THE GOSPEL OF TRAVIS - Forward

Everything contained within this manuscript is suspect.

I appreciate that most people, in a rush to “get to the good stuff,” skip the foreword. Believe me, I can sympathize. We’re all busy. Who wants to waste precious time reading some stuffy, pompous academic blathering on about esoterica when you can just read the damn thing yourself and come to your own conclusions?

However, I state my suspicions plainly and up front because I believe it is important that you know an expert’s opinion before you begin digesting this document.

So I say again: pretty much everything known about this manuscript, called The Gospel of Travis, is contested by scholars. Its authorship is uncertain. Its authenticity is up for debate. Its date of composition - even the decade or century of the writing - is at best a complicated story.

Religion can be - would it be fair to say a thorny subject? Tales of massive calamitous wars fought over the tiniest, most obscure differences in dogma fill the annals of history; so many cataclysmic accounts that there might not be shelf space enough in the largest libraries on earth to hold them all, nor container space to hold all of the spilled blood.

And so, I would hate for the reading public to misapprehend that I, the humble scholar, would deign to make value judgements on the content, especially in regards to the theological ideas presented herein, or to attempt to sway the reader one way or another about any spiritual subject. That is not my purview or intent. The last thing I desire is more spilled blood, especially my own. I just received a very nice cardigan as a birthday gift and would like to keep it blood-free for as long as possible.

In all honesty, I would normally pause before sharing my personal thoughts on this subject even at, say, a Thanksgiving dinner, let alone with the wider world. Lord knows I’ve made similar mistakes before at the holiday dinner table and I’m still paying for each of them with my wife’s Uncle Wally.

They say that in polite conversation one must avoid the topics of religion and politics. Wally might add to that list “cloth face masks” and “basic human rights.” But I digress.

As a scholar, my interest is in the text itself and in the history of its arrival onto the academic scene. And it is in this respect where I feel myself not only capable but in fact obligated to provide at least some modicum of context to the wider reading public.

Anyone possessing even a casual familiarity with the religion of Christianity can likely name its canonical gospels - the “Big Four” as it were: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

This is the sort of thing one might call a “gimme” at bar trivia, along with “who invented gravity” (which, by the way, is a trick question - gravity can no more be “invented” than can the ocean or the sky - however pointing out this factual flaw will win you neither a point in trivia nor many friends) or “who is Queen B” (some person named Beyonce, or so I’ve been told by people interested in the minutiae of modern popular culture).

However, those noble few of us who have devoted our lives to the study of the historicity of scriptural texts will attest to the existence of the apocryphal gospels.

Briefly: over the course of the first few hundred years of Christian history, the ecclesiastic community underwent the long and often contentious ordeal of whittling down the many, many written accounts, letters and apocalypses (meaning pieces of apocalyptic literature, not, you know, repeated endings of the world) in an attempt to discern the most important and useful texts for the purposes of spreading the teachings of Jesus Christ. As they worked through the literature, they cast aside those books that, for whatever reason, were deemed lacking or unworthy.

Eventually, the distilled selection was ratified by the entirety of Christendom. This corpus of work is what we know today as the New Testament of the Christian Bible (not to be confused with the Hebrew Bible, the Baby Bible or the ‘Best in the West’ Barbecue Bible, which is admittedly an excellent cook book). While the Gospels themselves are relatively standard across all denominations, within the New Testament there exist some minor differences in the included books between the various sects of Christianity. For the sake of brevity and in the interest of not boring the uninterested reader, I will not go into those here - if you want to know more, buy me a nice Lambic or Witbier at Marlowe’s Pub in town and I’ll talk your ear off.

At any rate, those books that did not make the cut - titles like the Gospel of Thomas, or the Diatessaron, or the comprehensively named Book of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, by Bartholomew the Apostle - are known as apocryphal. These tomes have been judged to be of dubious authenticity, or heretical in some respect, or else too fragmented or incomplete to be seriously considered for inclusion in the scriptural canon. Many were destroyed. Many we only know because pieces were discovered by happenstance.

The Gospel of Travis is one such piece of apocyrpha.

Prior to very recently, history was only ever aware of small fragments of the original Gospel of Travis, consisting of parchment scraps composed in Koine Greek primarily uncovered at the archeological dig sites of ancient banks and money changers. There also exist a scant few contemporaneous accounts that mention it, the most notable perhaps being Iranaeus remarking in a letter that it was “of no more value than its weight in...” and then a rather impolite term for hog excrement.

In fact, the scraps and fragments of this particular Gospel likely would have remained a mere footnote in liturgical history were it not for its sudden and recent reemergence - in a mysterious full translation - on the shelves of certain tech moguls and mega church pastors.

I might have remained blissfully unaware of its very existence as well had a copy not been slipped to me by a concerned former pupil of mine, who has since shirked his education in the classical literature to work for his grandfather doing something in private equity. Evidently some vestigial remnants of his former academic self found it important to apprise me of this document.

Given the sudden increased interest in the book and given my field of expertise, I felt it my duty to examine this document and weigh in on its veracity.

It is here that I feel I must perhaps confess my own limitations as a scholar, for while I am in fact a well regarded expert and a fully tenured professor, I was forced to toil without the assistance of my usual bevy of foreign exchange student researchers that normally aid me in my endeavors.

Unfortunately, due to ongoing budgetary issues involving the University and its strained relationship with the Executive Branch of the United States Government, as well as some unclear visa restrictions handed down by the same, I am currently unable to hire my usual cadre of assistants.

Evidently the American History department was foolish enough to try and teach American History. But I digress again.

Due to this added set of challenges, my ability to vet certain aspects of the text was severely hamstrung. I probably have not labored without the help of some form of assistant since defending my own dissertation back in my doctoral program, so you can understand how unusual this is for me. Imagine a Chief Executive Officer of a parcel delivery company who suddenly finds themselves without any workers but must still produce, say, a million individual shipments to their customers. Before long, this beleaguered white collar titan may well find themselves covering their hands in tape to staunch the flow of blood from all their paper cuts. Very daunting indeed.

However, the scholarship is moving too fast to wait for such luxuries as fact checking or due diligence. Because of the explosive gain in popularity of this newly discovered Gospel, there exists insufficient time to devote to a more comprehensive dive into the subject. The people must know with what it is they are dealing, and soon.

This is my proverbial pickle.

~~~~~

And so, to finally cut to the chase as it were, my spare few notes of context about this particular text are as follows:

As alluded to earlier, the authenticity and the authorship are at best questionable and at worst dubious. The original scraps are in Koine Greek, but the available “full” version of the manuscript is a mysterious translation into Ecclesiastical Latin. As such, it is impossible to know if the whole text was written by the original author or only parts, and what the motives and intentions of any additional authors may be.

Similarly, we cannot even attest to the identity of that original author, let alone the identity of any contributors or translators. The few textual clues present in the document indicate the author had on several occasions, similarly to Luke, addressed his testament to “Theophilus” (which translates from Greek into “lover of God”), however the same passages clearly delineate the author as someone separate from Luke - perhaps even a rival, although we have no more information of which I am aware to make that assertion with any certainty. There exists one other clue within the text, assuming the veracity of the information contained therein, that mentions the writer may have studied under Travis at the time of his own personal ministry. That’s all we have to go on.

Of course, add to that the fact that there exists no corroborating account of a disciple named Travis, a name which appears to be of French origin and not Aramaic, and we begin to see clearly why church leaders have been highly skeptical of this text for thousands of years.

As for the text itself, it appears to reference some of the same sources as the writers of the canonical gospels, including the hypothetical “Q source” - what we believe to be a collection of quotes attributed to Jesus that has since been lost to time.

In fact, all of the statements attributed to Jesus herein can be found, almost verbatim, in the various canonical gospels.

It would be impossible for me to state with any certainty whether the author or authors actively plagiarized. Accusations of plagiarism are the sort of thing that can absolutely destroy an academic’s career - quicker than stealing money or strangling a graduate student instructor with a lute string. And so, I would never bandy about such accusations even for writers who may well be deceased, possibly for nearly two thousand years. I will say, as someone familiar with grading undergraduate term papers and as one who has seen his fair share of Artificial Intelligence balderdash passed off as scholarship in his day, that certain passages do look rather suspicious to me.

Regarding the events depicted, the majority of those pertaining to the life of Jesus contained herein do appear to be similar to those recounted in other more traditional accounts, although I should note that the framing and ordering of these events can be drastically different from the widely accepted time-line presented in the New Testament.

And of course, there are a fair few novel events, ideas, quotations and details - especially those that pertains to the person of Travis - the historicity of which I will decline to adjudge at this time. There is simply too little existing archeological evidence (not unusual for this time period) to say one way or the other what of this is factual and what has been fabricated.

In all honesty, due to the lack of time to sufficiently perform all of the duties required of proper scholarship, it makes me somewhat queasy even to publish this particular edition. So much work has yet to be done and I fear right now I am only able to scratch the surface. I cannot even vouch entirely for my translation without the assistance of a journeyman editor or a hired dedicated translator (neither of which I can now afford).

Perhaps with some time, and with a retreat of the anti-scholastic tides currently drowning our national cultural and collegiate discourse, a more comprehensive and accurate assessment can be presented in a future addition of this book.

However, given the salience and topicality of some of the ideas contained herein, I felt it my duty to put this English language translation out, along with these scant few notes, so that the people may at least have some access to the same.

If we cannot afford the luxury of a fully informed opinion then let us be half informed at least.

T. Isadore Dimwiddie, PhD
University of the Sacred Heart in Wilksborough
March 21st, 2025

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