Saw a fantastic show on Channel Four BBC yesterday - The Lost Gospels.
What amazed me was the profundity of the entire information. Anglica priest Pete Owen Jones traveled from Nag Hamadi in Egypt to the St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, unraveling the mysteries of the Coptic scripts which never made it to the Scripture. The views, research and the alternate scenarios played out were truly mind-bending - and explored how Christianity would have looked had even one of the Lost Gospels been accepted by the fledgling Church, thousand five hundred years ago.
The Gospels of Mathew, Mark Luke and John are the ones that all of us are familiar with in the New Testament. The ones we were not aware about were - the gospels of Philip, Peter, Mary and Thomas. In addition there were the as yet undiscovered gospel of the Ebionites.
Gospel of Philip - radical idea - Jesus was a loved teacher, who loved his students back in equal measure, including Mary Magdalene
Gospel of Peter - radical idea - Jesus Christ was an God Himself. He came to Earth and abstracted a man - Jesus' body, to carry out His supernatural deeds and then left for His heavenly abode, leaving Jesus' body to suffer on the cross. This school of thought came to be known as the 'Deceitist' school of thought, 'deceiius' in Latin meaning illusion.
Gospel of Mary - radical idea - women had an equal part to play in the Church as men did. Also, this gospel established revelations pronounced by Jesus after His resurrection
Gospel of Thomas - radical idea - the female of the species is weaker to the male and not fit to enter Heave. This was spoken in the context of Mary Magdalene, who was supposed to have received the revelations from Jesus after the resurrection. Scholars interviewed by Pete Owen Jones mentioned that this might have implied that it could be the female aspect of one's nature - the effeminateness related ususally to weak beliefs etc.
The Ebionites gospel, contended that Jesus was a man and that it was his baptism by John the Baptist which made him divine. This gospel was rejected outright by the poweres that be, and the name Ebionite, meaning 'poor' in Hebrew was attributed to those who propounded this gospel. By 'poor' is implied the impecuniosity of thoughts of this particular sect.
Marcien from Turkey who reached Rome around 150 AD was the most revolutionary thought-leader who was struck by the dichotomy of the divinities presented in the two versions of the Testaments, the Old and the New. The Old Testament portrays a God who exacts revenge and retribution for any wrong-doing. On the other hand there is the God, who suffered Himself in order to release humanity from the bonds of pain and agony brought on by the weight of sins and perfidy. Marcien's solution was two Gods, which was explained by him in a couple of works which were instantly banned by the Church as heresy, leading ultimately to Marcien's excommunication. Marcien had propounded this because he felt that a God who loved would be more widely accepted, far removed from the Jewish God of the Old Testament who insisted that His subjects follow a strict set of rules.
So what finally caused 27 sacred texts to form the Holy scripture (New Testament) from among the 80 odd in circulation till around 500 AD. It seems that the three most important factors were - proximity to Rome with respect to where it was written, moderateness in outlook, pronounciation of a male led Church. Not satisfying even one of these criteria could have led to most of these 80 texts to be disqualified, so much so that even Peter's gospel was not included in the newly formed Holy Scripture of the Roman Catholic Church. The young Church was looking to establish itself as the world's foremost religion of the Middle Ages, donning the mantle of power brought upon by the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine.
