• The Gospel of Mary — Mary Magdalene teaching the frightened disciples
• The Gospel of Peter — the passion with a walking, talking cross
• The Gospel of Judas — Judas singled out for secret teaching
• Philip, Truth, the infancy gospels of Thomas and James, the Egerton Gospel, and more

The label is loose — Thomas is a sayings collection, Peter a passion narrative, and whether Thomas is gnostic at all is debated — but the ancient judges filed them together. The clearest verdict is Eusebius's, and it ranks these gospels lower than most people imagine. His “rejected writings” were respectable books like the Shepherd and Barnabas. The gospels put forward by heretics under apostles' names — he names Peter, Thomas, and Matthias — sat below that line: they “are not to be placed even among the rejected writings, but are all of them to be cast aside as absurd and impious” (Church History III.25.7). His reasons: no one in the succession of church writers had thought them worth mentioning, their style was “at variance with apostolic usage,” and their ideas were “out of accord with true orthodoxy.”

The first four are the working criteria that recur whenever ancient writers argue about the canon: apostolic origin, agreement with the rule of faith, acceptance across many churches, and long public reading in worship. Serapion of Antioch shows them operating in real time. Visiting Rhossus, he at first let the church read a disputed Gospel of Peter; after obtaining a copy from the circle he calls the Docetae, he found in it “many things in accordance with the true doctrine of the Saviour, but some things added to that doctrine,” and laid down the rule: “we reject intelligently the writings falsely ascribed to them, knowing that such were not handed down to us” (Eusebius, Church History VI.12, McGiffert translation). Whether the surviving Gospel of Peter is actually docetic is still debated.

Timing and secrecy did more damage. By around 180 CE, Irenaeus of Lyons held that the gospels could be neither more nor fewer than four, reasoning from the four zones of the world and the four principal winds, and he dismissed the Valentinians' Gospel of Truth as their “comparatively recent writing” that “agrees in nothing with the Gospels of the Apostles” (Against Heresies III.11.8–9, Roberts–Rambaut translation, 1885). A work now called the Gospel of Truth later surfaced at Nag Hammadi. Against teachers who claimed a hidden tradition, Irenaeus's reply became the church's standing rule: if the apostles had known hidden mysteries, “they would have delivered them especially to those to whom they were also committing the Churches themselves” (III.3.1). A gospel that opens, as Thomas does, “These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke…” had argued itself out of a canon whose whole logic was publicity.

Then there was the company the books kept. Around 350, Cyril of Jerusalem told candidates for baptism: “Let none read the Gospel according to Thomas: for it is the work not of one of the twelve Apostles, but of one of the three wicked disciples of Manes” (Catechetical Lectures VI.31, Gifford translation, 1894). The attribution is wrong — Thomas was circulating in Greek before Mani began preaching — but the logic is exact: books were judged by who read them.

The deepest objections were theological. In the Valentinian system Irenaeus summarized, the maker of this world is a lesser power, the demiurge, “constituted the Father and God of everything outside of the Pleroma” (I.5.2) and ranked below a higher, unknown Father; Marcion, from a different angle, declared the God of the law and the prophets “the author of evils” (I.27.2). For churches that read Genesis and the prophets as their own scripture, that split the Bible in two. The second fault line ran through the cross. Irenaeus reports Saturninus teaching that the Saviour “was without birth, without body, and without figure, but was, by supposition, a visible man” (I.24.2), and a Basilidean story in which Simon of Cyrene was crucified in Jesus's place while Jesus stood by and laughed (I.24.4). A church whose worship centered on a Christ who truly suffered could not canonize a Christ who only seemed to. For one book tried test by test, see why the Gospel of Thomas isn't in the Bible.

Were the rejected gospels suppressed?

Yes, though less cinematically than legend says. Once Christianity had imperial backing, heretical groups lost their meeting places and their books became evidence. Exclusion from the reading lists did the rest, because uncopied papyrus rots. Most of what survived did so by accident: in Egyptian rubbish heaps, a monk's grave, a codex bought in Cairo, and one sealed jar.

The pressure is documented. Irenaeus had already condemned the Gospel of Judas around 180 CE as “a fictitious history.” Constantine's edict against heretics named Valentinians and Marcionites among others and handed their houses of prayer to the catholic Church; Eusebius adds that “the law directed that search should be made for their books” (Life of Constantine III.64–66, Richardson translation, 1890). Then, in his 39th Festal Letter of 367, Athanasius listed the twenty-seven New Testament books — “Let no man add to these, neither let him take ought from these” — and called apocryphal writings “an invention of heretics.” Two cautions keep that letter honest. His “apocryphal” is not the Protestant Apocrypha: he commended Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, and Tobit as reading. And the surviving translation orders exclusion, not a bonfire. Fire, when it came, came centuries later and for a different book: in 787 the Second Council of Nicaea condemned the docetic Acts of John, barred anyone from copying it again, and ordered the copy before it burned.

What happened next is a hypothesis, not a record. The leading theory holds that monks near Nag Hammadi, rather than destroy condemned books, sealed thirteen codices in a jar; a serious rival reads the burial as a grave deposit. Either way, a farmer struck the jar in December 1945 — the case for each explanation is laid out here, and the discovery story here. The jar held 52 tractates, mostly treatises and revelations rather than gospels, and it is not the source of every lost gospel: the fullest copy of the Gospel of Mary comes from the Berlin Codex, bought in Cairo in 1896, and the Gospel of Judas from Codex Tchacos, found in the 1970s. “Removed from the Bible” understates what happened to these books. Rejected, starved of copyists, and accidentally saved is closer.

Did the Council of Nicaea remove books from the Bible?

No. The Council of Nicaea in 325 CE argued about the divinity of Christ, the date of Easter, and church discipline, and none of its surviving canons or letters mentions a list of scriptures. The story of bishops voting books out of the Bible is a legend that grew over centuries, not a record from the council.

The legend has a long pedigree. A ninth-century Greek compilation, the Synodicon Vetus, tells of the books being laid beside the holy altar while the council prayed that the inspired ones be found on top and the spurious on the bottom; Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary retold it with the apocryphal books falling to the ground; The Da Vinci Code (2003) gave Constantine the starring role. The only ancient link between Nicaea and a particular book runs the other way: Jerome, prefacing his Latin Judith, reports that the Nicene synod was reputed to have counted Judith among the scriptures — hearsay no Nicene document confirms, and an addition rather than a removal. The myth survives because it compresses a true story (imperial Christianity really did suppress rival scriptures) into one dramatic scene. The truth is slower and, honestly, stranger: no single villain, many small decisions, and a jar in the desert that undid the suppression sixteen centuries later.

Where can you read the removed and rejected books?

The rejected gospels that survive — Thomas, Mary, Judas, Philip, Truth, Peter — and the near-miss Apocalypse of Peter are on this site, free, each naming its manuscript and translator and showing the manuscript's gaps as gaps. The apocrypha removed from Protestant Bibles are in any Catholic or Orthodox Bible, or a King James edition with the Apocrypha.

Browse the library, or start with where to read the gnostic gospels. Decide for yourself what the boundary-drawers were keeping out.