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There was initial hope that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 would throw light on the roots of Christianity. There was speculation that perhaps John the Baptist and even Jesus himself were members of the sect or closely related to it. The scrolls have already contributed to a fuller understanding of the textual history of Jewish scripture and the realities of 1st century Judaism--especially its variety of apocalyptic hopes and the absence of anything that might be called orthodoxy. However, they have shed no direct light on Jesus. The Nag Hammadi manuscripts, discovered by Egyptian farmers in 1945, also proved of interest chiefly to students of the swarm of theologies that proliferated in early Christianity. The chance that they contain reliable historical information about Jesus is slender, though they hint tantalizingly that Jesus may have been more liberal in his views of women and sexuality than later church fathers allowed.
Our only substantial biographical sources are the New Testament Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, brief documents written in colloquial Greek late in the generation of those who knew Jesus first- or secondhand. By the end of the 2nd century, these four had become the basic canonical texts of the mainline Christianity of Rome and the Middle East.
A curious reader can also find survivors in several modern editions of New Testament Apocrypha (from the Greek apokruphos, "hidden")--scraps of other Gospels, letters, apocalypses, acts of the apostles and other figures related to Jesus. Some of them offer occasionally striking, even comic, moments. There are numerous stories about the young Jesus, for instance--a sometimes amusing, sometimes dangerous superchild playmate. And there may be actual moments of history in the mostly fictional tales of the acts of John the Beloved, Peter, Paul and others.
To glance at one of the most interesting remains, there are a few surviving speeches of Jesus from the Gospel of the Hebrews and a post-Resurrection appearance from the same source that have the ring of authenticity. "Now the Lord...went to James [his brother] and appeared to him. For James had taken an oath that he would not eat bread...till that hour when he saw him risen from the dead...The Lord said, 'Bring a table and bread'...He took bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to James the Just and said to him, 'My brother, eat your bread, for the Son of Man is risen from those who sleep.'"
And a single text from Nag Hammadi--the Gospel of Thomas--has proved to be of widespread interest. Thomas offers no narrative report on Jesus or comment on his career, but it does offer a collection of isolated sayings. Many are versions of sayings already available in the four canonical Gospels. A few others are so striking as to be perhaps genuine. For instance, in Thomas, Jesus says, "He who is near me is near fire, but he who is far from me is far from the kingdom" and "Split the wood and I am there; lift up the stone and you will find me there." Both have that fresh air of authority that rises from his better-known sayings.