I thought it would be fun to take a brief look at various Gospels in use by Christians of the first few centuries CE. One each week. A few weeks back I posted regarding the Egerton Gospel which I cleverly misspelled Edgerton Gospel.
For now consider the Oxyrhynchus Gospel 840:
". . . earlier, before doing wrong, he slyly reasons everything out. Be careful that you do not end up suffering the same fate as them. For the evil-doers of humanity receive retribution not only among the living, but they will also undergo punishment and much torture later."
Taking them along, he went into the place of purification itself and wandered around in the temple. Then a certain high priest of the Pharisees named Levi came toward them and said to the savior, "Who permitted you to wander in this place of purification and to see these holy vessels, even though you have not bathed and the feet of your disciples have not been washed? And now that you have defiled it, you walk around in this pure area of the temple where only a person who has bathed and changed his clothes can walk, and even such a person does not dare to look upon these holy vessels."
Standing nearby with his disciples, the savior replied, "Since you are here in the temple too, are you clean?"
The Pharisee said to him, "I am clean. For I bathed in the pool of David. I went down into the pool by one set of stairs and came back out by another. Then I put on white clothes and they were clean. And then I came and looked at these holy vessels."
Replying to him, the savior said, "Woe to blind people who do not see! You have washed in the gushing waters that dogs and pigs are thrown into day and night. And when you washed yourself, you scrubbed the outer layer of skin, the layer of skin that prostitutes and flute-girls anoint and wash and scrub when they put on make up to become the desire of the men. But inside they are filled with scorpions and all unrighteousness. But my disciples and I, whom you say have not washed, we have washed in waters of eternal life that come from the God of heaven. But woe to those . . . "
The fragment preserved was a 4th century portable codex copy, perhaps meant for public instruction, but the text is dated much earlier, mid first to mid second century. Similar in age to the Canonical Gospels, this text shows similar styling and theme yet, as far as this fragment can tell us, no direct dependence on them. This is an original composition, another apparently independent Gospel tradition tragically lost.
Recall the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matt and Luke) are in reality just 3 recensions of the same story. Gospel John shows a familiarity with the Synoptics but is no mere redaction, rather an original retelling with a flavor distinctive of a community on the fringes of what the Catholic Fathers can accommodate in their efforts to formulate a universalizing dogma. That's what makes the G.John so much more interesting. Same would probably be said of Oxy 840 had it survived. What we do know is that it was treasured and preserved for hundreds of years.