Fifty Ways to Forge a Gospel

Last month I attended a small conference on the early Christian apocrypha (that is, the Gospels, epistles, Acts, and Apocalypses from early Christianity that were not accepted into the canon of Scripture) at York University in Toronto. The special topic for the conference was the use of forgery in early Christianity, and I was asked to give the keynote address.

This is a topic, of course, I have been long interested in. I spent several years working on my (rather long) scholarly monograph o...