Congratulations!
Because you have, let's say, a healthy curiosity, you have stumbled upon the answer to one of the mysteries of the ages – the gospels of Jesus and how we came to possess them.
You probably have never heard of him, but an American named Winfred Martindale spent 40 years unraveling that mystery. He figured how one man, not four, inscribed a single four-part gospel, not four gospels, on a single 100-foot-long papyrus scroll, and how the scroll was hidden from Roman persecutors for about 350 years.
Then, around the year 400, the scroll was stolen (wait for it) by the Christian church of Alexandria, Egypt, which hid it, split up its four-column format, which the author had designed to discourage forgers, creating four "gospels" and rejiggering them to satisfy the self-serving needs of the by-then rather evil church.
Martindale outlined the above in 1977, in a self-published book titled The Original Gospel of Jesus. Miraculously, for lack of a better word, he had discovered several of the author's other anti-forgery tricks and, working backward, he was able to restore the gospel scroll to its original condition. But he was then too old to go on the road to sell it and he died in 1989 at age 89.
Martindale, however, left behind a couple of believers who have managed to digitize both the book and the 100-foot-long scroll (no mean feat) and we are selling them for a small fee to cover costs. We are confident that you will find them more than intriguing and enjoy having the inside dope on one of the great mysteries of the ages.
