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 explore the evidences in the gospels of the other possibility of Christ's nature: that he was entirely human.
The interpretive and rhetorical elements of this program build in intensity. It chooses its issues carefully. It only mentions once the political and state related issues that were being played out as a backdrop to the early history of the Christian Church (You guessed it, Constantine and his efforts to unite the Empire). In short, building a hierarchical state or imperial apparatus on the mystical elements that defined so much of the Gnostic branch of Christianity would have been impossible. But Pete mostly limits his examination to the textual and then leaves out the most heretical ones, and only uses those he does discuss to clarify orthodox Christian belief today. For example the neglected "The Thunder : Perfect Mind" begins
I was sent forth from the power,
and I have come to those who reflect upon me,
and I have been found among those who seek after me.
Look upon me, you who reflect upon me,
and you hearers, hear me.
You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves.
And do not banish me from your sight.
And do not make your voice hate me, nor your hearing.
Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard!
Do not be ignorant of me.
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honoured one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am <the mother> and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my husband who begot me.
I am the mother of my father
and the sister of my husband
and he is my offspring.
I am the slave of him who prepared me.
I am the ruler of my offspring.
But he is the one who begot me before the time on a birthday.
And he is my offspring in (due) time,
and my power is from him.
I am the staff of his power in his youth,
and he is the rod of my old age.
And whatever he wills happens to me.
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.
How can this intense introspection, almost meditative and Zen-like, be reconciled with the sort of Christianity we have today, where the Pope wrote so recently as the 2013 encyclical, Lumen fidei against “a model of salvation that is merely interior, closed off in its own subjectivism. In this model, salvation consists in elevating oneself by knowledge beyond “the crude faith of the masses” and “the flesh of Jesus” towards “the mysteries of the unknown divinity” (n. 47). The Church of Peter is still very much in control of doctrine. The idea of a lessened Christianity if the doctrine had not followed the path it had, as this video argues (see 1:19:16), is not particularly relevant to understanding the Gnostic texts. I would like to see more examination of the connections to Platonic and eastern thought.....maybe next time.
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