So how did Christians
and their faith get so fouled up? How did the faith wander so far away from the
original message of the man who started it all?
The faith got off track
much earlier than you think: it’s not just today’s evangelicals, or even the
medieval princes of the church in Rome, who derailed the train. It happened much
earlier.
In the three hundred
years after Jesus, there were many, many writings about him and his teachings,
bouncing around the Roman Empire. About thirty of those books adhered to the
orthodox party line pursued by the church: believe in the miracles of God and
Jesus, and obey the church, or you burn in hell. But there were at least a
hundred more books, which preached a different message entirely, all about
seeking out for wisdom, and letting everybody join the search, even women.
Those hundred books are
called the apocrypha. Essentially, the books that the church tossed out of the
scripture pile, because they didn’t like the message in them.
The problem for today’s
Christians is that the books that were thrown out, the apocrypha, are probably
what Jesus really intended for us to learn. That may be why there were a hundred
of them out there: that was what the real message of Jesus was supposed to
sound like, before the church shut that whole thing down.
So what do the apocrypha
say? Surprisingly, this big pile of books hangs together quite well as a
narrative – the narrative that the early church didn’t want you to hear.
The apocrypha offer a
clearer picture of how Jesus came into the world. The strong implication is
that Mary became pregnant because of a dalliance at a very young age, and was
given to Joseph, a very old man, as a ward rather than as a wife. Joseph
already had four sons and two daughters from an earlier marriage; he “married”
Mary when he was 92 and she was 14. Jesus was born prematurely at seven months.
The church didn’t want their narrative of the virgin birth complicated by all
this, so the story of Joseph was changed.
The apocrypha go to a
lot of effort to debunk some of the sillier beliefs in Judaism and Christianity.
The writings state that the Old-Testament God was scarcely worthy of worship: a
deity formed improperly, malevolent and arrogant; one book also suggests that
the devil had a hand in the creation of man. Another document states that even
Jesus himself ridiculed the idea that the God Jehovah, as written in the Hebrew
scriptures, was the real god.
One work states that the
all-important Torah law wasn’t even written down properly; something which Paul
and the other disciples may have believed also, since they said repeatedly in
the Epistles that Christians can safely ignore the rules in the Torah.
Another work implies that at least some of the original Jewish scriptures were
destroyed in a fire and then reconstructed during the Babylonian period, which
would call them into question as “God’s revealed word”; that incidentally would
also undercut today’s literalists who use Leviticus to justify persecuting
gays.
The apocrypha reject the
role of miracles, often ignoring the crucifixion and resurrection, and
stressing that a lot of the miraculous stories were intended as metaphor. Some
documents say Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross, or that another was
crucified in his place.
Even the apocryphal
documents that do accept the resurrection sometimes diverge greatly from the
established church doctrine, reporting that when Jesus descended into hell
after the crucifixion, he showed the apostles the fiery depths as well, and
then fought Satan for the lives of the apostles, and preached to Judas while he
was down there. One source even parodied the miraculous fable of Jesus,
reporting that Jesus was a rather nasty child, killing a few playmates with his
magic and blinding a few adults who complained about him, before he got on the
straight and narrow.
Many, many of these
apocryphal books which were voted off the Scripture Island showed Jesus and his
disciples worshipping, not God or miracles, but rather the Gnostic quest for
reason, truth and knowledge, and the fight against lies. These texts said that
the quest for knowledge ran from Eve down through Jesus, that wisdom was the
path to salvation, and that Paul himself, the man portrayed now as the first
great purveyor of church orthodoxy, was himself striving to find wisdom, at
least until the church “repackaged” his life story. The documents stress that
Jesus ridiculed those who were clinging to him and his name as the path to
purity, and he said that instead of seeking wisdom through the law, his
followers should instead conquer ignorance and fear.
These documents show
Jesus and his followers embracing the Gnostic life, seeking to live a good life
and find wisdom. They showed none of the rigidity of the later church: some of
the early Christians celebrated the demise of Jewish food laws while others
became vegetarians; some practiced celibacy while others felt it was useless to
try to resist the sexual urge so…go for it, everybody.
So if Jesus really
believed in wisdom rather than in miracles and Jehovah, why didn’t the church
follow suit? Because the effort to sell Christianity to gentiles across the
Roman Empire, and the church’s control over those converts, depended heavily on
obedience as the path toward the miraculous promise of the afterlife. And
obedience could not be mastered if the followers were thinking for themselves
and seeking to find wisdom without the guidance of the church.
So the church fathers
defended their new Catholic status quo, condemned the Gnostics, and insisted on
literal interpretation and unswerving obedience of the documents which the
church chose as scripture. They suppressed Gnostic writings, ensuring that none
of them got into the Bible, particularly anything which questioned Christian
miracles. They forged documents to support their case and attack the Gnostics,
including one fake epistle attributed to Paul.
Also, unlike the
Gnostics, the church loved the idea of the Old-Testament Jehovah, ready to
throw anyone into the eternal fires if they disobeyed – scare them with hell,
and it’s easier to sell them heaven. And then they added another idea that the Gnostics
would have loathed, the doctrine of
original sin, the notion that even children are going to hell unless they join
the church and obey, obey, obey.
According to Acts of
Timothy, it was the apostle John himself who assembled all of the existing
gospel fragments, sorted them into Matthew, Mark and Luke, and then,
dissatisfied, wrote a fourth gospel himself, stressing the standard Catholic
sentiment that faith and miracles were good, reason and the quest for truth
were not so good. Did you ever wonder why the philosophical precepts of Jesus,
which were almost all rooted in the teachings of the Greek philosophers, said
nothing in the Gospels about the greatest goal of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
– the quest for wisdom? Jesus addressed almost everything except wisdom –
according to the people who edited his words, people who wanted to stamp out
Gnostic thought.
The church leaders were
particularly energetic at suppressing anything that smacked of earthly desires
on the part of the Redeemer, ruthlessly stamping out two gospels, one stating
that Jesus had a wife, and another stating that Jesus saved a young man and
then spent the night with him.
So in the end, we got an
entirely one-sided Bible. Anything that preached obedience on pain of damnation
was in, and anything that encouraged people to seek wisdom in their own way was
out. And thus the New Testament was born. Even the Old Testament has been
cleaned out in the same way: when the Israelite patriarchs wrote about seeking
out wisdom, they said that the path to wisdom, if you really needed to go there
at all, was through obedience.
One striking image that
emerges in all the apocryphal documents is the strong likelihood that Judas was
libelled as a traitor, and Mary Magdalene slandered as a possessed maniac,
because they were the two followers who embraced the sentiments of Jesus most
closely, the two to whom Jesus gave his Gnosis.
Judas was closer to
Jesus than the church would like you to believe: he knew Jesus when they were
young, he was chosen by Jesus to run the business side of Christ’s movement,
and he supported Jesus’ Gnostic views when the other apostles weren’t
convinced.
As for Mary Magdalene,
the apocrypha make clear that even the apostles who disliked her admitted that
Jesus loved her; Jesus probably married her because she understood him best.
The other disciples disliked her not just out of jealousy but because, despite
being a woman, she asked Jesus so many questions that finally they asked her to
hold it down so that others could ask Jesus questions too. Later,
interestingly, she apparently worked as a preaching team with Phillip, so
apparently not all the disciples depised her. There was another female
disciple, Salome, who may have been Jesus’ sister or cousin, who also asked him
a lot of questions. But of course we don’t hear of these women in the Bible,
except to be told that Mary was possessed by demons. Women who thought for
themselves and even questioned authority? God forbid!
Unsurprisingly, another
category of writings which the church rejected dealt with women in the church.
Even in the New-Testament writings which were accepted into the canon, it is
obvious that women played a key role in Paul’s effort to spread the word across
the empire. The books that were not accepted go much further, calling for
female priests, advocating the education of girls, and telling the tales of
women who risked danger and execution to hear Paul preach. But the more the
church took hold, the fewer female voices and stories were heard.
Note also that in these
early writings, even Peter and Paul were originally portrayed as Gnostic, no
matter now anti-Gnostic they were portrayed later. Peter was irritated that
Mary Magdalene was monopolizing the sessions with Jesus, but he wasn’t
disputing Jesus’ quest for truth.
So the Bible which the
first Catholics gave to us is the tale of an angry Jehovah, and then a Redeemer
who embraced miracles and magic. But the writings which the church rejected
seem to ring true as the message that Jesus really wanted to convey: ignore
Jehovah and his anger and his laws, stop praying for miracles, and seek the
truth. And bring the women along while you do it.
And while you’re at it,
do all that stuff in the Sermon on the Mount which the early Christian bishops
forgot but the Gnostics in the street didn’t: taking care of the people around
you, the poor and the sick, tolerance, forgiveness, meekness. You see? If these
apocryphal documents had become the Christian Bible instead of the New
Testament we have now, the world would be a much better place: fewer miracles,
less hate and intolerance, more wisdom, more compassion.
The Jesus People might
try to haggle over the accuracy or provenance of some of these apocryphal
documents, but in Bogart’s immortal words, look at the number of them. About a
hundred documents, some still in existence, that say Jesus was all about wisdom
and truth, and not about miracles, hellfire and obedience. Are all one hundred
of them fakes, just because the anti-Gnostics, who clearly had a political
agenda, said so seventeen hundred years ago?
The documents which
have, in fact, been identified as fakes are documents supporting the church’s
jihad against the Gnostics, as well as a couple of additions to the New
Testament which were clearly forgeries aimed at pumping up the church’s
miraculous message: the ending of the Gospel of Mark, and some of Paul’s
letters. Clearly it was the church, not its Gnostic opponents, which was
fudging the story. The Gnostics had no need to fake anything because they had
Christ’s story right in the first place.
So here are the books in
my Bible. First, The Infancy Gospel of James, The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, The
Syriac Infancy Gospel, History of Joseph, Gospel of the Hebrews, The Gospel of
Appelles, Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Peter, The Gospel of Nicodemus,
Gospel and Questions of Bartholomew, Gospel of Judas, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of
Philip, Greek Gospel of the Egyptians, Gospel of Truth, Berlin Gospel, Secret
Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, Gospel of Perfection.
Next, the Acts of Paul,
Acts of Paul and Thecia, Acts of Peter, Acts of Philip, Acts of Timothy, Acts
of Xanthippe, Polyxena and Rebecca.
Next, Epistle of
Barnabas, Epistle of the Corinthians to Paul, Epistle of Diognetus.
Nest, The Apocryphon of
James, Apocryphon of John, Dialogue of the Savior, Pistis Sophia, Second
Treatise of the Great Seth, Cave of Treasures, Didache, Sentences of Sextus,
Naassene document.
Next, The Second
Apocalypse of James, Coptic Apocalypse of Paul, Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter.
You can look them up
yourselves if you don’t believe me.
