I watched it Sat night. The one expert they interviewed talked about the Gospel of Mary. She insinuated that Mary Magdelin was privvy to lots of private revelation Jesus made to her and others privately, and because the male Apostles didn’t know of these revelations they purposely rejected the writings. And also because she was a woman
They also talked about the Gospel of Thomas. Although they pointed out that most of what was in that was simply sayings of Jesus, that were mostly written down already in other gospels, it held some super secret teachings from Jesus.
The thing to remember about these ‘lost gospels’ is that they weren’t included in the bible. A lot of the writings and letters from the early age were lost. Does that make the bible incomplete? Does it mean that there are some secret teachings we aren’t aware of? IMO, no. We have the church that has been here from Day 1 to guide us, and for 400 years they didn’t use a bible. Early Christians had Tradition, tradition, and the leaders of the church to pass down teachings from generation to generation. And the Holy Spirit guided them.
That being said, in watching that show, something really made me mad. The experts said that in the early days, there were many many churches throughout the mediteranean. Each had their own version of Christianity and each was diverse. The Catholic church was in Rome, and modeled itself on the way the Roman army was organized, in a strict manner with bishops and priests and diocese, etc. But all the other communities were seperate and had their own traditions and variety of beliefs. When Constantine converted to Christianity, he used the Roman army to spread the Catholic version of Christianity throughout these other communities and imposed that organization and belief system on all the other communities.
Now, we all know that’s blatantly false and that the other communities knew the seat of Christianity was Rome, and they all followed and obeyed Rome. But it still disheartening to hear that **** pushed on national tv.
) Now I really liked how History Channel went out-of-character last year and produced a well-done - IMHO - documentary on the Shroud (“The Real Face of Jesus?”), more fine than a few other documentaries on the subject which merely seemed like a huge parade of skeptics (National Geographic, I’m looking at you!), but I’m slightly disappointed at how they’ve relapsed in this year’s sequel. Perhaps I don’t want to look at what they’ll churn the next year.