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Other Apocryphal fragments like the Gospel of Peter, and even the widely publicized and still suspect fragment from the Secret Gospel of Mark, may also contain scraps of genuine memory, but lacking complete originals, we have only the shakiest grounds for assessing their reliability. The disappointing fact seems to be that most of the surviving New Testament Apocrypha arose in legitimate attempts to comprehend realities about which the canonical Gospels are mute, and any dogged attempt to read them is apt to leave the reader with one prime reaction--those 2nd and 3rd century Christian editors who decided on the final contents of the New Testament were, above all else, superb literary critics.
And so we have the four Gospels. It has been fashionable among New Testament scholars for most of the 20th century to say that the Gospels are not what they claim to be: brief biographies. Yet their special claim would seem to be the preservation of reliable accounts of the career, teaching, death and resurrection of one extraordinary man. Many modern scholars, however, have tended to see them as propaganda, as campaign biographies--documents that contain fragments of actual history, but history so shaped and transformed by faith as to require caution in the reader who seeks firm fact.
Yet a fair-minded reader, with a normal human capacity for storytelling, might well consume all four Gospels in a night and conclude that their individual accounts bear enough relation to one another to suggest that they spring from a common event. Their internal differences are occasionally extreme, and their views of the nature of Jesus range from Mark's affirmation that he was the "beloved Son of God" to John's flat claim that Jesus was the Word, that eternal aspect of God who created the world and who has a continuing interest in the life of worldly creatures--ourselves above all. Nonetheless, the four together make a strong case for the urgency with which Jesus' early followers longed to preserve trustworthy records of a supremely important life, one lived in a particular place and time.
In the face of all contradictions and confusions then, our reader might be asked to return to Mark, not only the oldest but the clearest Gospel, and to deduce the full story it means to tell. In its brevity and speed--some 12,000 words in English, a mere pamphlet--Mark implies a far more complicated process of human growth than its outline specifies.
If our reader happens to have spent his or her life, as I have, writing fictional and nonfictional stories of his own, he may soon find himself mulling his deductions from Mark and the other Gospels and producing a usefully expanded narrative. It will not, of course, be a narrative for which one can begin to claim spiritual, doctrinal or historical authority, but since restrained imagination--as it thinks its way into the lives of others--remains our strongest means of human understanding and compassion, such an expansion seems an honest reaction to the Gospels' limited provisions. My attempt is always to open more and more dark corners of a story to human possibility.