Here's a new novel idea that I was tossing around with my writing group. It would be way too much work and research for me to do, but it would be interesting to write.

From what I've been able to gather, a group of people got together and decided which books should go in the bible and become part of the official cannon. There were others gospels, but they got rejected. My church has copies of all of the rejected books of the bible.

I thought that writing a novel about being a rejectee of the biblical conference would be so cool. It would
totally fictional of course, but I could create a character who actually knew christ when alive, and wrote a story about it which has been handed down through the generations.

His descendant has a mission to get his ancestor's gospel into the bible, and he or she goes to the biblical conference where he or she finds politics, intrigues, backstabbing, etc. Sadly, this gospel is rejected at the
end, but it still survives in the family's possessions.

I was also thinking the story would be fun if you start it in present time, and then flip back and forth to the present.

Like having the main character, a man comes to mind, inherit the document, and then start investigating it. He's the last of his line, and he has problems with relationships, so the line may die with him if he doesn't have kids.

Many of Christ's follower were jews, so I'd like him to be descended from the same tribe of Jesus, which is the Benjamin tribe, and tie that into the whole abraham line - Abraham, Jacob, Joseph & Benjamin
from Rachel, King David from the Benjamin tribe as is Jesus. I like the symmetry of that.

He'd have to have a love interest, so I'd add some university nerd chick, cute of course but nerdy as alll hell, archeologist type that he contacts to investigate the document. They fall in love investigating the family document, which is wrapped in benjamin tribe cloth, echoing how moses was found wrapped in jewish cloth floating down the nile. Not sure if cloth would survive that long, so some kind of benjamin tribe ancient relic.

You could plot it two ways; 1) have the family document reveal something they left out in the bible, which you'd have to make up and it would have be something very controversial, or 2) since there was no printing in those days, documents had to be written down and copied, so maybe his ancestor wrote a place down wrong or got some kind of obvious detail wrong, which would be why the ancestor's document was rejected as an official bible book.

Make fate be a small and simple thing, which affects everthing. But the story ends happily with sad lonely descendant finding love with cute archeologist nerd and the family line being carried on along with the secret.

This novel would be hard to write though, because you'd first have to come up with a some kind of biblical gospel that would closely mirror one of the four gospels in the bible as the secret text. I don't think it would be that impossible, but it would definitely require much
thought.

Each gospel had a point of view, so you'd have to come up with a new point of view which would mean reading all the rejected ones and knowing the major ones well enough to fake a copy of one.

I love the idea of the novel though.