[music playing] NARRATOR: Are there chapters
in the Bible that are missing? There are a number of
earth-shattering texts that we will likely never
see in our lifetime. NARRATOR: Stories that
have been censored? These are books that
allegedly were providing hidden or secret teachings. NARRATOR: And entire characters
that have disappeared? Any book that didn't have the
backing of influential people gets cast out. NARRATOR: But why? What was originally in the
Bible that was so shocking, so outrageous that it
should be forbidden? They were denounced as
the worst kind of blasphemy against Christ. [music playing] NARRATOR: It is one of the
most-important books ever written. Its contents have been studied,
debated, and fought over for thousands of years. But does the Bible
also contain secrets-- [lightning crashes] --secret prophecies, secret
characters, secret texts? Now for the first time,
an extraordinary series will challenge everything we
think, everything we know, and everything we
believe about the Bible. [music playing] The Bible. Every year, global sales of
this 2000-year-old best seller exceed 100-million copies. But not all Bibles are the same. The most obvious
difference, of course, is that Judaism only recognizes
what Christians refer to as the Old Testament,
but even Christians use different versions of
the Old and New Testaments. These vary not only in
language and translation but in terms of what is
included and what is not. For example, most
Protestant Bibles, including the King James
Version, contain 66 books. The Catholic Bible includes 73. But the Bible of the
Ethiopian Orthodox Church, a Christian denomination of
45-million followers in Africa has 81. One of the secrets
of ancient Christianity is that different ethnic
and religious groups had different Bibles. So there are different
groups, like the Coptics or the Ethiopian
Church, they actually have some inspired books,
whereas other groups do not. So we shouldn't just ask
which version of the Bible is correct, but it's which
collection of biblical books is correct. [music playing] NARRATOR: To be included in the
official version of the Bible, or canon, a book must be
considered to be divinely inspired, the word of God. But just who decides? [church bell gonging] I think with both the Hebrew
Bible, which sort of closed by the end of the
first century CE, and then the New Testament,
which was closed as a canon by about the end of
the fourth century CE, but once you have Bible in
the vernacular language, you begin to have
someone from a pulpit or from an academy
who says, this is what the Bible contains. NARRATOR: This
so-called canonization of the Bible led
to bitter arguments about which books
should be included and which should be suppressed. Certain books may have
made it into the canon because they were good theology,
but they might have made it in because they had the backing
of some strong influential people. Other books may have been
very true and accurate, but they may have been
marginalized because they didn't have the backing
of influential people. There were a group of men with
specific agendas determining what would and what
would not become canon, and this agenda was
about preserving the power of the church. The agenda here is
politics and economics. It's not spirituality. NARRATOR: Until the mid
1800s, many early Bibles, even the King James Version,
contained a number of books that have
since been edited out. These are known
as the apocrypha. The word "apocrypha"
literally means "hidden things." And so these were books that
allegedly were providing hidden or secret teachings. But the term "apocrypha" came
to mean books that were not accepted as part of
the official canon. There are actually
more apocryphal books than there are books
that are included in the canons, whether the
Hebrew Bible, Old Testament, or in the New Testament. Some of them are
historical books talking about the
history of Israel after the Old Testament period. There are some books that
are historical fictions. NARRATOR: The debate about
which books should or should not be included in the sacred
text is almost as old as the Bible itself. Some early theologians
and scholars cited disparities between
ancient Hebrew and Greek texts and questioned the authenticity
of various sources and authors. So any book that contradicts
what they've decided to believe gets cast out. It's called heresy. They burn the books. They-- they-- they condemn
anyone who believes this. NARRATOR: But of all the
apocrypha, or hidden books of the Bible, one book in
particular, the Book of Enoch, is considered so controversial
that many believe it was deliberately
omitted from the canonical, or official texts, because
of its bizarre and outrageous contents. Ironically, the
character of Enoch does appear in current
versions of the Old Testament but only as a devoted follower
of God, one who lived hundreds of years before the Great Flood. And all we know about Enoch is
that he didn't die, because he walked with God,
and then he was not. And so the theory there
is that God took him to a special place. Enoch is the only one in
heaven allowed to sit along with God, and he reveals
information to humanity. NARRATOR: Believed to have been
written over a period of time between 300 BC and 100
AD, the Book of Enoch was traditionally thought to
have been authored by Enoch himself in order to share secret
knowledge given to him by God. Enoch was an
incredibly popular book in the time leading up to the
formation of Christianity. Of all the sacred texts, I
think that the Book of Enoch, in many ways, is
the most forbidden. NARRATOR: At some point
before the fourth century, the Book of Enoch was removed
from the Hebrew version of the Bible and became
discredited by all but two early Christian churches. But why? Could there be clues
in the text itself? Enoch predicts the
end of the world. He predicts the
coming of the Messiah. He predicts all kinds
of wars and battles. But one of the things he does
is, he elaborates this story of the giants. [lightning crashes] NARRATOR: According to the
Book of Enoch, the giants, or watchers, were a group of
renegade angels sent to Earth to guard man more
than 5,000 years ago. But instead of protecting
the human race, they lusted after women
and corrupted mankind. The watchers mate with
human women, but also what the watchers do
is they teach women all kinds of forbidden arts,
such as warfare, magic, how to make weapons,
and also cosmetics. So makeup comes from the evil
watchers who taught women how to make up their faces. The Book of Enoch
is a real conundrum, because this idea that
the rebellious angels have a power that can
rival God is something that is very threatening
to traditional church. NARRATOR: In the Book of Enoch,
the offspring of the watchers and mortal women are described
as giant warriors called Nephilim. Nephilim means
"the fallen ones." And the theory goes that
they're called the fallen ones because they were
revolting against God. They decided that
they wanted to have all the power for themselves. The Nephilim, these
grotesque giants. They are neither
angels nor people. They are described
as monstrous beings, and there were apparently
thousands of them that populated the Earth. In fact, there were so many of
them that, at a certain point, God had to destroy
all of humanity in order to get rid of them. [lightning crashes] [music playing] One of the things that
people don't realize is that, when God sends the
flood during the days of Noah, that in one version the story
is that the reason God decides to destroy the Earth is
because these Nephilim were on the Earth. NARRATOR: Grotesque
giants attacking humans? And the Giants in turn being
destroyed by God in the Great Flood? Was the Book of Enoch purged
from the standard biblical texts because it was
considered too far-fetched, too outrageous? Or was it because it portrayed
God as a compassionate creator, one who forgave rather than
punished mankind for its sins? God is protecting us
in the Book of Enoch. It is a very different God
than the spiteful, wrathful God that we see in the
Genesis account. The church derives great benefit
from having us be very, very afraid of God and of God
wiping us all out if we're not obedient. [music playing] NARRATOR: Did early Jewish
and Christian leaders really omit the story of
Enoch from the Bible because they had an agenda? Could it be that they wanted
to keep their followers in line by promoting the notion of
an angry and vengeful God? Perhaps the answer can
be found by studying more forbidden texts
and ancient stories that suggest that
what is contained in the pages of the Bible
may not be the whole story. [music playing] Nag Hammadi, Upper
Egypt, December 1945-- a group of farmers unearth
a clay jar containing 52 religious texts written
between the second and fourth centuries. Bible scholars believe
they were hidden here nearly 2,000 years ago by
a religious group known as the Gnostics. The Gnostics weren't
a single group, but they had some common ideas,
and one of the biggest kind of commonalities between all the
different schools of gnosticism was their belief that the
material world was evil. Early on, you did have groups
of Christians that held ideas that were felt by
the mainstream to not be in line with the true
spirit of Christianity. And Gnostics claim to have a
tradition that comes directly from Jesus. Jesus is the first
one who tells us we don't need an intermediary. We don't need priests. We don't need churches. And this is where the
beginning of the Gnostic church comes from. NARRATOR: The Gnostics
were followers of Jesus who claimed to have secret
knowledge beyond that contained in the four Gospels
of the New Testament. And it was this alleged
secret knowledge related to Jesus' life
and teachings that was found at Nag Hammadi,
texts that scholars refer to as the Gnostic Gospels. These so-called lost
books of the New Testament include the Gospel of
Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of the Egyptians,
and the Testimony of Truth. The reason that a
lot of these books didn't make it into the
Bible is that they weren't congruent with the core message
of the books that did make it in. Every early Christian text
that makes it into the New Testament thinks that Jesus
is the Messiah that prophesied in the Old Testament, but there
were Christians that didn't believe this, and
there were Christians that were skeptical
about this strong link. And on the whole, those
Christians didn't win the day. They didn't actually find
that their text made it into the scriptures. These tests were declared
to be sort of full of errors, and they'll lead you astray. One famous bishop calls them an
abyss of madness and blasphemy against Christ. So these were the enemies
of the early church, and Christians thought, they
must have horrible things in them. Different bishops
believe different things. Christianity was
incredibly diverse in the first, second,
third centuries, and they're trying to come
together to hammer out just what is it that we believe. And those who had more
influence-- not just money, but those who had
backing-- political-- important political people-- these guys tend to get
listened to a little more than guys that are
just on their own. It was a politically
charged process. [music playing] NARRATOR: In 367 AD, when
Archbishop Athanasius of Egypt first drew up a formal
list of the books to be included in
the New Testament, he declared the Gnostic
texts to be heresy, and anyone daring to
read them would suffer the fires of eternal damnation. The Archbishop of Egypt
sent a letter to Christians all over Egypt and said,
I want you to get rid of those secret books
you like so much. Now, you can keep 27. Those 27 of the
springs of salvation. Those 27 are what we now
have in the New Testament. So copies of these
secret texts were burned. They were destroyed. They were thrown into the Nile. That was the order of
the Orthodox Church. They were considered to be so
corrupting and so dangerous, so demonic that the religious
authorities were very quick to destroy them. [interposing voices] The penalty for
copying or even keeping any of the Gnostic texts would
have been increasingly severe. It could have even led to--
to more severe punishment like torture and death. And so, obviously, somebody
who saw these documents as valuable managed to
hide enough of them away in Nag Hammadi so
that 2,000 years later, we could find them. NARRATOR: But just what was
in the Gnostic Gospels that made them so controversial,
so dangerous? Was it because the Gnostics
were hostile to the notion of an increasingly powerful and
centralized Catholic Church, or could it also be that the
Gospels contained information that threatened to shake the
church to its very foundation? Certainly, there was a
sense among the bishops that the church had a special
role in God's dispensation for the world. And so things like the
sacraments, baptism, the communion were important. Those were all material
acts, which virtually all the Gnostic groups tended
to dismiss as unnecessary. Among the Nag Hammadi texts,
the best-known and maybe the most important is
the Gospel of Thomas. It is a collection of just
over 100 sayings of Jesus. So it's not a narrative. It's not a story. He went here.
He did this. He healed. He walked on water,
nothing like that. It's just teachings of
Jesus, but it shows a form of Christianity that's very
different from the form that we read about
in the Gospels. The Gospel of Matthew, say,
in the New Testament claims to tell you what
Jesus taught publicly on the hills of Galilee,
thousands of people, but the Gospel of Thomas
claims to tell you what he said privately to one
person or two or just a few. If you read Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John, they're all the time
quoting the scriptures, so Jesus does things in order
to fulfill the scriptures. When he gets to the
Gospel of Thomas, he's not interested
in the scriptures, never mentions
the Old Testament, doesn't like Old
Testament characters. Some people thought
the teachings of Jesus could have been
influenced by Buddhism, so this well could
be a kind of merging of different traditions,
certainly Jewish traditions, certainly Christian
traditions, Greek, and it could well be Indian. NARRATOR: Is it possible, as
the Gnostic Gospels suggest, that Jesus' so-called missing
years were spent traveling to places like India
and the Far East? Might Jesus' profound
teachings have been the result of exposure to other
religions and philosophies, and could the depiction of Jesus
as a holy but still very mortal man be among the reasons why the
Gnostic Gospels were considered so dangerous and so subversive? The Gospels of the New
Testament all tell you how important Jesus is. Jesus of Nazareth is Son
of God, the Son of man, the King of Israel, the Messiah. I mean, you name it. He's somebody very special,
and he's not like you and me. Now, the Gospels of Thomas, they
say something quite different. They say Jesus, yes, he may
be speaking divine truth, but he's really like you and me. You also have a sense of
the divine image within you. If other depictions of Jesus
were in the Christian Bible, I think it would completely
change Christianity. It wouldn't be
Christianity anymore. It would be something else. NARRATOR: But as controversial
as the Gnostic Gospels were and are,
another lost gospel discovered half a century
earlier is considered particularly outrageous, because
it tells the story of Jesus and the person with whom he
had a very important and very mortal relationship-- Mary Magdalene. [music playing] Akhmim, Egypt-- it
was here in 1896, along the east bank
of the Nile River, that one of the most
controversial of the so-called lost Gospels was discovered-- the Gospel of Mary. Considered by scholars to
be a Gnostic Gospel written in the second
century AD, the story is told from the perspective
of Mary Magdalene herself. There's a lot of controversy
about Mary Magdalene, right. In the Bible, she's
portrayed a certain way. She's one of the
followers of Jesus. Oftentimes, she's
described as a prostitute, as one who Jesus kind of
picked up from obscurity and made her one
of his followers. The Gospel of
Mary Magdalene seems to suggest that Jesus shared
things with Mary that he didn't share with the rest
of the disciples. In this book, it specifically
says that Jesus loved Mary more than the other disciples. In fact, they actually
put that in the mouths of one of the disciples. Well, don't you know that
he loved her more than us. NARRATOR: Although the
actual author of this gospel is unknown and the first few
chapters have never been found, the text seems to reveal
astonishing details about Mary's
relationship with Jesus and the men who are commonly
referred to as his 12 apostles. We're told in the
Gospel of Mary Magdalene that she receives secrets
from Jesus because of his particular love for her. We're not told what
those secrets are, but we're told that they
are too secret or too holy for her to repeat. Unfortunately, the
document is not whole, so we don't get most of what
Mary told the other Disciples the parts that we do have
suggest that she was telling a story similar in some ways
to the old Book of Enoch about rising up to
various levels of heaven and learning things about
these various levels and then passing that
information back to us. There is a jealous
explosion that comes from Peter and from his
brother Andrew over this idea that Mary has been
given information that the rest of
them do not have, that Mary Magdalene is in
possession of wisdom teachings that have not been
shared with anyone else. In the end, Peter seems
to somehow turn on Mary, but another disciple
says, what's wrong, Peter? Why do you get so upset
about these things? If Jesus taught
her these things, we should rejoice
that we have them, and it sort of ends
on a positive note. And one of the Disciples
does defend Mary. The book makes
Peter the bad guy. What makes this
gospel so important is that there is no debate
within this material of Mary's authority amongst the apostles. NARRATOR: Even in the
traditional pages of the New Testament, Mary Magdalene
plays a significant role in the life and death of Jesus. She is one of the
followers who stands by him during his crucifixion. She is also one of the
first witnesses at the scene of his miraculous resurrection. One thing that we know
is that the Gospels all agree that the first
people to see Jesus risen or to recognize that he was
alive after his death were the women. And if seeing Jesus alive after
his death makes you a disciple, you'd think Mary would be one
of the most important disciples. One might wonder, why
isn't this made a bigger deal of in the New Testament? Are they trying to
suppress something? 2,000 years of
church tradition is overturned by
the Gnostic Gospels, because Mary Magdalene emerges
as the apostle of the apostles. She emerges as a
successor of Jesus, and I think this more
than anything else that is within the Gnostic
Gospels is absolutely terrifying to the modern church. Many people have thought
that, in fact, the later church leaders-- say 20, 30 years
after Jesus' life-- wanted to de-emphasize
the role that women played in the life of Jesus
and in the early church. And one way to do that was
to elevate the importance of the disciples,
the male disciples-- Peter, James, and
John and the others. And so there may have been
battles in early Christianity between those who wanted
to elevate the men and those who wanted
to celebrate the women, and we know which side
ended up winning out. There's no doubt that a
patriarchal establishment does eventually take hold
in early Christianity. I think that that's
associated very closely with when Christianity becomes
an arm of the Roman Empire. It was the Roman Empire
after all that praised the violent power of
males and their armies, and Christianity unfortunately
embraced a good deal of that thinking. [music playing] NARRATOR: Could this be why
the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the other
so-called lost Gospels were kept out of
the New Testament? Because the early church had
a pro-male and anti-female agenda? And could this agenda have
been further supported by the deletion of yet
another Gnostic text-- the so-called
Testimony of Truth, that describes a different
version of the story of Adam and Eve in
the Garden of Eden? In the Genesis story, you've
got a talking snake trying to convince Adam and Eve to eat
the fruit of a magical tree, a tree of knowledge,
but what it implies is that you shouldn't
pursue knowledge. In the Testimony
of Truth, the serpent is the hero, because
he granted knowledge to mankind instead of hiding
it, keeping it from them. One of the things the
serpent questions and asks us is, why doesn't God
want you to have knowledge? Why wouldn't God want
you to have knowledge if he loves you so much? Why is knowledge
a forbidden thing? So this idea of the
Testimony of Truth is really questioning
what the church is doing and why the church is
hiding the real wisdom. NARRATOR: By editing the
Bible in such a way as to blame Eve for mankind's
fall, did the leaders of the early church really seek
to suppress the role of women, or did they genuinely believe
the Testimony of Truth to be a false gospel,
a subversive attempt to corrupt God's holy message? For many Bible scholars
and theologians, additional clues can
be found by examining yet another controversial
text, one that dares to answer the ultimate question-- where do we come from? [music playing] [birds chirping] In the Book of Genesis,
the story of Adam and Eve virtually ends with
the couple's expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Except for the tragic story
of their first-born sons, Cain and Abel, little is
known about their fate. Adam and Eve are
kicked out of the Garden, and then our account
in Genesis ends. We don't know what
happens to them. There were a lot
of ancient scrolls, a lot of ancient books,
and not all of them made it into the Bible. One of them is the
Life of Adam and Eve, which is the second half of
the Adam and Eve stories. It sort of fills in all of
the interesting details, and it's not included
in the Bible. [music playing] NARRATOR: Thought to have been
written in the first century AD, the life of Adam and Eve
is based on an original Hebrew manuscript that, although
lost, has survived in various other languages
and under numerous titles. The story describes
Adam and Eve's lives after their expulsion
from the Garden of Eden. It also reveals many
interesting details about the couple's family life. We find that, once Cain kills
Abel, Adam and Eve are then given as a gift from God another
son named Seth, who becomes the good son, but
then beyond that, they are given 60 more children,
30 sons and 30 daughters, that accounts for
a lot more children than we're ever told about
in the traditional Bible. NARRATOR: The Book of
Genesis gives few details of Adam's later life,
simply recording that he lived for 930 years. But the ancient Hebrew text
of the Life of Adam and Eve paints a much fuller picture. One of the elements that you
see in the life of Adam and Eve that you don't see
in canonical Genesis is the emergence of disease
and death with Adam and Eve. There's a fascinating dialogue
with Adam talking to God saying, you know,
what's going on? Why did this happen?
I used to be happy. Now I'm unhappy. I used to have a perfect life. Now I have to till the
Earth in order to get food. What did I ever do
to deserve this? Adam suffers, and then he
sends Eve and Seth, his son, back into the Garden of Eden to
get some holy oil to alleviate the pains that his sin
has brought on him. Ultimately, it doesn't work. He dies. One of the things that's
fascinating about the Life of Adam and Eve is that Eve gets
to tell her piece of the story. Eve is far more sympathetic
in this version of the Life of Adam and Eve than she is in
the traditional Old Testament account, and I think that
might be one of the reasons why this particular
document is considered a little bit scary or
threatening to the church. [music playing] NARRATOR: But if the
leaders of the early church were determined to limit
the role of women, why? Was it simply in the
interest of promoting a male-dominated
society, or was there another more secret reason,
one that, if revealed, might challenge the conventional
Christian view of God as a single masculine
power and of the male as the dominant force in both
political and religious life? Kuntillet Ajrud, Egypt-- this
archaeological site located in the Sinai Peninsula
is believed to have once been a religious center
built by the Israelites between the eighth and
ninth centuries BC. During excavations
in 1975, researchers unearthed two
large ceramic jars, each covered with strange
symbols and illustrations of humans and animals. But also included were
Hebrew inscriptions which revealed a radical notion,
that God had a wife named Asherah. It actually says, may you be
blessed by Yahweh, the Hebrew God, and his Asherah. There was a goddess in
ancient Israel known as Asherah. She was the consort
or the wife of Yahweh, the God who we find
in the Hebrew Bible. NARRATOR: In fact,
the name Asherah is mentioned more than 40 times
throughout nine different books of the Old Testament. In the Book of Jeremiah,
Asherah is even described as the queen of heaven. And there is evidence
that she was worshiped by the ancient Israelites as
late as the time of Jeremiah in the 7th century BC. But was Asherah really
believed to be the wife of God. If so, then when did this
notion change and why? While the Bible that we
have says that, you know, there is one God, the
archaeological evidence might suggest that God
actually had a wife. [music playing] They are spoken of
as a divine couple, the ultimate beloved
relationship, the divine feminine and
the divine masculine coming together to create the ultimate
creator force which is God. Asherah symbols were a
tree, and she was often associated with serpents. So some scholars
have even argued that what's behind the
story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is
actually a really old goddess myth. And by the time she's
written about in the Bible, she's a foreign idol, she's a
god, she's a fertility goddess, and she is to not be
worshipped, and she's to be banished and burned. The Bible rails
against idolatry. This idea of
worshipping other gods in addition to the god that
was taught to us by Moses. This was not tolerated by the
central voices of the Bible, but the fact that they're
constantly going on about it means that it was happening. The single unique
idea of the Bible is that God was sexless, that
God had no consort, that God had no sexual identity. Now, the language of the
Bible uses male pronouns, and so we are accustomed to
thinking of God as a male, but one of the
ways to distinguish between the religion
of the Bible and virtually every other
religion of the ancient world was that only among
the Israelites was God a sexless creature. NARRATOR: But while stories
of a powerful goddess sitting as an equal at God's side have
been purged from the Hebrew testament, the Gnostic Gospels
seem to support the idea. Now, one of the
things that is so important about the Gnostic
material, what we see is a male and female God who
are equals who rule together in heaven as our mother
and father in heaven. [music playing] NARRATOR: Was the Bible
deliberately edited to suppress the idea that
God might have a dual nature comprised of both male
and female aspects, or was it to purge from the text
stories and characters that were thought to
be too far-fetched or might frighten off
potential converts? There are those who believe
such is the case with three more of the Bible's
forbidden and forgotten texts, which are attributed
to one of Jesus' most devoted followers, the apostle Peter. [music playing] Apocalypse. [explosion] For centuries, this ominous
word has evoked thoughts of utter destruction. [explosion] Armageddon, the end of days. But the word
"apocalypse" actually has a much-less-sinister
definition. Derived from the ancient
Greek term "apocalypsis," it also means "a revealing"
or "an unveiling." An apocalypse was a
revealing of a heavenly secret to a prophet or a seer. This prophet has a vision,
usually a bizarre vision, filled with very
strange imagery. The apocalyptic idea
is to convince you that, for just a little
bit more suffering now, you will have a really long
or perhaps eternal reward. NARRATOR: In the conventional
versions of the New Testament, perhaps the strangest and
most unusual of all the sacred texts is the
Apocalypse of John, also known as the Book of Revelation. In it, John describes
the end of days, the day when Jesus
returned to Earth and decides who will
join him in heaven and who will suffer the
eternal flames of hell. People today know about
the Revelation of John, the book called the Apocalypse. What people don't realize is
that that book almost did not make it into the New Testament. NARRATOR: But as
bizarre and disturbing as the Book of
Revelation may be, there were, in fact,
other apocalyptic gospels that were thought to be
too strange to be included. One of these is known as
the Apocalypse of Peter. When I first encountered what
are called the Gnostic Gospels, we were all surprised that
there were so many gospels that weren't in the New Testament. There's all these other
books of revelation. Some church fathers thought
the Apocalypse of Peter belonged in the New Testament
instead of the Apocalypse of John. NARRATOR: Written in
the second century AD, the Apocalypse of Peter is
one of at least 20 books of revelation that were kept
out of the New Testament. It depicts what some might call
a guided tour of both heaven and hell, where
Jesus graphically reveals to Peter the
gruesome consequences of sin. Peter is shown places where
people are being punished for their characteristic
sin on Earth, and so liars are hanged by their
tongues over eternal flames, women who have seduced
men by braiding their hair to make themselves attractive
are hanged by their hair over eternal flames. In this case, they
cry out, we didn't know it would come to this. NARRATOR: But while the text
of Peter's journey through hell may seem extreme, the depiction
of Jesus' resurrection in the Gospel of Peter is
considered downright bizarre even by scholars. [music playing] When Jesus emerges
from the tomb, also emerging from the tomb
after Jesus is the cross. The cross itself
comes out of the tomb. God says, where have you been? What have you been doing? Have you been preaching to
the souls that are departed? And the cross replies, yes. So we even have a
walking, talking cross at Jesus's resurrection. NARRATOR: In yet another
banned book attributed to the apostle Peter, the
Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter, Jesus is depicted
as a man who laughs in the face of his own death. Jesus shows him the
crucified man on the cross, and then Jesus shows him a
laughing man on the tree, and he tells Peter, the
real me is the laughing man on the tree. It's not the dead
man on the cross. This text is telling us
that Jesus did not want us to focus on the crucifixion. Now, what becomes very important
about the Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter is it is entirely
a condemnation of what's happening in the evolving
traditional church. NARRATOR: Were
these three books, all attributed to Peter,
deleted from the Bible because they were considered
too bizarre, or were they, as some scholars
believe, excluded because of their overemphasis
on sensational visions and unorthodox claims rather
than focusing on the teachings and philosophies of Jesus? There was this sense that
there was a core belief that had to be maintained, that there
were certain non-negotiable truths that were part
of the Christian gospel. And so if anything was
contradictory to that, then it needed to be suppressed. There are a number of
earth-shattering texts that we will likely never
see in our lifetime. [music playing] One of the pressing questions
is, why did the authors include the stories
they included and leave out so much else? There's no easy answer to the
question of why they included what they did. When we are exposed to Bible
stories, they are censored. They are selected and censored. The most-troubling,
the most-titillating, the most-provocative
passages are left out. [music playing] NARRATOR: Throughout
the centuries, the Bible has stood up to
the challenges of history, scholarship, and even
politics and remains, for billions of people, one
of the unshakable pillars of a civilized world. It is a compact between
mankind and an almighty God, a testament of faith, and
even though the discovery of more new chapters
or lost gospels may challenge what we believe,
it will not likely change it.
