What you hold in your hands is not new scripture. It is an older one, restored.

For two thousand years the words of Jesus have been filtered through layers of interpretation, institutional interest, and theological agenda. The canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, along with the Gnostic witnesses who wrote the Dialogue of the Savior, Concept of Our Great Power, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Truth and Thomas the Contender, were not composed in the order we received them, nor arranged to let Jesus speak for himself. They were assembled by communities with competing loyalties, copied and changed by scribes with theological convictions, and canonized by councils with institutional stakes. In that long process, a voice was gradually enclosed within a framework it never asked for.

This unified gospel is an attempt to remove that enclosure.

On the text itself

The four canonical gospels and the other supporting Gnostic sources have been woven into a single continuous account, not to flatten their differences, but to let a coherent teaching emerge from beneath them. Where the bible authors invoke the Hebrew scriptures to claim prophetic fulfillment, those references have been removed. The Tanakh passages exist, but when you return to the source, the prophecy claimed simply is not there. The original Hebrew does not support the Christian meaning imposed upon it. These are arguments made after the fact, not fulfillments. Jesus did not need them, and this gospel does not make them.

Likewise, every reference to God as an undifferentiated absolute has been rendered with precision: when Jesus speaks of his source and his sender, the text reads My Father. When the text points toward the sovereign force of this present world, the lawgiver of the 613 commandments, the deity of conquest and retribution, the text reads Your Father, or where clarity demands it, the name the Hebrew tradition itself preserved: Yahweh. This is not an editorial imposition. It is the distinction Jesus draws throughout the gospel record, most sharply in John, and which his audience understood as the charge that earned him death.

On Judas and the betrayal

The traditional identification of Judas Iscariot as the one who handed Jesus to the Temple authorities has been reconsidered here in light of what the text itself shows. Simon the Zealot, a man whose political identity was inseparable from armed resistance against Roman occupation and whose loyalties ran through the Temple establishment, emerges from a close reading as the more coherent figure. The mechanics of the betrayal, the access required, the motivation available, and the trajectory of the narrative point away from Judas and toward Simon. This unified account reflects that reading.

On the crucifixion and the Temple

What the gospel accounts obscure through diplomatic softening is here made plain: Jesus was not executed by Rome. He was executed by the Temple hierarchy, who used Rome as their instrument. The chief priests understood their own law, that one hung upon a tree is accursed (Deuteronomy 21:23), and deployed it as a weapon. A public crucifixion would do what a stoning could not: mark the condemned as rejected by God in the sight of the people. That Pilate required pressure, that the pressure applied was the kind that men with power apply to men who hold office precariously, is the plain reading of every account. This gospel does not look away from it.

On the resurrection appearances

The tradition of post-resurrection appearances to the disciples has been reduced here to what the earliest and most reliable witness records. Mary Magdalene sees the risen Jesus; she is instructed to send the disciples to the mountain. There, according to Paul's earliest account (1 Corinthians 15), more than five hundred see Jesus ascending. The gospel ends there, with that ascent, witnessed by the apostles and the crowd together. The later appearance narratives, developed across decades and shaped by the needs of emerging communities, are not included. What remains is starker and, in its starkness, more demanding.

On what Jesus preached

The central contention of this work is simple: Jesus preached his own gospel. Not the Torah reinterpreted. Not a new covenant that preserved the architecture of the old. A gospel of his own, concerning a Father distinct from Yahweh, a kingdom not of this world, a path of escape through love and labor for one's neighbor, open to all nations without condition of prior covenant. The broad gate, in his preaching, was not lawlessness. It was the gate that everyone around him was already walking through: fidelity to the god of this world and his system that binds it.

He was not offering reform. He was offering a way out.

A note to the reader

You will find things in this gospel that the tradition has smoothed over. The anger is here. The absolute claims are here. The uncompromising division, sheep and goats, light and outer darkness, the one master and the other a servant, is here. Jesus in this text is not mild. He is urgent. He knows the hour is late and the laborers are few, and he is calling across a field to anyone willing to hear him, regardless of what they have been told to call themselves.

Read him on his own terms. That is all this edition asks.