Gnosis "The Lost Gospels" by Anglican priest Pete Owen Jones
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Documentary presented by Anglican priest Pete Owen Jones which explores the huge number of ancient Christian texts that didn't make it into the New Testament. Shocking and challenging, these were works in which Jesus didn't die, took revenge on his enemies and kissed Mary Magdalene on the mouth - a Jesus unrecognisable from that found in the traditional books of the New Testament. Pete travels through Egypt and the former Roman Empire looking at the emerging evidence of a Christian world that's very different to the one we know, and discovers that aside from the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, there were over seventy gospels, acts, letters and apocalypses, all circulating in the early Church. Through these lost Gospels, Pete reconstructs the intense intellectual and political struggles for orthodoxy that was fought in the early centuries of Christianity, a battle involving different Christian sects, each convinced that their gospels were true and sacred. The worldwide success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code sparked new interest, as well as wild and misguided speculation about the origins of the Christian faith. Owen Jones sets out the context in which heretical texts like the Gospel of Mary emerged. He also strikes a cautionary note - if these lost gospels had been allowed to flourish, Christianity may well have faced an uncertain future, or perhaps not survived at all. The documentary, although a great feat of scholarship falls short of exploring some other important manuscripts such as the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Barnabas. It also fails to eplore the evidences in the gospels of the other possibility of Christ's nature: that he was entirely human.

Here at the Church of Santa Maria Magdalena, in the heart of Rome, administering mass is very much a male affair. In fact, throughout the Roman Church, the corridors of power are full of men. Women have a rôle, but it’s as a mother; virgin; wife. The churches argued that it’s a model which extends right back to the time of Jesus himself. The four Gospels all record that he chose twelve disciples, and that they were all men. It follows, they argued, that the priestly office should be held only by men, in imitation of Jesus’s decision two thousand years ago.

But among the many remarkable discoveries in Nag Hammadi were gospels which painted women in a very different light, the way [that] they came to be portrayed within the canonical Gospels. In Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, women are barely mentioned, and certainly Jesus didn’t have any female disciples, but in the suppressed Gospels of Philip and Mary, and in the Acts of Thecla and Paul, the picture is very different.

Far from being minor characters, these gospels reveal a church where in the first centuries after Jesus’s death, women took centre stage. And even more surprising: they suggest that in the years of Jesus’s life, women were even involved at the heart of his mission. And one of these texts suggests that there was one woman in particular who played a very important rôle in Jesus’s ministry. She’s someone who’s more usually associated with prostitution and madness than teaching the word of G‐d. She’s the bad girl of Christianity: Mary Magdalene.

For centuries, in art and literature, Mary Magdalene has been depicted as the repentant sinner: the woman who washed Jesus’s feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. But with the new discoveries of Nag Hammadi, a radically different and far more controversial picture of Mary is emerging.

In these texts, Mary appears very frequently as one of Jesus’s prominent disciples, and in one of the Nag Hammadi documents, in a text attributed to another of Jesus’s apostles, there’s an even more striking revelation. In a relatively unknown work, the Gospel of Philip, Mary Magdalene plays a key rôle and it is implied within that Gospel that her relationship with Jesus wasn’t just spiritual.

…wow.

  • Red_Sunshine_Over_Florida [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    The accuracy of the accounts of these non canonical gospels reflecting authentic traditions of the historical Jesus has been questioned by historians, with many of them, at the earliest, probably being written a generation later than the last canonical gospel. Though I have heard of some scholars trying to tease out parables from the Gospel of Thomas that sound more earlier than similar versions found in the canonical gospels.

    They often are interesting primary sources that give us a look into the concerns and practices of the Christian groups that wrote them.