The Gospel of the Lord Quotes

“According to the Gospels, Christianity is not a system of neo-platonic philosophy lodged inside a Jewish casing, not German existentialism waiting to be set free from its religious mythology, not a conservative or liberal political program looking for legitimation in religious tracts. Rather, the Gospels show that Christianity is about following Jesus the Christ. Finally, the Gospels are reminders that the words and deeds of Jesus must be uppermost in the minds, hearts, prayers, thoughts, and devotion of the church. The Gospels urge that those who bear Christ’s name must be willing to believe in him and follow him, through Galilee and Judea, through Gethsemane and Golgotha, through to the empty tomb and one day into the kingdom of heaven.”
― Michael F. Bird, The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus

“It was not the fault of Christian censors or a theological thought-police that the “other” Gospels were criticized and rejected. The “other” Gospels were not recognizable as “gospel,” and they failed to capture the hearts, minds, and imaginations of Christians in the worldwide church. The proof of this is the limited number of extant manuscripts for many of these “other” Gospels and the fact that many Jesus books were not known beyond their own immediate circles. The exclusion of other Gospels was not the result of the victory of the orthodox. It was rather based on an objective claim as to who more properly transmitted the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles. In the end, the reason the “other” Gospels lost out is that they simply failed to convince the majority of their antiquity and authenticity as stories of Jesus.”
― Michael F. Bird, The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus

“Further to that, it is surely interesting that many church fathers did not know about several of these so-called Gospels. Whereas Bart Ehrman thinks that the Gospel of Peter was just as popular as the Gospel of Mark, Bishop Serapion of Antioch had never heard of the Gospel of Peter before the church at Rhossus brought it to his attention. However, we can assume that Serapion knew all four canonical Gospels because his predecessor Theophilus compiled a Gospel harmony.95 While Irenaeus had his own collection of “other” Gospels, including the Valentinian Gospel of Truth and the Sethian Gospel of Judas,96 these are never once mentioned by either Clement of Alexandria or Origen, the two authors who cite “other” Jesus books more liberally, nor are they known to the catalogs of Eusebius and the Gelasian decree. Consequently we must wonder precisely how widely many of these “other” Gospels circulated beyond their point of origin.”
― Michael F. Bird, The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus

“Furthermore, putting the heading “Gospel” on a document does not really determine its genre any more than inscribing “Recent Observations on Nocturnal and Hematophagic Humanoids” on the cover of a Twilight novel turns it into a scientific research paper.”
― Michael F. Bird, The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus