How to Use This Book

This book is about the books that are not in your Bible, or not in every Bible. There are twenty-five chapters, in four parts.

Part One is the Apocrypha of the 1611 King James Bible: the fourteen books printed between the Old Testament and the New in the first King James Bible. Most of them are still scripture in Catholic and Orthodox churches.

Part Two is the three extra books kept by the Orthodox churches of the East.

Part Three is two books kept only in the Bible of Ethiopia, which my people were reading in my own time.

Part Four is six of the lost gospels, written about me after I was gone, which no church ever put in its Bible.

You can read straight through, or turn to any book you have heard of and start there.

Here is how each chapter works.

It opens with a box called At a Glance. It tells you who wrote the book, when, where it fits, which Bibles keep it, where you hear it in your own Bible, how close it stays to me, and which chapters to read if you only have time for three.

Then comes Words to Know, so any unfamiliar word is defined before you meet it.

Then The Book in Brief, which tells you what happens in the book, from start to finish. Most people have never read these books. You should know what is in one before you hear what I think of it.

Then the chapter itself, in short sentences and plain words. The big books get long chapters, and the small ones get short ones.

After it there is a box called Check It Yourself. It sends you to the book itself, and to your own Bible, so you can see whether I told you the truth.

At the end there is The Short Version, the few lines that hold the whole chapter.

Every chapter also has its own free page on LessonsOfJesus.com, at the name of its book, such as LessonsOfJesus.com/tobit. The pages add Go deeper sections with the longer history, the manuscripts and the arguments behind the chapter.

Two promises before we start.

One. You can check everything. References look like this: (Tobit 4:7). That means the book of Tobit, chapter 4, verse 7. History facts have a small number after them, and the notes at the back of the book tell you where each one comes from.

Two. I will not put words in my own mouth. When I tell you what I think of one of these books, I will measure it by what the gospels remember me saying and doing, and nothing else.

Which translations this book quotes. Quotations of your Bible, and of the books in Parts One and Two, come from the World English Bible, a modern translation in the public domain. It includes all of these books. Where it prints God’s name as Yahweh, this book prints the LORD.

1 Enoch and Jubilees are quoted from the translations of R. H. Charles, published a little over a hundred years ago. The Gospel of Peter, the Protoevangelium of James and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas are quoted from the old translations in the Ante-Nicene Fathers. All of these are in the public domain, and they sound old-fashioned because they are. The Gospels of Thomas, Mary and Judas were found in modern times, in the last hundred and thirty years, and their translations belong to the people who made them, so you will find only short quotations from them here. The rest I will tell you in my own words.