Did They Find a Different Jesus in Ancient Documents?

 It was in the 1990s that the public started hearing more about the Gospel of Mary. It naturally created a curiosity in the minds of believers and non-believers alike. The stir created by Jesus Seminar made room for many other books to see light and popularity. The common theme of these books as extra-biblical sources about Jesus was that the canonical Gospels have hidden many things about Jesus and that for the first time in history people have access to the ‘truth’ about Jesus. The political and faith climate in America was ripe to receive these books without much critical investigation about the veracity of these claims. I remember reading many years ago about the response of Julian Huxley to Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. His response was that it provided a guilt-free escape from the moral demands of the Christian church. (I do not remember the source now). Similarly, in an America where sexual freedom had become the most desirable social trait, books that portrayed Jesus as married to Mary Magdalene1 or even as a person with homosexual tendencies2 were well suited for the modern population who wanted to escape from accountability to a Creator God and biblical morality.

Intentional misleading of unsuspecting public behind these array of books can be easily shown. A classic case is the Gospel of Mary. If you enter the title in a Google search window, a large number of books and articles based on this theme shows up. If you read the summary on Wikipedia,  (which is important here as it is contributions from the public), one can easily see the bias behind these publications. “The Gospel of Mary is a non-canonical text discovered in 1896 in a 5th-century papyrus codex written in Sahidic Coptic. This Berlin Codex was purchased in Cairo by German diplomat Carl Reinhardt.” See the bias? The secular Wikipedia itself acknowledges that the information comes from 5th century papyrus codex written in Coptic! The canonical gospels were written in Greek (with Aramaic portions) in the first century. We have to acknowledge also that two other fragments of the Gospel of Mary have been discovered since then, both written in Greek.

Where is the bias? Most scholars agree that the original gospel was written in Greek some time during the 2nd century. However, Hollis Professor of Divinity Karen King at Harvard Divinity School suggests that it was written during the time of Christ. Karen King and Elaine Pagels of Princeton are two theological professors willing to give an early date all the false narratives, while insisting that the canonical gospels were written during the second century. Pagels was caught red-handed when she wrote a foreword to The Secret Gospel of Mark, authenticating it. That book has been shown since then as an invention of Morton Smith by many scholars.

The gender war in America also played into it. Karen King of Harvard writes: ““It was precisely the traditions of Mary as a woman, as an exemplary disciple, a witness to the ministry of Jesus, a visionary of the glorified Jesus, and someone traditionally in a contest with Peter, that made her the only figure who could play all the roles required to convey the messages and meanings of the Gospel of Mary.”3 The fact that many of the Gnostic gospels portray Peter standing against Mary has poured oil into the fiery furnace of gender wars in America.

Exploitation is clearly traceable behind many of these ventures. For example, The Secret Gospel of Mark was published by Dawn Horse Press in California. When you look at their website, it clearly says that Dawn Horse Press was founded to “make available the reality-teachings and the revelation-history of Avatar Adi Da Samraj.4 A press that was founded to promote the teachings of a New Age guru, who calls himself an ‘avatar’ (incarnation of God) was the press that published the totally fictional book titled The Secret Book of Mark!

It is a well-known fact that the Gnostics of the first and second centuries, upon realizing that they cannot stop the spread of the gospel, tried to corrupt the belief system of the early believers by presenting a different Jesus who spoke their language and promoted their teachings. It had started during the days of the Apostles. It cuased Apostle Paul to say, “For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the Spirit you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough.”5 It was a clear warning to the church to watch out for false teachers who were trying to infiltrate the church of God. Such warnings are common in the epistles of John also.

An unbiased investigation of these extra-biblical ancient documents clearly shows that the Apostles were not the authors of these documents and that their names were illegally forged to gain respectability and acceptability for their creations. The New Testament as we have it today was already in circulation from the second century. These documents were created by a waning Gnostic movement to confuse the large masses embracing Christianity. The church fathers who put the New Testament did a meticulous job in weeding out the false from the true. That is why there are no contradictory teachings in the New Testament.

1Meyer, Marvin ( 2004). The Gospels of Mary. New York, NY: Harper Collins.

2 Smith, Morton (2005). The Secret Gospel of Mark. Lower Lake, CA: Dawn Horse Press

3 King, Karen (2003). Which Mary? : the Marys of early Christian tradition. Boston, MA: Brill.

4 http://www.dawnhorsepress.com

5 2 Corinthians 11:4.