Question:

I have heard and seen articles so many times about the Catholic faith
hiding evidence of other gospels and possibly a gospel from Jesus himself?
This concerns me since I used to be Catholic (now a non-denomintated
Christian) and still have many Catholic friends that may be oblivious of
this information and frankly get very defensive about the fact that their
faith may be hidng something.

Answer:

The Catholic Church certainly has a few skeletons in its closet. However,
there has been an unfortunate trend even since the Reformation to label
the Roman Church as the devil incarnate and the antithesis of
Christianity. Whatever you feel about the Catholic Church, it is not
Christian behavior to slander and sling around false charges. I believe
that this is the case with the rumor you have heard. There is no evidence
whatsoever that the Catholic Church has supressed actual inspired
Christian documents. In fact, this charge does not even make sense. For
the first three hundred or so years after Jesus was crucified, the church
was very much Christian. It had only moved relatively little in the
direction which eventually produced what we think of as the Roman Catholic
Church. The Roman popes did not claim universal supremacy until the fifth
century. The Catholic priesthood with its ritual and works-salvation did
not develop until even later. It does not make sense that an organization
in the sixth century could have covered up Christian scripture, as we have
entier manuscripts of the New Testamen from as early as AD 350 and quotes
of almost the entire New Testament from the second and third centuries.

The answer is that, no, the Catholic Church is not hiding important
biblical documents. The rumors you have heard are with regard to
heretical letters produced by the Gnostics beginning in the second
century. Such documents include the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of
Judas. It is true that the true Christian Church in the first few
centuries did publicly declare a great number of Gnostic and other
heretical writings to be false teaching. It is even possible that some of
the Christians burned copies of these false “gospels.” The first century
church also burned copies of books on witchcraft in Ephesus (Acts 19:19).
Despite efforts by the Christian Church to oppose those who were using
these books to attempt to pull people away from biblical teaching, such
books made their rounds, which explains why we have found some manuscripts
of these early gnostic writings. You can read them for yourself and I
promise you will see why they are not in any way whatsoever candidates for
inclusion in the New Testament. I am not personally a fan of book
banning. Possible the Roman Catholic Church can be charged with banning
false gospels in an undemocratic way, but they cannot be successfully
charged with removing parts of the inspired scripture.

John Oakes, PhD