Season 2 · Episode 28
Full episode description
The Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Judas, the Jewish-Christian gospels. Each was the holy book of a real Christian community. None made it into the Bible. This episode walks the rejected gospels, asks what their communities believed, and confronts the parallel injustice. Six books inside the New Testament were written under apostolic names by authors who were not those apostles. They got in.
This episode walks:
- the Gospel of Thomas, the sayings collection rediscovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, where Jesus speaks in riddles and the kingdom is already here
- the Gospel of Mary, where Mary Magdalene is the disciple Jesus loved most and Peter rejects her testimony
- the Gospel of Peter, a passion narrative with elements absent from the canonical gospels, including a giant talking cross
- the Gospel of Judas, where the betrayer is the only disciple who truly understands Jesus
- the Jewish Christian gospels of the Ebionites and the Nazoreans, lost except in quotation by their opponents
- why these books lost. They were too late, too local, too philosophically radical, or too inconvenient for the form of Christianity that was consolidating
- the parallel injustice of the New Testament forgeries. The Pastoral Epistles. The Second Letter of Peter. Probably Ephesians and Colossians. The Letter of James. The Letter of Jude. Six pseudonymous books inside the canon
- the criterion the proto-orthodox said they were applying, apostolic authorship, and the way that criterion cannot fully explain why the forgeries got in and the rejected gospels did not
The canon’s edges tell us something the criterion does not. The Bible is a settlement, not an inheritance.
Not from tradition. From evidence.