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.
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.
In1945. Three hundred miles south of Cairo is a place of deserts and caves called Nag Hammadi. Egyptian farmhands searching for a type of fertile soil find a skeleton, and with it a sealed jar. At first they do not open the jar because they fear it might contain an evil Jinn. But the lure of gold tempts them. When they break open the jar they find not gold, but thirteen leather bound papyrus codices. How these then survive is itself a minor miracle (no pun intended) since the farmhands rip up the texts to divide them amongst themselves, some are discarded in a back yard and some of these dusty old papers are designated as kindling. But in the main they do survive. These are the Nag Hammadi texts, and they contain more than fifty early Christian texts, written in Coptic and dating from the 3rd or 4th century AD. They now reside at the Coptic Museum, Cairo. They include the almost complete Gospel of Thomas, which is not a narrative but a list of 114 sayings of Jesus, at least half previously unknown, many decidedly cryptic, The Sophia ("wisdom") of Jesus (an important Gnostic concept is "Sophia"), and The Gospel of Philip. It is The Gospel of Philip which causes the most controversy, because it suggests that Jesus had a very close (though not necessarily sexual) relationship with Mary Magdalene. Tantalisingly some words have been destroyed, but the usual translations of the key parts are as follows:
"There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary, his mother, and her sister, and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion. His sister and his mother and his companion were each a Mary.
And the companion of [the saviour was Mar]y Ma[gda]lene. [Christ loved] M[ary] more than [all] the disci[ples, and used to] kiss her [often] on her [mouth]. The rest of [the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval]. They said to him "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Saviour answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness."
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.
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