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00:00:00It was when I went hitchhiking as a teenager that I first read the New Testament.
00:00:22On that occasion, the driver who picked me up was a Christian and we got talking.
00:00:27He said if I wanted to find out about God, I should read the Gospels.
00:00:34I wasn't travelling through the Egyptian desert at the time.
00:00:37I was actually on my way down to Exeter, hitching along the A303.
00:00:42But it was a turning point and when I got home I read the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark,
00:00:47Luke and John and I think really it was John that struck a chord with me, with its deep
00:00:52sense of Christian mystery and its poetry and its mysticism.
00:01:00That day was the first step on a journey that led to my ordination as a priest in the Church
00:01:05of England.
00:01:07But what I didn't know then was that these Gospels were only a fraction of the information
00:01:13we have about Jesus.
00:01:15In fact, over the last century, discoveries here in the Egyptian deserts have revealed
00:01:23that in the first 400 years after Jesus' death, there were in existence more than 20 Gospels,
00:01:3115 apocalypses and nearly 50 other texts about Jesus.
00:01:39So why do we only know of the ones in the New Testament?
00:01:47This is the story of a battle of words that spread across continents, that led to intrigue,
00:01:53forgery, condemnation, a battle in which texts fought against each other for acceptance in
00:02:01a fledgling faith and what was at stake was the kind of faith that Christianity would
00:02:07turn out to be.
00:02:13If the Gospel of Peter had won out, Christians today might believe that Jesus never died.
00:02:21If the Gospel of Philip had won, Mary Magdalene might have been hailed as the first Pope.
00:02:28If the infancy narrative of James had been accepted, I would have learned in Sunday school
00:02:33that a child called Jesus caused his teacher to wither on the spot just for reprimanding
00:02:40him in class.
00:02:42In fact, if any of the different texts had ended up in the New Testament, Christianity
00:02:46today would look very different, or perhaps it wouldn't have survived at all.
00:03:03The New Testament, four Gospels, letters by the Apostles, Paul, Peter and James, and
00:03:13the Book of Revelation.
00:03:15It's a collection of texts that our society has taken utterly for granted as the books
00:03:20that form the basis of Christianity.
00:03:25Certainly this apparently perfectly ordered set of texts are those I've had to absorb,
00:03:31I've had to study since becoming a priest in the Church of England.
00:03:36But throughout all my theological training and all the conversations I've had with other
00:03:41priests and Christian academics, we've never really discussed, I never really knew about
00:03:46the countless other books that didn't make it into the New Testament.
00:03:56This film is the story of my journey to uncover this treasure trove of lost literature and
00:04:02through it the very different forms of Christianity it represents.
00:04:09What I've discovered through them is a religion far removed from the sanguine, organised movement
00:04:15I believed it to be.
00:04:19These lost Gospels were discarded by the early Church Fathers as heretical and they were
00:04:25left out of the New Testament, but I've come to believe that without them we can't begin
00:04:31to understand the origins of the Christian Church.
00:04:37These texts have reawakened in me a new fascination in Christianity and shown me what an extraordinary
00:04:44place the early Church must have been.
00:04:49My journey begins in Egypt.
00:05:03The metropolis of Alexandria was home to Athanasius, one of the most powerful and colourful Christian
00:05:09bishops in history, who lived and worked in the city in the 4th century AD.
00:05:19Known by one contemporary as a man whose face was radiant with intelligence, he wrote
00:05:25every year to all the Christians under his jurisdiction to tell them when to celebrate
00:05:30Easter.
00:05:32But in his 39th letter, written in 367 AD, he had something more controversial to say.
00:05:41What Athanasius included in his letter was a list, but not just any list.
00:05:47He named the 27 books which we now know make up the canon of New Testament scripture and
00:05:53he made it clear, he made it very clear, that it was these and only these that the Church
00:05:58approved of as scripture.
00:06:00Any other book, he said, should not be read.
00:06:06At a single stroke, he condemned a wealth of literature that had, up until that point,
00:06:11been regarded as Christian.
00:06:13The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were permitted, but those of Mary, Philip
00:06:19and Peter were condemned.
00:06:23The Acts of the Apostles was considered to be educational, but the Acts of Tecla were
00:06:27shunned.
00:06:28The first and second letters of Paul to the Corinthians were allowed, but I'm afraid the
00:06:33third one didn't make it.
00:06:38Athanasius' edict was remarkable because it was the first time anyone in the top echelons
00:06:52of the Church hierarchy had suggested that only certain books would be tolerated.
00:06:58And for nearly 2,000 years, those texts that the bishop banned remained a complete mystery
00:07:04to us.
00:07:06All we have is scant references to them, found in the writings of their enemies, the early
00:07:10Church Fathers, who only mention them purely to condemn them and to warn his congregation
00:07:16of the erroneous teachings they contained.
00:07:20And perhaps this might have remained the case if it wasn't for a chance find in December
00:07:261945, a discovery that forced scholars to completely rethink the nature of early Christianity.
00:07:35300 miles south of Cairo, close to the Nile, is an area called Nag Hammadi.
00:07:57It's an extraordinary place, made more so by what was found buried here just over 60
00:08:03years ago.
00:08:05A library of papyri books containing more than 50 individual works from early Christianity,
00:08:13the majority previously unknown.
00:08:17I've come here with Professor Bart Ehrman, who's devoted the last 30 years to studying
00:08:22this period of history.
00:08:24Well, this is where they discovered the manuscripts.
00:08:28There were seven farmhands from the nearby village of Al-Qasr who were out digging for
00:08:33tabak, which is nitrate-rich soil in this area, that they use for fertilizer.
00:08:38The seven of them were digging near one of these boulders, and one of them hit something
00:08:44in the ground and uncovered it, and it turned out it was a skeleton.
00:08:48Next to the skeleton, they found a jar, an earthenware jar, reddish color, that stood
00:08:54about two feet high.
00:08:55What was in it?
00:08:56And the jar was, they didn't know at first because the jar was sealed, in fact.
00:09:00There was a bowl over the top, and they were afraid to open the jar because they thought
00:09:05there might be an evil genie inside, and then, after some reflection, they realised there
00:09:09might be gold inside, and so they smashed into it with their mattocks, and there wasn't
00:09:15gold or genie.
00:09:16There were some codices, some books.
00:09:20The books formed the most significant collection of lost Christian writings.
00:09:29The manuscripts date from the fourth century, but some scholars believe they may have been
00:09:34composed much earlier.
00:09:39They include several Gospels about Jesus, but the man they describe is unrecognisable
00:09:47from the Jesus found in the traditional books of the New Testament.
00:09:53This was a Jesus who didn't die, who took revenge on his enemies, and who kissed Mary
00:09:59Magdalene on the mouth.
00:10:02These were shocking and challenging texts, never before seen by a Western scholar, and
00:10:08although it was known they'd existed in antiquity, they'd been lost for nearly 1,500 years.
00:10:17What these documents show us is that in the early centuries, in the 100 or 200 years after
00:10:21Jesus' death, there were alternative visions of what Jesus was all about, and what Christianity
00:10:27was supposed to be.
00:10:29There were different understandings of who God was, or even how many gods there were,
00:10:33and most of these documents claim to be representing the views of Jesus himself, and so these provide
00:10:39us with an alternative vision of what Jesus himself might have actually taught during
00:10:44his public ministry.
00:10:50So why did these books end up buried here?
00:10:59Scholars believe they came from a nearby monastery from the fourth century, now in ruins.
00:11:08The texts may well have belonged to the monks who lived here, and when Bishop Athanasius
00:11:14issued his stern edict, they should have got rid of those books, deemed heretical.
00:11:22But they couldn't bring themselves to destroy them, perhaps because they found wisdom and
00:11:26consolation in their words, so they simply buried them, in order that they might be uncovered
00:11:31again some other day.
00:11:38There's even a rumour that the skeleton found with the scrolls belonged to a slave, ordered
00:11:44by the monks to carry the 13 books to their burial place, and then murdered to prevent
00:11:52him from ever revealing their secret.
00:12:01Despite the monks' best efforts to protect their texts, ironically it was after their
00:12:06discovery by the Bedouin farmers in 1945 that they nearly didn't survive.
00:12:13Having found the papyri, the ringleader Ali ripped them up to divide them between his
00:12:18companions.
00:12:19When they showed no interest, he wrapped them in his turban and took them home.
00:12:24When he got there, he threw them into a courtyard which was reserved for animals.
00:12:29To make matters worse, his mother used some of the brittle leaves that evening to start
00:12:34a fire for the family meal.
00:12:36It's a miracle they survived at all.
00:12:41But survive they did, and one way or another, the texts found their way north, to the safety
00:12:47of one of Egypt's most respected museums.
00:12:59This is the Coptic Museum, and it's here that the Nag Hammadi scrolls are now housed.
00:13:09I want to find out just what it was about them that made the leaders of the early church
00:13:14feel it was necessary to condemn them as heresy.
00:13:20My companion is the distinguished Coptologist Stephen Emmel, who has spent over 30 years
00:13:25conserving and studying the texts.
00:13:31Amongst the manuscripts found were many fragments of Gospels not included in the New Testament.
00:13:37One such text is the Gospel of Thomas, unusual because it was discovered in its entirety.
00:13:45It's attributed to, although not proven to be, the work of one of Jesus' disciples, famous
00:13:52in the New Testament as Doubting Thomas.
00:13:56He's the apostle who refused to believe in Jesus' resurrection until he saw it for himself.
00:14:04The Gospel penned in his name is a collection of 114 sayings ascribed to Jesus, written
00:14:13in Coptic, the Egyptian language, from the beginning of the Christian period.
00:14:18Its style and central message is very different from that found in Matthew, Mark, Luke and
00:14:24John.
00:14:26It begins here.
00:14:27This is the subtitle to the previous work, and a new work begins.
00:14:32These are the secret words that the living Jesus spoke, and Didymus Judas Thomas wrote
00:14:39them down.
00:14:41And then what follows in the Gospel is simply a series of sayings of Jesus, most of them
00:14:46are introduced with the simple phrase, Jesus said.
00:14:50But there is no narrative framework, there is no mention of his death, no mention of
00:14:54his resurrection.
00:14:55Rather, it's things that Jesus said, puzzling things, and the point is for the reader to
00:15:00understand them, to think, not simply to believe.
00:15:04So are the sayings from Thomas similar to the ones that we find in Matthew, Mark, Luke
00:15:09and John?
00:15:10Many of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas are identical with sayings that we find in
00:15:13the New Testament Gospels.
00:15:15Some of them are completely new.
00:15:17Perhaps the most famous is at the very end of the Gospel of Thomas, which we have here.
00:15:25Simon Peter said to them, let Mary go away from us, because women are not worthy of life.
00:15:35Jesus said, behold, I will lead her so that she might become male, so that she might become
00:15:44also a living spirit, like you males.
00:15:50Because any woman who makes herself male will go into the kingdom of the heavens.
00:15:56Now that's a saying we don't find anywhere in the New Testament.
00:16:00I'm not sure I see that going down particularly well in the Western world right now.
00:16:05It's been a very controversial subject of discussion, what exactly is meant there.
00:16:09I'm inclined to agree with those people who argue that it's not literally meant a kind
00:16:14of biological transformation from a woman into a man, but rather in general in the ancient
00:16:19world, maleness, and not just human maleness, but maleness as a concept was understood as
00:16:24being more complete, more perfect than femaleness, partly it was a male chauvinistic society.
00:16:29And so that what's being said here is that any person, and especially any woman, who
00:16:33becomes a more complete or a perfect human being will enter into the kingdom of heaven.
00:16:43Scholarly debate has raged over the historical accuracy of Thomas' Gospel, and much of the
00:16:48argument has concentrated on its date.
00:16:54Although the physical manuscript of Thomas can be dated to the early 4th century, there's
00:16:59speculation that the content of the Gospel is far older.
00:17:06The logic goes that if it was written in the 1st century, it could well be earlier than
00:17:11the canonical Gospels, and if that's the case, it's the nearest we'll ever get to the historical
00:17:18Jesus.
00:17:22So is this the earliest information about Jesus that we have?
00:17:26It could be, because this form, nothing but a series of teachings of Jesus, a few very
00:17:33simple narrative frameworks, but no biographical information whatsoever, whereas the canonical
00:17:38Gospels, especially Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are cast as a kind of biography of Jesus.
00:17:44This form, transmitting simply what Jesus said, what he taught, is what scholars have
00:17:49for hundreds of years assumed was the more original form of the Gospel as the message
00:17:55of Jesus.
00:17:56So the Gospel of Thomas, certainly according to its form, could well be historically older
00:18:00earlier than any of the Gospels in the Bible.
00:18:10The fact that so many fragments of the Gospel of Thomas have been found also suggests that
00:18:15as well as being early, it was widely read, and the good condition of the Nag Hammadi
00:18:22text in particular was because it was written on the best quality papyri, save for the books
00:18:28that were highly valued.
00:18:35So what exactly was it about the Gospel of Thomas that led to its exclusion from the
00:18:40New Testament?
00:18:42On the surface, a text that contains the sayings of Jesus hardly seems controversial, and yet
00:18:49even though I studied at theological college, I wasn't taught about it.
00:18:55Well there's a hint in that very first saying in the book.
00:19:00The Gospel starts, these are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and the Didymus
00:19:06Judas Thomas wrote down.
00:19:09And he said, whoever finds the correct interpretation of these sayings will never die.
00:19:15And when you read Thomas, this hiddenness is immediately apparent.
00:19:22The Gospel isn't straightforward, it's though it's been written to be deliberately obscure.
00:19:27Sayings such as, if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save
00:19:34you.
00:19:35If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
00:19:42Their meaning is cryptic, it's also compelling.
00:19:48In fact, these pithy aphorisms were riddles waiting to be decoded.
00:19:55But this wasn't just a word game.
00:19:58Those who successfully deciphered the code would be rewarded with immortality.
00:20:09And it was exactly the secrecy of the sayings and what they promised that the orthodox leaders
00:20:16of the church found so disquieting.
00:20:31I wanted to know about the promise of eternal life held in these enigmatic teachings.
00:20:38And about the people who believed in them.
00:20:41And I joined Bart Ehrman for a glimpse of the forgotten world in which Thomas once flourished.
00:20:48This Gospel emphasizes the importance of secret knowledge for salvation.
00:20:54The key to salvation, according to the Gospel of Thomas, is by learning the secret teachings
00:21:00of Jesus and knowing what they meant.
00:21:03There were groups of Christians in the early church known as Gnostic Christians.
00:21:08They were called Gnostics because the Greek word for knowledge is gnosis.
00:21:14They were the Christians who knew, who had the secret knowledge that brings about salvation.
00:21:19In my opinion, the Gospel of Thomas is a Gnostic Gospel, propounding a set of beliefs that
00:21:25if people can understand, they'll have eternal life.
00:21:30Religion has been full of secret teachings.
00:21:33Why did the early church leaders find that so disturbing?
00:21:38The way of salvation that's taught in this Gospel stood at odds with the way of salvation
00:21:42taught by what became traditional Christianity.
00:21:47According to these church fathers, salvation was open to everybody, high and low, intelligent,
00:21:52unintelligent, rich and poor, anybody who believed in the death and resurrection of
00:21:56Jesus.
00:21:57But according to these texts, it's only people in the know, only the inside group, those
00:22:03who had esoteric knowledge who could have salvation.
00:22:07This was a very different understanding of salvation that cut at the very root of what
00:22:11early Christianity was all about.
00:22:20Today, Christians universally accept that it's Jesus' resurrection and not just the
00:22:26interpretation of his teachings that leads to eternal life.
00:22:32The Gospel of Thomas reveals that in the 3rd and 4th centuries, it wasn't so clear-cut.
00:22:44I can see how a Gospel that promised salvation through Jesus' teachings alone could well
00:22:51be very, very popular.
00:22:54In the rational world of the 21st century, a text which plays down the more unbelievable
00:22:59elements of his life, his miracles, his being raised from the dead, could be very attractive.
00:23:05But the world of the early Christians was very, very different.
00:23:09And there was one reason, in particular, why early Orthodox Christian leaders wanted to
00:23:14believe that it was Jesus' victory over death that was the only path to salvation.
00:23:21In the 3rd and 4th centuries, Christians throughout the Roman world, even those here
00:23:32in Egypt, suffered persecution.
00:23:37Their refusal to worship other gods and their persistence in flaunting their own beliefs
00:23:43created tensions and suspicions, and thousands were killed for their faith.
00:23:52And for these Christians living in fear, there was one aspect of Jesus' life that in particular
00:24:01sustained them, and it was his suffering on the cross, but more importantly, the knowledge
00:24:07that on the other side of that suffering lay redemption, the resurrection.
00:24:12Jesus was a role model. If he had suffered and been resurrected, then their own suffering
00:24:18had a purpose.
00:24:22A gospel which placed no importance on Jesus' death and physical resurrection, like Thomas,
00:24:29was never going to provide reassurance to those facing martyrdom.
00:24:33And it's no surprise that Gnostic Christians were well known for not being prepared to
00:24:39die for their faith.
00:24:43For this reason, that for many groups of Christians, the Gospel of Thomas is so subversive, a Jesus
00:24:50who was a teacher of wise words is all very well and good, but it's not worth risking
00:24:56your life for.
00:24:58And unless Christians were willing to stand up for, and in some cases to die for, their
00:25:03faith, the Christian religion might well face a very uncertain future.
00:25:11The Gospel of Thomas reveals that during the first centuries of Christian history, there
00:25:16were no fixed right ideas.
00:25:19In fact, the infighting was intense and the battle lines blurred.
00:25:29This is the story of a war, but not one fought with swords and spears, it's a battle of words.
00:25:36The history of early Christianity was a bloody one and the stakes were high.
00:25:41All sides believed they were the holders of the truth and that the texts and the ideas
00:25:46they contained were the way to salvation.
00:25:51These books held the key to the future of your soul.
00:25:55They could make the difference between eternal paradise and perpetual damnation.
00:26:06In the Roman Catholic Church today, the result of one such battle is only two opponents.
00:26:36Here at the Church of Santa Maria Magdalena in the heart of Rome, administering Mass is
00:26:46very much a male affair.
00:26:51In fact, throughout the Roman Church, the corridors of power are full of men.
00:26:57Women have a role, but it's as a mother, virgin, wife.
00:27:04The Church has argued that it's a model which extends right back to the time of Jesus himself.
00:27:09The four Gospels all record that he chose 12 disciples and that they were all men.
00:27:19It follows, they argue, that the priestly office should be held only by men, in imitation
00:27:24of Jesus' decision 2,000 years ago.
00:27:32But among the many remarkable discoveries at Nag Hammadi were Gospels, which painted
00:27:38women in a very different light to the way they came to be portrayed within the canonical
00:27:44Gospels.
00:27:45In Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, women are barely mentioned.
00:27:49And certainly Jesus didn't have any female disciples, but in the suppressed Gospels of
00:27:55Philip and Mary and in the acts of Tecla and Paul, the picture is very different.
00:28:07Far from being minor characters, these Gospels reveal a church where, in the first centuries
00:28:12after Jesus' death, women took centre stage.
00:28:18And even more surprising, they suggest that in the years of Jesus' life, women were even
00:28:23involved at the heart of his mission.
00:28:27And one of these texts suggests that there was one woman in particular who played a very
00:28:35important role in Jesus' ministry.
00:28:38She's someone who's more usually associated with prostitution and madness than teaching
00:28:43the word of God.
00:28:45She's the bad girl of Christianity, Mary Magdalene.
00:28:54For centuries, in art and literature, Mary Magdalene has been depicted as the repentant
00:29:00sinner, the woman who washed Jesus' feet with her tears and dried them with her hair.
00:29:08But with the new discoveries of Nag Hammadi, a radically different and far more controversial
00:29:13picture of Mary is emerging.
00:29:19In these texts, Mary appears very frequently as one of Jesus' prominent disciples.
00:29:31And in one of the Nag Hammadi documents, in a text attributed to another of Jesus' apostles,
00:29:37there's an even more striking revelation.
00:29:40In a relatively unknown work, the Gospel of Philip, Mary Magdalene plays a key role in
00:29:49the Gospel, and it is implied within that Gospel that her relationship with Jesus wasn't
00:29:54just spiritual.
00:30:06Along with all the other Nag Hammadi works, the Gospel of Philip is now housed in the
00:30:10Coptic Museum in Cairo.
00:30:14The text has been translated and studied by Stephen Emmel.
00:30:18Tell me about the Gospel of Philip.
00:30:20One of the most interesting things about the Gospel of Philip is a peculiar insight that
00:30:25it gives us into the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
00:30:29Of course, there's some information about Mary Magdalene in the New Testament Gospels,
00:30:33especially in relationship to her being a witness of the resurrection.
00:30:36But there's very little said there about her relationship with Jesus.
00:30:41In the Gospel of Philip, there's a passage which suggests quite explicitly that they
00:30:45may have had a kind of physical, intimate physical relationship based on a special love
00:30:50between them.
00:30:52What does this text reveal?
00:30:54This is the passage here.
00:30:56It begins with a reference specifically to Maria Tamagdalene, Mary Magdalene, and then
00:31:01it says, the Saviour loved her more than all the disciples.
00:31:08But there's a suggestion of an even more intimate connection.
00:31:16During their long burial in the desert, some of the books were attacked by ants.
00:31:21In the Gospel of Philip, the ants made a hole in a very crucial place.
00:31:27This gap has tantalised scholars for decades.
00:31:33Then comes the crucial sentence.
00:31:34He kissed her, on her, and at this point there's a hole in the manuscript.
00:31:39So we have to use our knowledge of Coptic grammar and I'm inclined to think that the
00:31:44most likely restoration in this case is that he kissed her on her mouth many times.
00:31:53It's a revelation which has fired the imaginations of scholars and popular authors alike.
00:32:01Does this indicate that Christ is having a physical relationship with Mary Magdalene?
00:32:05Well, that's one way that one could perhaps interpret the text.
00:32:08After all, if you take kissing on the mouth as part of an intimate sexual relationship,
00:32:13one could draw that conclusion.
00:32:15There's another way to understand the passage, however, whatever the historical reality is.
00:32:20Kissing was sometimes presented as a way of transferring spiritual knowledge in a most
00:32:25intimate fashion, not so much because it was lip to lip, but rather spirit to spirit,
00:32:31spirit as breath.
00:32:32The breath of God.
00:32:33Exactly.
00:32:34And he breathed upon them.
00:32:35Our breath is our life and through kissing we share breath and therefore are sharing
00:32:40our most intimate and essential being.
00:32:43And so it's maybe suggesting that Jesus here is communicating a special level of wisdom
00:32:48and knowledge to Mary.
00:32:50Do you think that really happened?
00:32:52I think we can't possibly know whether Jesus ever kissed Mary, but I would say in the context
00:32:59of a movement like that, with a very tight inner circle of disciples and a highly revered
00:33:05charismatic teacher, that it's not completely out of the question that there would have
00:33:09been demonstrations of fondness through physical contact.
00:33:12I wouldn't exclude it as a possibility.
00:33:19Any suggestion of a sexual relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus is something the
00:33:24church has always frowned upon.
00:33:28And yet for me, the idea really isn't so shocking.
00:33:31Why shouldn't Jesus have had an intimate relationship with a woman?
00:33:42Whatever the truth about Jesus and Mary's physical relationship, the Gospel of Philip clearly
00:33:47suggests they shared a strong spiritual connection.
00:33:52And it undermines the traditional view in the New Testament Gospels that Peter was the
00:33:57favourite disciple of Jesus.
00:34:03The contents of Philip are so controversial, it's easy to dismiss them as an aberration.
00:34:10But in fact, there's another lost Gospel which also portrays Mary in a different light.
00:34:21In 1897, two British archaeologists started excavating the ancient rubbish dumps of the
00:34:27Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus.
00:34:31They uncovered nearly 50,000 fragments of papyrus, some of them over 1,500 years old.
00:34:41Amongst this mountain of texts, one scrap was initially overlooked.
00:34:47But on closer examination, its true significance emerged.
00:34:54It was the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, a text scholars hadn't even known existed.
00:35:02The fragment is now kept in the Sackler Library in Oxford.
00:35:12I went to meet papyrologist Dr Nicholas Gonis, who's responsible for its conservation.
00:35:18Look at that.
00:35:20Where's our one?
00:35:22Ours is...
00:35:23It's this one.
00:35:24Ah.
00:35:25Right.
00:35:27The papyri came to Oxford in boxes, and this fragment languished in a box for 70 or more years.
00:35:34It was in a box.
00:35:35Did they not think it was important?
00:35:37No.
00:35:38It looks very ordinary.
00:35:39It looks like a legal document or a letter.
00:35:43Oh.
00:35:44But then if you have a closer look, just for the sake of curiosity, the first thing you
00:35:48see is a sequence called Apophagmatum tu Soter, Sayings of the Saviour.
00:35:58And then the very next line, you pretty clearly make out the name Mariame, which is the Hellenized
00:36:04version of Mary.
00:36:06So it is pretty clear that you're dealing with a religious narrative, actually something
00:36:11about the sayings of Jesus, which gets your imagination rolling.
00:36:17And then once you study it further, then you can identify it as of the Gospel of Mary.
00:36:26Enough of the fragment has survived to identify a story which suggests that even after Jesus'
00:36:32death, Mary continued to exert huge influence.
00:36:38It describes a discussion between Mary and the other disciples in which she reveals details
00:36:44of a vision she's had of Jesus.
00:36:50But her words don't go unchallenged.
00:36:52The disciple, Peter in particular, is hostile, asking whether Jesus would really have spoken
00:36:58privately with a woman than openly to them.
00:37:03He very clearly has a problem with the idea that Jesus might have selected Mary above
00:37:08himself and the other disciples to interpret his teachings.
00:37:15So why did a work which reveals Mary Magdalene as Jesus' closest disciple disappear from history?
00:37:32St Peter's, the centre of the Catholic faith.
00:37:37The basilica is named after the disciple who, in the New Testament Gospels,
00:37:42Jesus is said to have called his rock and to whom he entrusted the leadership of his church.
00:37:49Peter is the man the Catholics consider to have been the first pope.
00:37:55But what if his leadership hadn't been so clear-cut in the first century?
00:37:59What if there had been an opponent to his authority and there had been a
00:38:03woman? The Gospel of Mary suggests that that scenario is not as far-fetched as it sounds.
00:38:15According to this Gospel, it wasn't Peter to whom Jesus entrusted his innermost thoughts,
00:38:21but Mary, both before and after his death.
00:38:27The Gospels of Philip and Mary write that Jesus was a man of faith,
00:38:31but the Gospels of Philip and Mary rather scandalously imply that it wasn't Peter who should have been the first pope,
00:38:38but Mary Magdalene.
00:38:43For the male hierarchy of the church, it's easy to see how such writings posed a threat.
00:38:51These texts risked undermining the very foundations of their claims to leadership.
00:38:58But can they possibly be true?
00:39:01Well, here in Rome, lurking under the surface of the city,
00:39:05there's very tangible evidence revealing that certainly,
00:39:09in the early centuries of the fledgling church,
00:39:12women were more influential than is traditionally believed.
00:39:17We're in the Catacomb of Priscilla, one of the many catacombs under the city of Rome.
00:39:23These were Christian burial sites, dating from about the 2nd through to the 5th centuries.
00:39:30And you can see here the slots where the bodies would have been stored.
00:39:35This is where they would have been kept.
00:39:37And this is where they would have been buried.
00:39:41Keith Elliot is an expert in early art and Christianity.
00:39:45How far does this extend?
00:39:47Oh, there's kilometres all over the city of Rome.
00:39:50Wow.
00:39:52The frescoes in these catacombs support the claims in the Gospels of Mary and Philip
00:39:58that women were influential,
00:40:00and that it was not Peter who should have been the first pope,
00:40:04but Mary Magdalene.
00:40:06This is one of the Gospels of Mary and Philip,
00:40:09that women were influential in the early church.
00:40:14Well, where we're going to now is the so-called Greek Chapel.
00:40:18Oh, look at that.
00:40:19I know. One of the marvellous things we're going to see here
00:40:22is a fresco which has been dated 3rd century.
00:40:25There it is.
00:40:27What are they doing?
00:40:28Well, this is what looks like a Eucharistic meal.
00:40:32We have a table here with bread and fish,
00:40:35but I think the thing to notice here is
00:40:38we've certainly got at least one woman present at the table.
00:40:41The person third to the right is obviously a woman.
00:40:44You see the veil coming from her hair over her shoulder.
00:40:48That might be rather surprising,
00:40:50because we're not always used to thinking of women
00:40:53having a prominent role to play in the early church.
00:40:56But this was fairly typical,
00:40:58and a lot of the early Christians met together in house churches.
00:41:02I mean, in the lost Gospels,
00:41:04women appear to play a much more prominent role.
00:41:07Is that a fair reflection of what was going on in the early church?
00:41:10I think it is, yes. I think that's true.
00:41:12And the interesting thing is, looking at these pictures down here,
00:41:15is to remind ourselves that they were being painted
00:41:18about the same time as those Gospels were being written.
00:41:21So we've got pictures and we've got Gospels,
00:41:23both of which are emphasising the more dominant role
00:41:26of women in the early church.
00:41:28Right.
00:41:29In the first centuries of Christianity at least,
00:41:32it seems women were at the heart of the faith.
00:41:40And in Mary Magdalene, such women found a role model to be proud of.
00:41:48There's no way of knowing whether the Gospels of Philip and Mary
00:41:52really are a true representation of Jesus' life.
00:41:57But they may reflect a second-century power struggle
00:42:00between men and women over the leadership of the church.
00:42:05A battle of the sexes.
00:42:10The Mary Magdalene of these Gospels
00:42:12might not be entirely historically accurate,
00:42:15but what she represents is Christian communities
00:42:18where female leadership was a matter of importance,
00:42:22communities where women played a prominent role.
00:42:25They also suggest that male leadership within the church
00:42:29was not a foregone conclusion.
00:42:32The debate was very much alive.
00:42:38Through the Gospels of Mary, Philip and Thomas,
00:42:42I've glimpsed battles between long-forgotten groups of Christians,
00:42:47sects who were divided over the right way to immortality
00:42:51and who fought about the position women should hold.
00:42:55Their Gospels reveal ideas and doctrines
00:42:58far removed from those we understand as Christian today.
00:43:05But there's one issue in particular
00:43:07which dominates a great number of the lost Gospels.
00:43:11It's not about the hierarchy of the church or the path to salvation.
00:43:16It's about the very nature of Christ himself.
00:43:22MUSIC PLAYS
00:43:34Today, Christian beliefs about Jesus are clear.
00:43:38He was simultaneously human and divine.
00:43:42It's a revolutionary idea, but we can easily forget
00:43:47that it's one which only emerged after three centuries of bitter debate.
00:43:53The issue was, how could Jesus be both God and man?
00:44:01And there's one lost Gospel
00:44:03in which the extremes of this conflict are very clearly revealed.
00:44:08It's a work which shockingly suggests that Jesus was never human at all
00:44:14and it's attributed to his closest disciple, Mary Magdalene's arch-rival.
00:44:20I'm talking, of course, about this man, St Peter.
00:44:25In Christian tradition, he's Jesus' chief apostle, his right-hand man
00:44:29and the rock on which his church was built.
00:44:32Quite literally, if you believe the tradition,
00:44:35that the bones found under here are of the great man himself.
00:44:40He was the humble fisherman that became the keeper of the keys to heaven.
00:44:45What better witness could there be to what really happened during the life of Jesus?
00:44:50We have a couple of letters claiming to be from Peter in the New Testament,
00:44:55but surely, if there was a Gospel of Peter,
00:44:58it would have been important enough to make it into the Bible.
00:45:02Well, there is, and it didn't.
00:45:05So, what's the story?
00:45:10Scholars had always known about a Gospel of Peter
00:45:13because of tantalising references to it in other Christian texts
00:45:18from as early as the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
00:45:21But their reaction to it is rather surprising.
00:45:25The church historian Eusebius wrote about the Gospel in 300 AD,
00:45:31but rather than singing its praises, he included it in a list of heretical forgeries.
00:45:37So, what was it about the Gospel of Jesus' most trusted disciple, Peter,
00:45:43that was so dangerous?
00:45:47Well, for centuries, scholars didn't know.
00:45:50No manuscript of it survived,
00:45:52so its contents remained a mystery until a chance discovery.
00:45:58CHANTING
00:46:06The year is 1886, and a team from the French archaeological mission
00:46:11are excavating the grave of a monk in the mysterious town of Achmim
00:46:16on the east bank of the Upper Nile.
00:46:19The archaeologists then uncover a codex parchment buried with the monk,
00:46:25and after translating it, they quickly realise the magnitude of their discovery.
00:46:34A portion of the Gospel according to Peter
00:46:38had been restored to the Christian community
00:46:40after having been lost for centuries.
00:46:44Just think of it.
00:46:46A Gospel written by the man who knew Jesus best of all.
00:46:50This has to be big news.
00:46:56But its contents revealed something that would have rocked the early church.
00:47:04Whereas in the New Testament Gospels, Jesus dies...
00:47:09..in the Gospel of Peter, he doesn't.
00:47:26CHANTING
00:47:37The image of Jesus suffering and dying
00:47:40is one of the most widespread and powerful in the Christian church.
00:47:46And it's remembered very literally by pilgrims at Easter.
00:47:51Every year, thousands of Christians come to Jerusalem
00:47:55for the Good Friday procession.
00:47:57They pack the route that Jesus is supposed to have taken,
00:48:00carrying the cross to his death.
00:48:07The idea of Jesus' agony on the cross is so ingrained in the human psyche
00:48:12that it's difficult to imagine a Christianity without it.
00:48:16But unlike the account of the crucifixion in the canonical Gospels,
00:48:21in the Gospel of Peter, the story of Jesus' ordeal on the cross
00:48:25is one completely devoid of suffering.
00:48:29The text claims that as he was being crucified,
00:48:32he was silent, having no pain.
00:48:38The account also carefully avoids saying that Jesus died.
00:48:42This failure to undergo fundamental human experiences
00:48:46such as pain, suffering and death
00:48:49would have rung alarm bells for many in the early church.
00:48:55Were the supporters of the Gospel of Peter
00:48:58suggesting that Jesus wasn't human?
00:49:04Although Christians today take for granted the idea
00:49:07that Jesus died,
00:49:09although Christians today take for granted the idea
00:49:12that Jesus was both man and God,
00:49:15the Gospel of Peter very clearly shows
00:49:18that for the first Christians, this was still a matter of debate.
00:49:23This was a church in confusion,
00:49:26where ideas about the balance between Jesus' humanity and divinity
00:49:30were hotly contested.
00:49:33Was he divine?
00:49:35Was he merely human?
00:49:37Or was there some way in between?
00:49:40The people who upheld the Gospel of Peter
00:49:43were at the heart of this conflict.
00:49:46For them, Jesus was purely divine.
00:49:49He only appeared to be human
00:49:52and his suffering and death were a deception.
00:49:58I can understand their thinking.
00:50:00If Jesus was God, surely he couldn't have suffered.
00:50:04After all, God can't die.
00:50:10This school of thought came to be called Deceitism,
00:50:14a name derived from the Greek word decis,
00:50:17which means appearance or semblance.
00:50:22And those who were part of the sect were called the Deceitai,
00:50:27literally illusionists,
00:50:29those who believed Jesus' humanity wasn't real.
00:50:35We don't know who wrote the Gospel of Peter,
00:50:39but it certainly wasn't the only tract about the nature of Jesus
00:50:43circulating in the early church.
00:50:46There were other texts promoting alternative ideas.
00:50:52If the Deceitic views of Jesus lay at one extreme,
00:50:56then there was another equally controversial group
00:50:59whose views lay at the other.
00:51:03Whilst the Deceitists claimed Jesus only appeared to be mortal,
00:51:08this sect believed he was most definitely a human,
00:51:12but one hijacked by God.
00:51:26Here in Israel, traces of another lost gospel can be found.
00:51:33It's a text which shockingly suggests that Jesus,
00:51:38although singled out by God, was born a mere mortal.
00:51:49It was the work of a sect now virtually forgotten,
00:51:52known as the Ebionites.
00:51:55They were Christians, but they were strongly committed
00:51:58to maintaining the Jewishness of their faith.
00:52:01They believed Jesus was the Jewish Messiah
00:52:04sent by God to fulfil Jewish scripture.
00:52:09Although this sect were by no means the only Jewish Christians at the time,
00:52:14after all, Jesus had been a Jew, as had all his earliest followers,
00:52:19the Ebionites provoked some of the most vociferous opposition.
00:52:24Their name comes from the Hebrew word ebion, meaning poor.
00:52:29It was a term their opponents used to their advantage,
00:52:33accusing them not of being poor in material wealth,
00:52:37but in understanding.
00:52:41Unlike other Christian groups, such as the Gnostics and the Deceitics,
00:52:45although the Ebionites must have risen from the dead,
00:52:50none of them have actually survived.
00:52:52In fact, the only reason we know about them at all
00:52:55is because their heresies have been immortalised
00:52:58in the works of their opponents.
00:53:03Glimpses of the gospel have surfaced in the writings
00:53:06of an early Christian named Epiphanius.
00:53:11One of his most lengthy texts is known as the Panarion.
00:53:15In it, he attacks no fewer than 80 heretical groups and their books.
00:53:27Professor Larry Hurtado has studied it.
00:53:32What does Epiphanius say in the Panarion about the Ebionites?
00:53:37He doesn't like them.
00:53:39He lists them as one of a whole host of heretics,
00:53:42a kind of handbook of every kind of Christian belief
00:53:45you'd never want to embrace,
00:53:47among which he lists the Ebionites as one of them.
00:53:50Basic things that he says is that he describes them
00:53:53as a kind of Jewish Christian group,
00:53:56and he says that they prefer their own gospel
00:53:59over against the four gospels that are recognised by other Christians.
00:54:03And what was this gospel?
00:54:05It was the gospel of the Epiphanies.
00:54:08It was the four gospels that are recognised by other Christians.
00:54:11And what was this gospel?
00:54:13One writer describes it as being a version of the Gospel of Matthew,
00:54:18in Hebraic language, with certain things missing.
00:54:22But it raises about as many questions as it does settle.
00:54:29But if the Gospel of the Ebionites was based on a work
00:54:32that was accepted into the New Testament,
00:54:35why was it considered heretical?
00:54:40Well, if we study the accusations of their opponents,
00:54:43there's one shocking difference between the two texts.
00:54:49In Matthew's gospel,
00:54:51Jesus is said to have been miraculously born of a virgin.
00:54:56But the Ebionites disagreed.
00:54:59So in their gospel, they left out the story of the Nativity.
00:55:06They believed that rather than being conceived
00:55:09by the Holy Spirit in the womb of a virgin,
00:55:13Jesus was born the eldest son as a result of the sexual union
00:55:17between his parents, Mary and Joseph.
00:55:21But for Epiphanius, and for others like him,
00:55:24such beliefs were heretical,
00:55:26and any gospel containing such ideas had to be stopped.
00:55:36The problem with the rejection of the virgin birth
00:55:40was that it cast doubts on Jesus' divinity.
00:55:45If there was no miraculous conception,
00:55:48then what made Jesus different from any other man?
00:55:54Well, the Ebionites believed it was his baptism that transformed him.
00:55:59For them, it was this moment,
00:56:02when he became the Son of God.
00:56:06The Ebionites are accused of not believing in the virgin birth,
00:56:09of rejecting the idea of Jesus being born special.
00:56:12They supposedly distinguish between the man Jesus,
00:56:15who was just an ordinary man born and died in an ordinary way,
00:56:18and the divine Christ.
00:56:20So Jesus Christ, for them, is not one, but two entities.
00:56:23And the man Jesus is used as a vehicle of the divine Christ,
00:56:26who comes upon him at a certain point, at his baptism.
00:56:29And then uses him as the human vehicle for the ministry.
00:56:32So at his death, the divine Christ deserts and leaves him,
00:56:36goes up to heaven, and the man Jesus is left to die.
00:56:39So if that's the case, then they would have thought of,
00:56:42not technically of Jesus as being divine,
00:56:45but of Jesus as being inhabited by divinity, in some sense.
00:56:50What was the problem with that
00:56:52for the Orthodox leaders of the church?
00:56:54One of the problems that causes for rejection of the virgin birth
00:56:58and the problems that causes for Orthodox Christians
00:57:01is that how you understand Jesus
00:57:04is closely connected with how you understand salvation
00:57:08and how you understand how salvation was worked out.
00:57:12The emergent Orthodox view is that
00:57:14in order for Jesus to win salvation for humans,
00:57:17he had to be, A, authentically human,
00:57:20but he also had to be genuinely divine, both.
00:57:24And that had to include a real bodily death.
00:57:27In the Ebionite view, as it is ascribed to them,
00:57:30the divine Christ simply, you know,
00:57:32kind of parachutes down at a certain point
00:57:34and then opts out at a certain point.
00:57:36And the notion is you have a real separation, therefore,
00:57:39between the divine and the human,
00:57:41which prevents the two from having a real power
00:57:44and efficacy for salvation.
00:57:48Complicated stuff.
00:57:50But the Ebionites were grappling with an extraordinary idea.
00:57:55God made man.
00:57:57And perhaps it's precisely the complexity of the concept
00:58:01that explains why gospels like those of the Ebionites
00:58:05and the Deceitists were still circulating
00:58:08during the third and fourth centuries.
00:58:14What they were discussing, after all, was not a simple question.
00:58:18The nature of Christ and the philosophical contradictions
00:58:22that provoked were not ones that were going to be easily resolved.
00:58:28But the gospel of the Ebionites did achieve something.
00:58:33Along with the Deceitic texts, the gospel was one of the works
00:58:37which helped the early church to begin to define
00:58:41what was and what was not acceptable
00:58:44in the debate about Jesus' true nature.
00:58:49Without such works to react to,
00:58:52it might well have taken the church longer to clarify
00:58:55exactly what it meant when it claimed that Christ was both human and divine.
00:59:03The church's final doctrine stated that Jesus was God from God,
00:59:08but also truly human.
00:59:12It was a statement which immediately condemned the gospel of the Ebionites.
00:59:17It condemned the gospel of Peter and the gospel of the Ebionites
00:59:21to the dustbin of heresy.
00:59:30But there was one issue on which both heretics and Orthodox were united.
00:59:35They all accepted that the books of the Old Testament,
00:59:38the Jewish Bible, were sacred.
00:59:42Well, almost united.
00:59:45With one exception.
00:59:49His name was Marcion,
00:59:51and he was probably the greatest heretic the early church had to face.
00:59:57Had his opinions prevailed,
00:59:59the Old Testament would have ceased to exist altogether
01:00:03and all traces of Jesus' Jewishness would have been obliterated from history.
01:00:10Marcion's ideas were so brilliant and so ruthlessly logical
01:00:15that he, more than any other man, began a movement
01:00:18which ultimately led to the loss of over 20 gospels from history.
01:00:25His influence was such that he forced the early Christians
01:00:28to decide which books they wanted to revere and which they had to condemn.
01:00:40CHOIR SINGS
01:01:01In 139 AD, a wealthy young man travelled from his birthplace
01:01:06of the city of Turkey to the capital of the Roman Empire.
01:01:11On his arrival, he generously donated 200,000 sesterces
01:01:16to the fledgling Christian church, and then he set to work writing.
01:01:21Five years later, he unveiled two of the most compelling,
01:01:25distinctive and revolutionary literary productions
01:01:29the church had ever encountered, and they were so dangerous
01:01:33that they had to change the course of Christian history.
01:01:42But like the Gospel of the Ebionites,
01:01:44all physical traces of these controversial books have disappeared.
01:01:50The only evidence we have for their existence
01:01:53is once again in the writings of those who oppose them.
01:01:58A measure of Marcion's significance is that whilst the Ebionites
01:02:03are mentioned only eight times in three books,
01:02:06Marcion's writings are the subject of great tomes.
01:02:12His ideas were so radical that one early church father, Tertullian,
01:02:17devoted five volumes to attacking Marcion and his ideas.
01:02:23So what was it about his beliefs that caused such consternation?
01:02:31Well, unlike the Ebionites,
01:02:33rather than embracing the Jewishness of Christianity,
01:02:37Marcion utterly rejected it.
01:02:40And it was the radical form that this rejection took
01:02:44which caused such a storm.
01:02:47CHOIR SINGS
01:03:02Marcion began a careful comparison of the Old Testament
01:03:06with the scriptures about Jesus,
01:03:09and what he discovered led him to a shocking conclusion.
01:03:14He came to believe that the Gospel brought by Jesus
01:03:18was the good news of deliverance,
01:03:21involving love, forgiveness and redemption.
01:03:26And by way of contrast, that the Jewish law was the bad news
01:03:30which had made the Gospel necessary in the first place.
01:03:34And he saw that this Jewish law involves strict control
01:03:38and judgment and death.
01:03:41The law was given to the Jews.
01:03:43The Gospel of life was given by Christ.
01:03:47But once Marcion became committed to this idea,
01:03:51he found himself facing a profound philosophical problem.
01:03:55The God of the Jews was wrathful, vengeant, judgmental.
01:03:59How could this God also be God of the Jews?
01:04:03The God of the Jews was wrathful, vengeant, judgmental.
01:04:07How could this God also be the loving and merciful God of Jesus Christ?
01:04:19His answer was so controversial that ultimately he would be
01:04:23banished from Rome for even suggesting it.
01:04:27In a stroke of brilliance, Marcion decided the only explanation
01:04:31was that there were two gods.
01:04:35And after he decided this, everything else fell naturally into place.
01:04:43The God of the Old Testament was the creator of Genesis,
01:04:47who'd called the Jews to be his people and given them his law.
01:04:52This God also insisted that his people should be penalised
01:04:56should they fail to keep that law.
01:04:58And since everyone transgressed in some way, they would all be punished.
01:05:03He wasn't an evil deity, but he was scrupulously just.
01:05:11Marcion then concluded that the God of Jesus came into the world
01:05:16in order to save people from this vengeful God of the Jews.
01:05:21He nicknamed this God, God the Stranger,
01:05:24because he'd been previously unknown to us
01:05:27and he claimed that Jesus came unexpectedly
01:05:30and did more than anyone could have hoped for.
01:05:34He paid the penalty for other people's sins
01:05:37to save us from this vengeful Old Testament deity.
01:05:45For the pagan Romans, the idea of two gods wasn't shocking at all,
01:05:50but for many Christians who were strictly monotheistic,
01:05:54it was a scandalous idea.
01:05:57And it was to arguing this concept
01:05:59that Marcion dedicated himself in his writing,
01:06:03producing two literary works to support his views.
01:06:07The first of these was known as The Antitheses.
01:06:14I went to meet Dr Bernard Green, who studied it.
01:06:18Bernard, please tell us about The Antitheses.
01:06:21It's effectively a biblical commentary.
01:06:24What he does is he takes you through the texts about Jesus
01:06:28and contrasts them step by step with the Old Testament.
01:06:32Are there any examples of this?
01:06:35A good example might be where Jesus heals a leper in St Luke's Gospel.
01:06:40He reaches out and touches the leper and heals him.
01:06:45And at once Marcion contrasts this act of love
01:06:50with what it says in the Book of Leviticus,
01:06:53that a leper is unclean and must never be touched.
01:07:00But it was Marcion's second literary masterpiece
01:07:03that was to give rise to real consternation.
01:07:07It was a new edition of other books.
01:07:10What he'd done was that he'd put together a canon of scripture,
01:07:14a collection of books that he felt
01:07:17were sacred and authoritative literature.
01:07:25It was the first time in Christian history
01:07:28that anyone had assembled a closed canon of scripture.
01:07:34Long before the New Testament was even dreamt of.
01:07:39Marcion excluded the Old Testament in its entirety
01:07:43and his New Testament consisted only of the Gospel of Luke
01:07:47and ten letters by the early Christian convert and missionary Paul.
01:07:55Why those texts in particular?
01:07:57Marcion feels that these are the ones that are most free of Jewish influence.
01:08:02For example, it's in Luke's Gospel that Jesus comes across
01:08:07perhaps most clearly as preaching a message of forgiveness and love,
01:08:13reaching out to the outcast.
01:08:15Why did Marcion concentrate on the works of Paul?
01:08:19Paul said that Christians didn't have to follow the Jewish law,
01:08:24observing the Sabbath, the dietary regulations, circumcision.
01:08:28And in doing so, he set Christianity free
01:08:31from the commands of ancient Judaism.
01:08:36Marcion, reading Paul,
01:08:38believed that this was the key to what Christianity was truly about.
01:08:42Was Marcion not right?
01:08:44The problem with Paul, from Marcion's point of view,
01:08:47is that he doesn't quite say what Marcion wants him to say.
01:08:51Paul has deep respect for the Jewish scriptures and for the prophecies.
01:08:56But all of this is edited out by Marcion
01:09:00in order to make Paul's message more shrill.
01:09:04More anti-Jewish.
01:09:06Can you not have a Christianity
01:09:08that is completely distant from the Old Testament?
01:09:12Oh, Marcion was putting his finger on a very tense problem for Christianity
01:09:17because, of course, in all sorts of ways,
01:09:19Jesus himself was disagreeing with aspects of Jewish law.
01:09:24And early Christianity had to free itself
01:09:28from the close observance of Jewish law
01:09:30if it was going to become a great world religion.
01:09:33It's just that Marcion's answer is so radical.
01:09:36And not only do the Old Testament and New Testament have nothing in common,
01:09:42but there are actually two different gods responsible for them.
01:09:46That's such a radical statement
01:09:48that it caused shockwaves in early Christian communities.
01:09:57So convinced of his thesis, was he,
01:09:59that Marcion had the audacity
01:10:01to summon the most influential men in the Roman Church
01:10:04to a church council, the first ever recorded.
01:10:11But when he presented his ideas to them,
01:10:13rather than being hailed as a genius, he was condemned.
01:10:17The Christian leaders refunded the very generous donation
01:10:21that he'd made on his arrival in Rome
01:10:23and then they promptly excommunicated him.
01:10:27Although condemned, Marcion's influence didn't die.
01:10:37If the hierarchy of the church disagreed with the text in his canon,
01:10:41they would now have to come up with their own.
01:10:45Marcion's precedent forced them to start making decisions
01:10:49about sacred scripture themselves.
01:10:52By the end of the third century, there were over 20 gospels,
01:10:56numerous letters attributed to different apostles
01:10:59and various other texts recording the life of Jesus and his followers,
01:11:04all circulating in the Christian church, nearly 80 in total.
01:11:11So how on earth have so many of the most influential men in the Roman Church
01:11:16been lost to us until relatively recently?
01:11:19What exactly happened that led these writings to disappear from history?
01:11:25Certainly Marcion played his part, but he was by no means the only factor.
01:11:30He was merely a catalyst that began a process
01:11:34that took centuries to complete, the formation of the New Testament canon.
01:11:39BELLS RING
01:12:10The Basilica of St Peter's
01:12:12is one of the most potent symbols of Christian orthodoxy.
01:12:24Benedict XVI, the present pope.
01:12:30He's a representative of the winners of that ancient battle
01:12:34between rival Christianities.
01:12:39Today, you just can't help stand in awe of the spoils of that victory.
01:12:45But how exactly did the winners get the upper hand?
01:12:51Obviously, Marcion's canon focused the minds of the leaders of the Roman Church
01:12:56on the idea of a selection of texts.
01:13:02But there were other factors, other considerations,
01:13:05that informed the decision as to which texts were
01:13:08and which definitely were not appropriate for the eyes of their congregations.
01:13:24This is believed to be the exact site of Peter's martyrdom.
01:13:28At the hands of the Romans, he was crucified upside down.
01:13:32And with his death, and those of the other disciples,
01:13:35who were the eyewitnesses to Jesus' life and teaching,
01:13:39there was a growing feeling that it was important
01:13:42to agree once and for all on the facts about Jesus' life.
01:13:47Otherwise, anyone could come along
01:13:50and claim to have had a new divine revelation which superseded the old.
01:13:56There had to be a line drawn somewhere.
01:14:03So why was that line drawn at the collection of texts
01:14:07we have in the New Testament today?
01:14:11Why the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
01:14:14and why not those of Peter, Mary and Thomas?
01:14:18Well, St Peter's martyrdom wasn't an isolated incident.
01:14:22The statues around St Peter's Square of the martyrs of the Church
01:14:27are a stark reminder of the kind of problems
01:14:30the early Christians were facing.
01:14:33The Romans slaughtered thousands of them
01:14:36in brutal and dehumanising ways in such a climate,
01:14:40any Gospel or letter that didn't speak directly to the suffering of people
01:14:45simply wasn't going to catch on.
01:14:50The Christians facing persecution were always going to reject those texts
01:14:55in which their saviour didn't lead by example.
01:15:00So, deceitic works like the Gospel of Peter,
01:15:03in which Jesus himself never really suffered on the cross,
01:15:07were singularly unhelpful.
01:15:11And in a battle for the survival of the fittest,
01:15:14they were bound to fall by the wayside.
01:15:22But perhaps the factor that most influenced the selection of any text
01:15:26was its authorship.
01:15:30For a book to be included,
01:15:32it had to be the authentic work of an apostle.
01:15:37So, how did the early church leaders decide which texts
01:15:41were the genuine work of apostles and which weren't?
01:15:45With some difficulty, this is a short answer.
01:15:48Obviously, those texts that claimed to be by an apostle,
01:15:51those that had an apostle's name in it,
01:15:53so, you know, the Apostle Paul to the Romans or to the Corinthians,
01:15:57at least, made it worth discussing.
01:16:00In other cases, texts seem to have acquired apostolic authorship,
01:16:04as far as we can tell, simply by tradition.
01:16:06In the case of the Gospel of Matthew,
01:16:08which is attributed to the Apostle Matthew,
01:16:10or in the case of the Gospel of John,
01:16:12attributed to the Apostle John,
01:16:14neither of these texts says it was written by these people,
01:16:17and yet, from the very earliest references to them,
01:16:20by name, they are ascribed to such figures.
01:16:23So, if you ask, well, how did that happen?
01:16:26The answer is, I don't know, nobody else knows for sure.
01:16:29It happened so early, but it appears to have been, obviously,
01:16:32something other than the text claiming it to be so
01:16:35and its claim being accepted.
01:16:37It appears to have been just a kind of tradition
01:16:39that was associated with these texts.
01:16:41What about the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter?
01:16:44Yeah, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Thomas,
01:16:46Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Philip,
01:16:48all of these explicitly claim to be written by those figures,
01:16:52and these figures are, you know, apostolic generation figures,
01:16:55and many of them were not included in the canon.
01:16:58One of the things they had going against them
01:17:00was it appears that they were written actually,
01:17:02in their present form at least,
01:17:04significantly later than the canonical Gospels.
01:17:06They got a late start and they didn't make it.
01:17:09Those that had been written earlier
01:17:11and had more of a chance to circulate and to make their claim
01:17:14and to get that claim accepted, if they were able to do so,
01:17:17stood a better chance.
01:17:20And so, very gradually, a consensus of opinion began to form.
01:17:28By the mid-second century,
01:17:30hundreds of churches across the Roman Empire
01:17:33had started to decide informally at first
01:17:36which texts were and which weren't to be included.
01:17:43For a number of books, the debates were relatively muted,
01:17:46but others generated considerable disagreement.
01:17:50The Shepherd of Hamas, a book of visions,
01:17:53was hugely popular in the early centuries of the church,
01:17:57appearing in lists of accepted Christian literature
01:18:00until as late as the fifth century.
01:18:03And then suddenly it dropped out, judged to be too recent
01:18:07and written not by an apostle but only the brother of a vision.
01:18:12Therefore, not Holy Scripture.
01:18:16In the same way, the inclusion of Revelation,
01:18:19the last book of the New Testament,
01:18:21which describes the end of the world in vivid detail,
01:18:25wasn't a foregone conclusion.
01:18:29It seems impossible to imagine a canon
01:18:32without the Horsemen of the Apocalypse
01:18:35or 666, the number of the beast.
01:18:39But believe it or not,
01:18:41the Book of Revelation nearly didn't make it.
01:18:46In the fourth century, bishops argued it should be omitted
01:18:50because of the difficulties involved
01:18:52in interpreting its complex symbolism.
01:18:57But it was saved at the last minute
01:18:59when early Christian leaders became convinced
01:19:02that it was written by Jesus' disciple John.
01:19:05Even though the author himself never makes such a claim.
01:19:12So apostolic authorship, real or attributed, could be decisive.
01:19:18But so could a gospel's content.
01:19:21Bart Ehrman believes that unless the book helped ensure
01:19:24the fledgling faith's chances of survival,
01:19:27it didn't stand a chance.
01:19:29Would Christianity have been as successful
01:19:32Would Christianity have been as successful a religion
01:19:36if the books that had been left out had been left in?
01:19:39If Christianity had taken the books of the Ebionites,
01:19:42it would have been a Jewish canon
01:19:44that would have appealed to Jewish Christians,
01:19:46but wouldn't have had widespread appeal to the Gentiles
01:19:49who made up the majority of the empire at the time.
01:19:52If Christianity had taken over the canon of Marcion,
01:19:56it would have excluded the Old Testament
01:19:58and wouldn't have had any claim to antiquity
01:20:00in a world in which antiquity was very important.
01:20:03People in the ancient world thought that
01:20:05for a religion to be true, it had to be ancient,
01:20:07and the Marcionite religion wasn't ancient.
01:20:10It was a new thing.
01:20:11The Gnostics had texts that were elitist in nature,
01:20:15where only the insiders could understand the truth
01:20:18that could bring about salvation.
01:20:20Christianity would have become a closed elitist society
01:20:23that wouldn't have had widespread appeal.
01:20:25My sense of things is that if Christianity
01:20:27hadn't formed an orthodoxy,
01:20:29a single coherent understanding of the faith
01:20:32with a canon of scripture,
01:20:34that probably Christianity would not have taken over
01:20:37the Roman Empire.
01:20:38So why was this emphasis on unity so important?
01:20:41When the Roman Emperor Constantine
01:20:45converted to the faith in the year 312,
01:20:48he wanted to use this religion
01:20:50as a way of unifying his fragmented empire.
01:20:53If Christianity were highly fragmented
01:20:56at the time of Constantine,
01:20:58then he wouldn't have seen the political value
01:21:00of committing himself to Christianity.
01:21:02And if Constantine hadn't converted to the faith,
01:21:05then the Roman Empire never would have converted to the faith
01:21:08and we never would have had Western Christianity.
01:21:13Perhaps then it was inevitable that texts supported
01:21:16by the Roman churches had the edge over those championed
01:21:20by churches further afield.
01:21:24They were the ones with the power and the money
01:21:27to make a difference.
01:21:29The Gospel of Thomas may have been very popular in Egypt,
01:21:32but without the backing of Rome,
01:21:34it was unlikely to win through.
01:21:40So, not surprisingly, texts written in Rome,
01:21:43like the Gospel of Mark, became more popular.
01:21:48Being in the right place at the right time
01:21:50certainly helped ensure your inclusion in the New Testament.
01:21:58MUSIC PLAYS
01:22:07By the end of the second century,
01:22:09signs of concerted efforts to promote certain books
01:22:13and not others began to emerge.
01:22:17These range from Athanasius' letter urging his congregation
01:22:21not to read erroneous literature
01:22:24to letters from the church fathers of bishops
01:22:27charging halfway across Europe
01:22:29to stop the circulation of heretical texts.
01:22:33The next 300 years would see the emergence and enforcement
01:22:38of an official Christian book list of accepted works, a canon.
01:22:45It was a process which proved so effective
01:22:48that only traces of those Gospels,
01:22:50so well loved by the Deceitics, the Gnostics
01:22:53and the Marcionite Christians, still remain.
01:22:58And perhaps the reason why so many of these writings
01:23:01have been lost to us altogether
01:23:03is because it is inevitably the winners who write history.
01:23:08The losers of that process drift from our memory into obscurity.
01:23:21CHOIR SINGS
01:23:33Some of the forbidden Gospels came to a violent end.
01:23:37In 447 AD, Pope Leo the Great ordered Gnostic texts
01:23:42to be burnt with fire.
01:23:45But the vast majority simply stopped being reproduced.
01:23:51Surprisingly, there was no official pronouncement on the canon
01:23:55by the Catholic Church until the 16th century.
01:23:59Nevertheless, by the end of the 4th century,
01:24:02there was almost universal acceptance
01:24:05that the 27 texts we now know as the New Testament
01:24:09were sacred scripture.
01:24:12CHOIR SINGS
01:24:18The impression I've always had of the New Testament
01:24:21is one of a unified collection of books with an organising theology.
01:24:27But even here, there's a surprise.
01:24:30In the texts that were chosen, there's a startling amount of diversity.
01:24:36They contain different Christianities,
01:24:39from the Gospel of Matthew with its emphasis on Judaism,
01:24:43Mark's flashes of vivid, eyewitness detail,
01:24:46to the brilliant mysticism of John
01:24:49and his vision of Jesus as the Incarnation.
01:24:56These were the texts discerned to contain the truth.
01:25:00It was within their pages that the path to God could be found.
01:25:05They, and only they, led to eternal salvation.
01:25:18But there the line was drawn.
01:25:20There were a limited set of ideas within which people could be creative.
01:25:25But it was this far, and no further,
01:25:28and established social control had finally been exerted
01:25:33on what ideas were permissible.
01:25:36With that, the New Testament was born.
01:26:04Over the centuries, the New Testament has assumed a status
01:26:08that the Orthodox leaders of the early Church
01:26:11could probably never have envisaged.
01:26:16In Christian services across the world,
01:26:19people rise to hear the Gospels spoken
01:26:22as a mark of reverence for the Word of God.
01:26:26And perhaps if it wasn't for the protective sands of this beautiful land,
01:26:30the victory of the Orthodox would have been absolute.
01:26:35The forbidden texts would have faded from memory and from history.
01:26:40Christian monks would simply have stopped reproducing them.
01:26:44And in the end, they would have vanished.
01:26:48From my perspective, it's easy to be seduced by these lost Gospels
01:26:53and the ideas they embody.
01:26:56Women having a role in the Church.
01:27:00A Jesus who is a wise teacher,
01:27:03a man who is a man of God,
01:27:06a man who is a man of God,
01:27:09a man who is a man of God,
01:27:12a man who is a man of God,
01:27:15a Jesus who is a wise teacher rather than a miracle-maker.
01:27:20Two gods, one solely responsible for good and the other for evil.
01:27:29Today, great store is set by religious tolerance
01:27:33and perhaps if the Orthodox had allowed contradictory texts to flourish,
01:27:38Christianity would be seen as less authoritarian,
01:27:42More a faith which rejoices in diversity.
01:27:46Certainly, for many, a more popular message.
01:27:52But the irony is, had it done so, the Church might not have survived at all.
01:27:57The fledgling religion needed a unity, a hierarchy, an orthodoxy to survive.
01:28:04Had the lost Gospels been embraced, the religion might have faced its own imminent destruction.
01:28:10And rather than just the text being lost to us, Christianity itself might have disappeared forever.
01:28:30Raggy Omar concentrates on the story of a hugely controversial Biblical discovery,
01:28:35the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's here on BBC4, tomorrow night at 9.