The Church Fathers · c. 3rd–4th century
The Epistle to the Laodiceans
Attributed to Paul
What it is
Twenty short verses supplying the letter Colossians 4:16 says Paul sent to Laodicea and which nobody had. It is assembled almost entirely out of phrases from Philippians and says nothing that Paul had not already written elsewhere — which may be why it survived so long unchallenged.
Why it lasted
Jerome called it rejected by everyone and it went on being copied anyway, appearing in well over a hundred Vulgate manuscripts and in the first printed German and English Bibles. The clearest case of a forgery that persisted not by deceiving anyone but by being harmless.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
Read next