Rejection, Biblical Style

 

Dear Thomas

We thank you for sending us 'The Gospel According to Thomas'.  We are afraid that we are going to have to pass on this at the present time. We appreciate that this will be disappointing news but we have received numerous other submissions along the same lines and we have had to make some difficult choices.

However, we would like to retain your writing tablets, because, if there was demand for a Gospel in Coptic in the future, we may review the position.

Yours

Eusebius 

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 Dear Nicodemus

We thank you for sending us 'The Gospel According to Nicodemus'.  I’m afraid it is not for us.  Although we were wowed by your first-hand accounts of the trial of Jesus of Nazareth, we found the style uneven and disjointed and the narrative incomplete.

Please note that we are not, at this moment in time, considering publishing another Bible.

We are returning your stone tablets via prepaid and self-addressed camel.

We wish you luck in seeking publication elsewhere.

Yours 

Eusebius

 

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 So, it happened even in those days. 

Joking apart… many other Apostles and close followers of Jesus wrote Gospels, including James, Syriac, Mary (probably Mary Magdalen), Marcion, Peter, Barnabas and Philip, although some of these were incomplete or merely a compilation of Jesus’s sayings.  Even Judas is said to have written his own version.  Contrary to what Dan Brown asserts in ‘The Da Vinci Code’, the decision as to which Gospels were included in the New Testament was not made at the Nicea in 325 AD but over a period of time.  Eusebius, a Christian historian writing in the 300s and the priest who baptised the Emperor Constantine, was hugely instrumental in the selections made.  However, a lot of the facts we ‘know’, for instance that the two men who hung beside Jesus on the cross were called Dismas and Gestas, emanate from ‘rejected’ Gospels.

So, fellow writers, as rejection happens even to the best, delete all those dreaded… nasty… horrible… emails.  New Year.  New start.

Rosemary Johnson has had many short stories published, in print and online, amongst other places, Cafe Lit, Scribble, Friday Flash Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Fiction on the Web and 101 Words.  She has also contributed to Together magazine and Christian Writer.  She has also written a historical novel, set in the Solidarity years in Poland.  In real life, she is a retired IT lecturer, living in Suffolk with her husband.