An older but excellent post by my colleague Philip Jenkins:
Quite regularly, the media produce claims about supposedly startling new discoveries concerning the Bible, alternative gospels, and/or Christian origins – just over the past decade, think for instance of “Jesus’s Wife” or the Gospel of Judas. A common theme in such reporting is just how astonishing and unexpected such finds are, and how their novelty would have shocked earlier generations. And in most cases, the weary academic response should properly be that actually, we have known all this stuff for a good long while, and usually for well over a century. The fact that we so often forget those earlier discoveries, and so grievously underestimate the intellectual daring of earlier generations, is in itself a significant component of the sociology of knowledge.