The Lost Gospels, presented by Anglican priest Pete Owen Jones, is a
fascinating exploration into the huge number of ancient Christian texts
that didn't make it into the New Testament. Shocking and challenging,
these were works in that presented a Jesus who didn't die, who took
revenge on his enemies and who kissed Mary Magdalene on the mouth. This
Jesus is 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 from the one we know. He discovers that in addition to the
gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, there were over 70 gospels,
acts, letters and apocalypses circulating in the early Church.
Through
these lost Gospels, Owen Jones reconstructs the intense intellectual
and political struggles for orthodoxy that were 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 has sparked new
interest about the origins of the Christian faith. Pete 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 eplore the evidences in the gospels of the
other possibility of Christ's nature: that he was entirely human.
However, the question that really needs to be asked is: isn't God himself supposed to decide what comprises of his book?
The Church decided in the 3rd or 4th century, that it was going to
decide what gospels were going to be included in the Bible, so that
meant most of them were not and those that weren't were hidden for 1500
years. Discover what these other gospels had to say.
