All New Testament Apocryphal Gospels

New Testament Apocryphal Gospels are narrative writings about the life, birth or passion of Jesus that early Christian communities produced alongside the four canonical gospels but that no major church body ultimately included in its New Testament. The Gospel of Peter is a fragmentary second-century passion and resurrection narrative, attributed pseudonymously to the apostle Peter, that early church writers such as Serapion of Antioch judged doctrinally suspect and excluded from canonical use. The Infancy Gospel of James, also called the Protoevangelium of James, is a second-century narrative recounting the birth and childhood of Mary and the birth of Jesus, and it became a major source for later Christian devotion to Mary even though it never entered the New Testament canon. Modern scholarship groups these and related texts under the label New Testament apocrypha precisely because they imitate canonical gospel form and subject matter while standing outside the closed canon, distinguishing them from the Apostolic Fathers' epistles and church-order writings, which do not attempt gospel narrative at all.