The Missing Gospels appears to be the flagship of the Christian Traditionalists' defence against the growing impact of the Nag Hammadi gospels and other recently rediscovered early Gnostic Christian texts.

In The Missing Gospels, Darrell Bock attempts to show that Traditionalist Christianity has its roots securely in the first century with Christ, and that the Gnostics were simply an aberation that appeared in the second century.

However, Darrell Bock's The Missing Gospels will not be quite as successful in containing true Christian Gnosticism as his predecessor Ireneus was in the Second Century.

Ireneus and his accomplices achieved success against Christian Gnosticism largely through the establishment of a massive centralised power structure under the Bishop of Rome.

Ireneus put it this way:

we do put to confusion all those who, in whatever manner, whether by an evil self-pleasing, by vainglory, or by blindness and perverse opinion, assemble in unauthorized meetings; we do this, I say, by indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul; as also by pointing out the faith preached to men, which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops.

For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its pre- eminent authority

Bock and his traditionalist Christian compatriots no longer have the option of such a declaration of 'Martial Law' and have to rely on works such as The Missing Gospels to get their point across.

Of course the missing Gospels that the work refers to, were only missing thanks to the actions of the predecessors of the modern Christian Traditionalists who followed Ireneus in the fourth Century. Actions that included both the destruction of Gnostic Christian texts and disinformation about their content. There are of course other texts that are still missing thanks to their actions!

Missing texts did not go missing because they offered support for the Traditionalist Christian position!

A good illustrative point is the Apology of Aristides that went "missing" until the late 19th Century.

Of course Bock doesn't ask why we are missing so many dissenting texts, but to give him his due, he does admit to the early Traditionalists disinformation campaign - in the nicest possible way.

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