What is the Apocrypha — and why it matters for religious diversity.

False, spurious, doubtful, secret, shady. There’s much unflattering talk around the Apocrypha, but what are they, really? Objectively, the Christian Apocrypha is a body of ancient religious texts that didn’t become part of the biblical canon but circulated widely among early Christians. They were fun, entertaining and also considered wise or sacred for some. Eventually, male leaders from the emerging Catholic Church, the Church Fathers, started separating them from sacred biblical texts, and labeling them as prohibitive or, in the best cases, tolerated for instruction.

It’s an ancient story but one that still matters today. Apocryphal texts show there was never a single unified Christian church, not even in the beginning of Christianity. They also reveal that the mainstream narrative of Christian origins — the Biblical narrative of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection, followed by the evangelism of 12 apostles and the spread of Christianity by Paul of Tarsus — is, at minimum, a narrow version of what went down.

Jesus and disciples in “Untitled” (“Ethiopian Last Supper,” anonymous, year unknown)

Between one and 365 gods

In the beginning there was… a mess. Two or three generations after Jesus, in the 2nd century, people were conceptualizing, creating and understanding Christianity for the first time. They weren’t eyewitnesses of Jesus’s life or…