Berthold

This is a thing my teacher of Latin once told me (not in school):

The lifelong virginity of Mary, which is a Catholic dogma, relies on one apocryphal gospel (I have forgotten, which), where even the procedure of "proof" (a midwife as eyewitness) was described.

Are there other examples where Church dogma is based on not officially canonized scriptures?

andrewcriddle

'based on' may be problematic here 'is first found in' may be better.

One example would be the bdily assumption of Mary which is first found in Apocryphal writings dating from the 4th century onward.

Andrew Criddle

Zeichman

If you wanted to know, this was based on the Infancy Gospel of James, which can be found at www.EarlyChristianWritings.com

robto

A lot of the ideas about Hell come from the Apocalypse of Paul (different from the Apocalypse of Paul found at Nag Hammadi).

Berthold

A further example of embroidering upon the canonical sources is how the Magi, of unspecified number, rank and names, became the Holy Three Kings, named Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, representative of the three then known continents, their bones allegedly lying in Cologne Cathedral.

Enda80

The serpent of Eden as a shape-shifting Satan in disguise represents an idea that may have started in the Koran, which explicitly says that it was Satan who tempted Adam and Eve.

Of course, the Koran was written after the New Testament, so they were able to shoehorn retroactively this idea.