In exploring ancient apocryphal traditions, we uncover a tapestry of Jesus’s portrayals both converging and contrasting with canonical gospels. These “Jesus books” – infancy, ministry, passion, and dialogue gospels – showcase early Christianity’s narrative dynamism. Apocryphal texts reveal Jesus as a wise or petulant child, challenging Jewish norms or Torah-observant, literate, philosophical, mythological, hell-conquering, and anti-apostolic. These diverse depictions, addressing sociocultural and theological questions of the era, provide alternative or supplementary perspectives on Jesus’s identity and teachings, significantly contributing to our understanding of early Christian diversity and doctrinal development.

Irenaeus as the mastermind of the canonicl collection, later known as the New Testament, creates the foundation for the later picture of a chronological development from Jesus and his disciples through the first bishops and the institutionalization of the Church. However, he himself hardly relates to these writings as historical evidence, but rather engages in an anti-heretical use of some of them to endorse church orthodoxy. It is this apostolic foundation that provides the rule of truth against which he sees the heretics struggeling, driven by evil forces in an apocalyptic scenario.

Irenaeus’ view is condensed in the collection that he brought together, combining the Book of Acts with the so-called Catholic Letters (= the Praxapostolos). Placed after the four Gospels, it endorses a neatless development from Jesus and his early followers through the early days of growth of the church in its emancipation from its Jewish beginnings. With Paul’s letters in a revised version that was made to fit the Gospels and the Praxapostolos this fiction of a continuous, rapid and Spirit-guided growth was linked to the success-story of the Church in contra-distinction to the miseries and decline of the Jewish community and the vain attempts at undermining the Church by the develish heretics.