Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60053. The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, sold something in the region of eighty million copies, and left a residue of assumptions that is still with us two decades later. I still meet people who believe that the church suppressed rival gospels, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and that the doctrine of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 13011. Gnostic teaching is the ancient heresy that refuses to die. It surfaces in the second century in developed form, it is answered in seed form inside the New Testament itself, and it turns up again every few decades wearing new clothes and promising the same thing: secret knowledge for a special few. I…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1186. What is the Gospel of Thomas, and why does it keep surfacing in popular articles and documentaries about the “hidden” or “suppressed” gospels? The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, discovered among the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt in 1945, and it has become, in certain circles, a…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1076. The Gnostic gospels turn up every few years in a documentary or a bestselling novel, usually with the claim that the church suppressed a truer, more mystical version of Jesus that these texts supposedly preserve. It is a compelling story, and I understand why it sells books. It is also, on the actual…