The Apocryphal Gospels

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Speaker 17 Hey guys, welcome to the Ancients. Today's episode is all about the apocryphal gospel.
So those gospels, those accounts of Jesus' life and more that didn't make it into the Bible.

Speaker 17 I had no idea just how rich and diverse the world of early Christianity was, but this episode really shines a massive spotlight on it, and I hope you guys find it as interesting as I did recording it.

Speaker 17 Our guest is the journalist and author Catherine Nixie. Catherine has recently written a new book called Heretic, Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God.

Speaker 17 Let's go.

Speaker 18 Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Speaker 17 The four Gospels that make up a crucial part of the New Testament, detailing the life and miracles of Jesus.

Speaker 17 But in the early centuries of Christianity, almost 2,000 years ago, there were many more gospels. Many more stories about the Son of God, some more violent and extreme than others.

Speaker 17 Today, these writings have been labeled apocrypha.

Speaker 17 They ultimately were not integrated into the accepted canon of scripture.

Speaker 17 And yet, for centuries, many of them remained incredibly popular.

Speaker 17 They revealed how different groups of early Christians learnt different stories about Christ.

Speaker 17 Today, we're going to explore some of these texts and the extraordinary stories they told about Jesus' life that aren't mainstream today.

Speaker 17 This is the story of the Apocryphal Gospels with our guest, Catherine Nixie.

Speaker 17 Catherine, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast.

Speaker 1 It's been too long.

Speaker 19 Oh, it's a delight to be here. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 17 And to talk about the apocryphal gospels, Catherine, I had no idea just how many different accounts of Jesus' life there was in the early centuries of Christianity.

Speaker 19 No,

Speaker 19 nor did I. I was brought up Catholic.
I was the daughter of a monk and a nun. And so we went to church every Sunday.

Speaker 19 And I kind of got quite a good Catholic education from my parents, but the Catholic, you're always a little bit vague. I didn't think I understood everything that was going on in church.

Speaker 19 I thought for quite a long time that God was called Peter because we seemed to say thanks, Peter God, all the way through Mass.

Speaker 19 So it was a sort of religious upbringing, but not a kind of theologically testing upbringing. And then when I was a bit older, I started reading actually classical texts, really.

Speaker 19 This is how I came to this. So I'm a classicist.
I did classics at university. And I remember coming across people who had definite echoes of Jesus in in their lives, in their stories.

Speaker 19 These people who were born of virgins, grew up to become healers, laid on their healing hands. And sometimes this would be like four centuries before Jesus.

Speaker 19 And so the similarities were really obvious.

Speaker 19 And then I started reading more and then I discovered that not only were there all these kind of Jesus alikes in the classical world, there were also within Christianity huge varieties of Jesus.

Speaker 19 So there's a Jesus who, some early Christians believed hadn't been crucified, he'd got someone else crucified in his stead, and then stood opposite laughing, because if you're a God, why are you going to let yourself be crucified?

Speaker 19 And there was a Jesus who killed people, and then there was a Jesus who impregnated his own mother, Mary, himself. Because, of course, if God is three in one,

Speaker 19 and God made Mary pregnant, then also so did Jesus. But it's a bit weird to think about some of these things.

Speaker 17 We're going to delve into some of these stories throughout the chat.

Speaker 17 First of all, also, is it fair to say, I did say earlier, like early Christianity, but do some people now say actually it's better to say early Christianities?

Speaker 19 Yeah, it absolutely is. I mean, it sounds like one of the kind of irritating things that academics say to make things more complicated than they need to be and to confuse the general public.

Speaker 19 But it really is a much, much better way of looking at it.

Speaker 19 And it's also, there was such a wide variety of Christianity, not only in what they believed, but also what they read, but also in how they lived.

Speaker 19 And, you know, some Christianities had bishops who were women. The practices were widely, wildly differing.
So it is definitely better to say early Christianities.

Speaker 19 The way a lovely description is, the early Christians used to describe themselves as this kind of field of wheat that was constantly being invaded by the tares, the kind of weeds of heresy.

Speaker 19 Whereas now what they say is what you have to imagine is a field of competing saplings.

Speaker 19 And it's not at all clear which one of these is going to grow up to become the kind of mighty oak of Christianity in later years.

Speaker 17 And is there a case even within the apocryphal gospels? Well actually first of all Catherine I should ask what do we mean by apocryphal?

Speaker 19 Like fundamentally for the people listening to this it's the ones that are not in the Bible that you will probably pick up in the Western world.

Speaker 19 Like there's a bit of variety between different Christianities now. Coptic Christianity will have slightly different books to us.

Speaker 19 But fundamentally if it's not in the Bible that you pick up that's what we think of as the apocryphal gospels. It means sort of covered up and secret in Greek.

Speaker 19 They weren't really that covered up or that secret for centuries. They were hugely popular.

Speaker 19 And a lot of what we'll come on to this, I'm sure, but a lot of what we think of as inverted comments, real Christianity is in fact from the apocryphal gospels.

Speaker 19 So things such as hell or the donkey that Mary rides on in the Nativity.

Speaker 19 So if any of you were Mary's in the Nativity, the donkey that you sat on or sung about, that came from an extraordinary apocryphal. so-called gospel.

Speaker 17 And also with the word apocryphal, of course we say apocryphal gospels, but I know in your your book there are works covered that aren't just gospels.

Speaker 17 I mean can the word apocryphal also be given to other religious Christian texts that didn't make it into the Bible?

Speaker 19 Yes, exactly, exactly. So gospel means good news.
The word gospel in Greek is eu angelion, which means eu in Greek is good and angelion is news. Like an angel is a messenger.

Speaker 19 So it's something that brings news. It's that same word that keeps coming up.
So gospel is just a translation of that. And that's really something that tells the story of Jesus's life.

Speaker 19 But there's more books in the Bible than just as we know, you know, the Bible is a library, not a book. There's more books in the Bible than just those that tell the stories of Jesus's life.

Speaker 19 So there's lots and lots and lots of texts that the way it usually gets described is didn't make the final cut. It wasn't quite like that.

Speaker 19 They were not directors sitting on their chairs saying, no, that scene doesn't come in. It was a much more organic process.
If you believe in them, it was guided divinely.

Speaker 19 If you don't believe in them, you know, you would say it's more like certain groups had certain texts.

Speaker 17 And do we get a sense over time that certain apocryphal texts were viewed as worse than others that didn't make into the final cut?

Speaker 19 Yes, definitely some were viewed as worse. I think there was a sort of element of the ones that came close to being included.
I mean it's a sort of narcissism of small differences also.

Speaker 19 And then there were other ones that were to us kind of quite radical and quite weird, but they were accepted elsewhere.

Speaker 19 I think what you have to kind of get rid of in your mind in listening to this again is that slightly annoying Christianities rather than Christianity.

Speaker 19 Because if you were in a christian in india and there were a lot of christians in india from early on you would be reading thinking different things to if you were a christian in england where christianity arrived quite late so you would be thinking different things and it feels weird to us because we have been brought up on a mono what we call a monotheistic monolithic religion you know the catholic church spread over europe for over a millennium and had control, like considerable control over what was read and thought under its aegis.

Speaker 19 But actually other religions at the time when Christianity was around were completely different depending on where you went.

Speaker 19 So you would get a different Zeus in Greece to the Zeus, Jupiter, that you would get in Italy.

Speaker 19 It was considered normal that gods would change and it was considered normal that you would adapt to your gods. You know, Julius Caesar saw gods as kind of evolutions of the same thing.

Speaker 19 And early Christians tried to argue that their god, their Jesus, was an evolution of what was in pagan gods. They would say, well, we're just like you.

Speaker 19 You know, what we say about Jesus is no different to what you say about Asclepius say. And then they changed their mind.

Speaker 17 So let's move on now to the Apocryphal Gospels and explore a few of the accounts. And a few of them I know that in your book, you exploring some really extraordinary details.

Speaker 17 First off, this was a bit of an impossible question because I'm not sure, like, do we know how many apocryphal gospels there were in total?

Speaker 19 We don't know. Oxford University Press did a book recently of apocryphal gospels and they had 40 texts, but I mean there were definitely way more.

Speaker 19 And some of them are found only kind of, you know, like lots of ancient texts, they're found very, very serendipitously, like quite a lot of them were found in a jar.

Speaker 19 Others were found, some we had loads of copies of, two of my favourite ones, in fact, we had loads of copies of. But some of them, they're fragmentary.
So you're almost, they're almost lost.

Speaker 19 So many more, I'm sure, existed, but have been lost.

Speaker 17 Yes, as you say, if many of them fell out of fashion, that's, you know, if they're not written and written and written, that they can easily be lost.

Speaker 17 And actually, it's quite lucky that they survive in certain cases it strikes me that there seem to be quite a few of these gospels that explore the birth of jesus that explore the birth of christ am i not right well am i am i not mistaken you are you are

Speaker 7 too many negatives

Speaker 19 yeah i know i don't know is that yes or a no yes am i correct you are correct you are absolutely correct yes because the thing is it makes a lot of sense a lot of what they explore is kind of what you feel is in inverted commas left out of the bible it's what you want to know you want to know more about mary you want want to know more about Joseph.

Speaker 19 You definitely want to know more about that conversation, whatever it was when Mary says to Joseph, oh, by the way, I'm pregnant and it's by God.

Speaker 19 You know, these are the things you want to know about the birth of a deity. Who would not want to know about that?

Speaker 19 And these are the things, these things that the Bible actually bounces over pretty quickly that the apocryphal gospels really go into in detail.

Speaker 19 And the birth of Jesus is one that is gone into in enormous detail. In

Speaker 19 well, I don't know if this is one of the ones that you're interested in.

Speaker 17 Well, I think we're going to go through them, but shall we do the infancy gospel of James first? Because this feels a big one.

Speaker 19 Oh, yes, yes. Go on.
Yeah. The infancy gospel of James.

Speaker 19 This sort of went wildly out of fashion.

Speaker 19 I don't know if you'd heard of it before.

Speaker 17 Never. Not before reading the book.

Speaker 19 Okay, okay. The infancy gospel of James.
If you have ever been Mary or Joseph in a school play, this is your gospel. The birth of Jesus is really very lightly covered in the Bible.

Speaker 19 It's kind of bounced over. The Bible actually spends more time explaining travel arrangements and tax than it does the actual birth itself.

Speaker 19 So, this begins, it's actually a very beautiful gospel. It has a scene in it when Mary tells Joseph that she is pregnant and that it's by God.

Speaker 19 Joseph comes home from what seems to be a business trip, and so she says that he's pregnant. And Joseph is genuinely very upset, kind of, I think, understandably.

Speaker 19 And he is very skeptical of her defending herself and saying that she's pregnant by God. But he kind of comes around to it.
And they set off with Mary on a donkey.

Speaker 19 And so, if you have ever sung those songs in the School Nativity where Mary's on a donkey, that is not from the Bible. There are no donkeys in the New Testament.
That is from this.

Speaker 19 As an aside, I went on a donkey walking holiday when I was pregnant. And I have a lot more I can say.
It is a very bad way to get around.

Speaker 21 I've thought of Mary a lot and I thought, I really took my hat off to her.

Speaker 19 I feel she put up with a lot, but after the donkey holiday, I thought she put up with a lot more.

Speaker 19 Anyway, so they're walking along and Mary says that they have this lovely phrase, she says, the child that's in me presseth to come forth. So her contractions are beginning, in other words.

Speaker 19 And Joseph, so finds a cave. This is a stroke of luck.
He finds a cave for her to give birth in.

Speaker 19 So if you've ever seen her, I always used to be puzzled when I was younger when you saw depictions of the nativity in a cave. It was kind of popular in Europe, more popular in Europe than it is here.

Speaker 19 So this is what it comes from. It's not in the Bible.
So Joseph finds a cave in which he can give birth. And then an even greater stroke of luck, there's a midwife who turns up.

Speaker 19 And so the midwife comes in to help. And then Mary starts to go into a really strong, strong neighbor.
Joseph leaves, as is a habit in those days.

Speaker 19 And Joseph, then it kind of switches to Joseph and he's standing outside. And then he's looking just sort of across the landscape and he realizes that something strange has happened.

Speaker 19 So he realizes that he was watching a shepherd who is about to hit his flock and his arm has frozen in mid-air.

Speaker 19 He looks up to the sky and the birds that were flying across, they have frozen also in mid-air. The stars themselves have stopped moving.
So time itself is a standstill. A God has been born.

Speaker 19 Jesus has been born. And he goes back into the cave.
And the midwife is there. Mary is there.
Jesus is there. Everyone's very happy.
The midwife is so excited.

Speaker 19 She runs outside and she sees a woman and she says, I've got something amazing to tell you. A virgin has given birth.
And this woman is, not without reason, a little bit skeptical.

Speaker 19 And then she says, well, I don't believe that. She says, I won't believe that until I come in and thrust my hand in and search for the parts.

Speaker 19 In other words, conduct a virginity test on Mary who's just given birth. And the midwife, which I think is very much not to her credit, immediately says okay come in

Speaker 19 and she doesn't seem to ask Mary either so this woman comes in we don't know what Mary is saying about this or feeling about this so the woman comes into the cave and she puts her hand into Mary's vagina and the response of Mary's vagina is completely unambiguous because the woman's hand is burnt clean off and then the woman says whoa

Speaker 19 as you read whoa

Speaker 19 you feel here that I always feel that Mary ought to be the patron saint of birthing women after this because that's you do reach a point when you've had enough Anyway, she says, because I have tested the living God, my hand falleth away from me in fire.

Speaker 19 And this gospel was enormously influential. So we've completely forgotten its existence.

Speaker 19 But as I say, if you were Mary or Joseph in the school Nativity, that trotting round on the donkey, that is not from the Bible, that's from this.

Speaker 19 If you see a Nativity from a cave, that is not from the Bible, that's from this. It changed the calendar of the Catholic Church.
It changed the character of the Catholic Church.

Speaker 19 The Catholic reverence of Mary is thought to come from this gospel. It was enormously popular.
Its importance is really impossible to overstate.

Speaker 17 So does it certainly seem then that in certain of these apocryphal gospels, the ones that cover the birth of Jesus, that Mary is given more attention to than in the canonical four that we have surviving today, that you actually have more information about Mary in these ones that didn't make the final cut?

Speaker 19 Yes, absolutely. It's a really, it's a really good point.

Speaker 19 A lot of what they're doing is filling in what we would call backstory for characters that we're interested in but don't have enough information on.

Speaker 19 You know, there's clearly a huge hunger to know about the Mother of God.

Speaker 19 Of course you would want to know that.

Speaker 19 Women in particular, who are women are not that, there are more women in the Gospels than perhaps some people think, but and they have a more prominent role perhaps than history has always recognised.

Speaker 19 But there is not that much Mary in the Gospels. There really isn't.
And so what a lot of these Gospels do is they add in bits. So they're often explaining things that seem puzzling.

Speaker 19 There's another gospel that explains the story about the camel through the eye of the needle because obviously there's a lot of rich people listening to the story about it's harder for a rich man to get to heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle there's an apocryphal gospel that shows how this happens because peter makes a magical needle that gets so big that you can even ride a camel through it and not just a camel you can even because because this is what these gospels are like they really are extraordinary put a prostitute on top of the camel and ride a camel and a harlot through it.

Speaker 19 Any puzzles that you had with the Bible, they fill in and that's what these do.

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Speaker 17 I would also ask about Joseph. Do we hear much about Joseph in these apocryphal gospels as well? Because it sounds like there's a bit more scepticism around the virginity of Mary when Jesus is born.

Speaker 19 Joseph never has a man deserved his sainthood more, I think, than Joseph. Yeah, there is.
There is a lot of skepticism.

Speaker 19 So there's a wonderful gospel gospel that kind of gets wrapped up into something else. But it's basically Joseph doesn't come around to the idea that this is the Son of God.

Speaker 19 And there's an extraordinary gospel in which Joseph and Mary, so that they've that, by this point, they've fled to Egypt and they're traveling through Egypt.

Speaker 19 And Joseph is kind of like a tourist in a country where he doesn't like the food. So he's really grumbling about everything.
Oh, I don't like this. Oh, now we've left our home.

Speaker 19 Oh, and the date palms are too high and I can't get any of them. And then he says the most extraordinary thing.
He says, he turns to Mary and he says, well, he sort of says,

Speaker 19 you know, she's obviously claiming it's the Son of God. He says, I have often thought to myself that perhaps I just had sex with you while I was drunk.

Speaker 19 And to people who are not brought up Christian, you just think, well, it seems like a reasonable thing for, you know, he's confronted with some odd circumstances.

Speaker 19 To people who are brought up Christian, I mean, this is sort of extraordinary. And I think it's extraordinary to think that Christians ever thought it was acceptable to write this down.

Speaker 19 And I think that gives you a sense of how different the early atmosphere was and how it was perhaps Christianity was closer to other religions in lots of ways when it began than it has become since.

Speaker 17 But do we think, as mentioned near the beginning, you know, how it's early Christianities, do we think sometimes that a bit of skepticism around the virgin birth story in certain of these gospels, do we think that actually reflected an actual concern, an actual debate amongst certain early Christian groups?

Speaker 19 Yes, definitely, without a doubt. There were early Christians who said that Mary was just born from Joseph, as from Joseph's seed, as all men are born from their fathers.

Speaker 19 So the virgin birth is only actually mentioned in two of the four gospels. It was not a universally accepted Christian tenet.

Speaker 19 And it was also, it was incredibly mocked by everybody outside Christianity. So Celsus, again, of course, he absolutely scorned the idea that there was a virgin birth.

Speaker 19 He said, oh God, Mary, no, she just got knocked up by a Greek soldier who was called Pantheros, which sounds a bit like the Greek word for virgin, which is Parthenos, which you see see in words like Parthenon, that's where that word comes from.

Speaker 19 So he says she just got knocked up by a Greek soldier, and then she made up the story of the virgin birth to cover her shame, and then she fled from her home.

Speaker 19 And this is when Kelsus also piles in with his comment about his sort of there are not many feminists in the ancient world, it has to be said.

Speaker 19 He says that God, even if he was going to choose anyone, he wouldn't have chosen Mary. He was God.
He could have anyone he liked.

Speaker 19 He would have chosen a queen, not a kind of peasant somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 17 Let's move on to another gospel, apocryphal gospel that I have in my notes here. It's still an infancy gospel, but I believe it concerns not the birth, but the young Jesus years.

Speaker 17 It's the infancy gospel of Thomas. And it seems the portrayal you get of Jesus when he's very young in this gospel is,

Speaker 17 dare I say, he's out of control. He's on a rampage.
He's murderous.

Speaker 19 This is extraordinary. When the apocryphal gospels kind of came back to light after having been sort of forgotten for centuries, this was one of the ones that genuinely distressed people.

Speaker 19 And when you read it, you can see why. So Jesus to us is milk and honey.
This is sunbeams and Sunday school Jesus. You know, he's suffered the little children, Jesus.

Speaker 19 He's got lambs and he's always loving. It was not obvious in the ancient world that God would be that kind of kind, slash, to the ancient eyes, a bit sappy.

Speaker 19 So it is with sort of some surprise that we read the ancient text known as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

Speaker 19 It begins when Jesus is, he's around five, and I don't know if any of you have had five-year-olds, you know what they're like. And he's playing by the water.

Speaker 19 He's playing by the stream, and he's doing it on the Sabbath, and he shouldn't be doing it on the Sabbath, but so which will kind of come into some importance later.

Speaker 19 So he's playing by the stream, and he's damning the water. And that's lovely.
You know, everyone who has a child, it's great to get them to a stream.

Speaker 19 You have a quiet half hour while they just muck about damning water. But this Jesus is actually a bit more sinister than that, because he's not doing it with his hands.

Speaker 19 He's just doing it with his words. So he says a word, and the waters seem to change their course.
He says another word, and the waters seem to run clear.

Speaker 19 And then a little boy who has perhaps not noticed how odd this is comes up and he breaks the dam that Jesus has made.

Speaker 19 And Jesus turns to him in a fury and he says, you insolent godless ignoramus, what harm did they do to you? You shall also wither like a tree.

Speaker 19 It's a very weird curse, and bear neither leaves nor root nor fruit.

Speaker 19 Now, you don't quite know what that means, but the effect is absolutely instantaneous because this poor little boy shrivels up and becomes withered and deformed and so that's a bad start to the day and then Jesus goes home and is clearly sort of been set off on the wrong footing he's walking through the village and somebody bumps into him and it might have been an accident it might not as everyone who's small children knows this can't really get on their wick and it gets on Jesus's he turns around and he says to the boy you shall not go further on your way And then the boy drops down dead.

Speaker 19 And it goes on like this. And then his teacher,

Speaker 19 he's a bit snitty to his teacher and his teacher whacks him on the back of the head and the teacher falls unconscious. And eventually, people go and complain to Mary and Joseph.
I mean, poor Joseph.

Speaker 19 And they're complaining because Jesus has not unreasonably killed their child and others across because he's deformed their child.

Speaker 19 And Joseph says to Mary, do not let him outside the door, for all those who cross him die.

Speaker 19 So this is a very, again, it's a very different Jesus to the Jesus that we know, but it was very popular and remained popular for centuries.

Speaker 17 I find interesting that that infancy gospel is attributed to Thomas. The one before was attributed to James.

Speaker 17 But do we think these works were actually originally written by the disciples, by the people who they're attributed to?

Speaker 19 No, no, no, they're much later. They're much later.

Speaker 19 The James one was earlier than some of the others. It's about probably 120, around about that.
So they're later than the ones that we have in the Bible.

Speaker 19 The attributions come later because they give them an air of authority. We don't really know.
who is writing these things down at all. No, definitely not.

Speaker 17 Is there also a story, kind of keeping on the more infamous Jesus portrayal that you get in some of these, is there one where he has a brother and he sells his brother into slavery?

Speaker 19 Yes, this was popular in India, in the East. You know, you're never quite sure what they mean when they say India, but Thomas Christians would use this text for a long time, it's believed.

Speaker 19 It's not quite clear where. Anyway, but basically, in this story, Jesus has a brother and he's also described as his twin.
It's very confusing. We don't know in what way he is his twin.

Speaker 19 And he seems to be almost an identical twin and actually scholars really can't fathom this because if he is if they were in the womb together I mean like the problems that can like you don't even need to think very hard to think of what the problems are that have been raised by them

Speaker 19 that Jesus may have an identical twin. So what they seem to think is that this man is just a bit like Jesus.
He looks a bit like him.

Speaker 19 It seems to be seems to be the binum likely thing, possibly also a brother.

Speaker 19 Anyway, but there's a point in the Gospels that we still have where Jesus kind of sends all his followers out to kind of go and spread the word.

Speaker 19 But in this story, one of them, Thomas, does not want to go. And what Jesus does instead is

Speaker 19 he's kind of trying to persuade him to go to India and he doesn't want to go. So, what Jesus does is when he's not looking, when Thomas is not looking, he sells him into slavery.

Speaker 19 So, he sees a merchant nearby, an Indian merchant, and he says, You see that man over there? Jesus says to him, and he says, He sort of more or less says, Well, you can have him.

Speaker 19 So, he writes out and he even writes him out a receipt. And so,

Speaker 19 again,

Speaker 19 this is a kind of underhand duplicitous Jesus, unlike the Jesus that modern Christians would recognise from the Bible.

Speaker 19 I mean, not one of the interesting things I think perhaps about these is that when you go back to the Bible having read them, you also notice that there are faces to Jesus in the Bible that you perhaps don't notice when you read it the first time because, I mean, you know, you were brought up Christian, I was brought up Christian.

Speaker 19 You were expecting to see a loving Jesus. But actually, there's bits in the Bible where Jesus is not loving at all.
He says things like, I have come not to bring peace but a sword.

Speaker 19 There's a bit in Tolstoy, there's a bit in Anna Karenina, where you get Levin spending ages saying, you know, what a difficult passage this is. Why is he saying that?

Speaker 19 Why is he not come to bring peace? So one of the things that the apocryphal gospels do, did when they were first discovered, they kind of came out in the 1820s. A newspaper man called William Hone

Speaker 12 found them.

Speaker 19 And he instantly realized what a hit he had on his hands and he printed them and they caused a huge, huge scandal from which Hone really barely, kind of barely recovered.

Speaker 19 He did recover and he didn't, but he spent the rest of his life defending defending himself for doing this.

Speaker 19 But one of the things they do is that they throw the Christian story into relief and they also make you go back to the Bible, the Bible as we know it, and reread it.

Speaker 19 And you see that there are textures in it that you've not noticed.

Speaker 17 And it seems like we've only covered a few of the stories and there are so many more. I've got in my notes that there's also a Gospel of Judas.

Speaker 17 I mean, I don't know anything about it, but it sounds absolutely extraordinary that you have one of these gospels that is attributed to the figure who obviously betrays Jesus Christ in the canonical gospels in the story that we have.

Speaker 19 Yes, but was also revered in other Christianities because if there is no Judas, then there is no crucifixion. And if there's no crucifixion, then there's no salvation.

Speaker 19 So he wasn't universally reviled. He was for some an essential part of the story and revered accordingly.

Speaker 17 You also mentioned, of course, with Jesus's message in the Bible, you know, when you look back at it, you actually notice some almost a hard interview than you might expect.

Speaker 17 And I remember interviewing Helen Bond in the past and with the story of Jesus and how his message is quite apocalyptic.

Speaker 17 You know, get ready, be prepared for what's coming, similar to what you were saying with other figures at the time with that kind of message.

Speaker 17 And I noticed that amongst these apocryphal texts, you also have these apocalypses. I've got apocalypses of Peter and Paul.
I mean, do we know what these are?

Speaker 19 The apocalypses are so much fun. So they are

Speaker 19 in the same way that nobody reads Dante's Paradito.

Speaker 19 Everyone reads the Inferno because you want to know what's being, horrible things are being done to like Florentine bankers deep in the bowels of hell.

Speaker 19 I mean, the apocalypses are brilliant fun and Christians get really cross about them early on. Like official Christianity sort of says you shouldn't read these.
These are not for reading.

Speaker 19 These are not nice.

Speaker 19 Obviously nobody can get enough of them because the Gospels offer all good and nice things and these offer moneylenders standing up to their necks in pus and women who harlots being punished in really disgusting, genuinely revolting ways.

Speaker 19 I mean they they are this sort of symphony of sadism.

Speaker 19 And what's interesting about them is that they really puzzled some Victorian scholars because they were just just like,

Speaker 19 how is this? Where is this coming from? But really, it's not that much of a mystery because this kind of proportionate punishment, what we think of as hell, is not just a bad place.

Speaker 19 It's not just an unpleasant place. It's a somewhere, it's a kind of tit-for-tat place.
You do something nasty in this life and you will be punished in a similar

Speaker 19 sort of mirror image way in hell. So there are people in these apocalypses, for example.
There is women who spend too long doing their hair.

Speaker 19 So they, in hell, they find themselves held up by their hair.

Speaker 19 Or, you know, there's adulterers who find themselves held up by their feet, which doesn't sound that bad until you realise that feet is an ancient euphemism for testicles.

Speaker 19 So they are like perpetually suspended. So there is just sort of page after page of this absolutely gruesome sadism.
And all ancient readers clearly loved it.

Speaker 19 But it was also, it was absolutely common in ancient descriptions of hell. So if you read Virgil, who was writing in the first century BC before Christ, He has a very similar sounding hell.

Speaker 19 If you read Plato, he has a very similar sounding hell five centuries earlier. And you are having these things in ancient non-Christian texts.
You get burning fiery lakes.

Speaker 19 You get things that sound very like demons with pitchforks. You get people being punished again and again until their sin is washed clean.
Obviously, you get Nero in hell. He's punished.

Speaker 19 He's in everybody's hell.

Speaker 7 Is he?

Speaker 17 Is he actually in the apocalypse texts?

Speaker 19 I mean, he's not in the apocalypse texts. No, no, no.
He's in the non-apocalyptic ones. But I'm sure if they, I'm sure, I have have no doubt that they would put him in if they could.

Speaker 17 Yes, I know there's a link in the book of Revelation of something that he could be the Antichrist figure.

Speaker 17 That's another story, isn't it?

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 19 It's like the kind of good, the sort of nice, shiny Sunday school bits of Christianity are there in non-Christian texts. But so are these sort of fiery, burney, hellish bits.

Speaker 19 Because there isn't really hell in that way in the New Testament. It comes from these later frowned-upon texts.

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Speaker 17 Now, Catherine, are there any other particular works that you'd like to mention that are either apocryphal or are linked to the apocryphal works?

Speaker 19 I think some of the most striking texts are the magical texts. And they're most striking, I think, because they were the most forbidden in the ancient world.

Speaker 19 So these were actively, these were definitely actively destroyed. There was lots of,

Speaker 19 nobody liked magical texts.

Speaker 19 But what we forget about the ancient world is that they were, we think about the Romans, we think about their kind of sensible people, sensible, straight roads, sensible, straight minds.

Speaker 19 They liked architecture, engineering. They occasionally let their hair down with gladiators, but otherwise they were pretty kind of, you know, they liked concrete.

Speaker 19 Romans were concrete people with concrete thoughts. They were not at all.
The ancient world teemed with ghosts and the supernatural and with magic.

Speaker 19 You have ancient Roman laws, some of the earliest Roman laws forbid magical practices. And so if they're forbidding them, they believe in them.
And you get it all the way through.

Speaker 19 And there were lots of various different magical practices, which when they were came to light in sort of the in manuscripts that again, that survived on a slender, slender thread into the modern world.

Speaker 19 They really shocked the people who were reading them because what you found reading these manuscripts was that you found things like people who could make water solid so that you could run over it as if it was the ground you found people who could

Speaker 19 perform miracles who could raise people from the dead you found instructions on how to raise people from the dead and you found instructions on how to call down a god from heaven how to become like a god from heaven yourself how to heal the blind how to cure the lame there's an index in the magical book and it's got like sort of all the all the miracles are there you know heal the blind cure the lame there's quite a lot quite a lot of things about impotence actually which didn't make it into the Bible.

Speaker 19 But they are medical texts and they are clearly hugely popular in the ancient world. Magical figures were when Jesus arrived, people just thought of him as a magician.

Speaker 19 That is what he is seen as by the ancient world. Almost all ancient observers categorise him as a magician, or a charlatan, or a huckster.
But really, it's magic that he's seen as doing.

Speaker 19 And it's Christians who kind of forbid this word magic and kind of becomes extremely unpopular in Christianity. And magical texts are forbidden, magical texts are burnt.

Speaker 19 And when when you read them you can see why because almost any miracle that Jesus does in the Gospels will find a counterpoint. Water into wine, absolutely, but not just wine.

Speaker 19 I mean I mentioned it earlier, any kind of wine, really fancy wine, whatever vintage you want.

Speaker 19 You will find loaves, fishes, but you will also get side orders and they also do, these magical texts can enable you to have sort of what sounds a bit like salad dressing as well.

Speaker 19 So it was hugely popular.

Speaker 19 And what is interesting is it wasn't that fought against by some Christians because one of the things that you use to do magic, it appears in these texts and it appears elsewhere in other things, is a wand, what we would call the wand.

Speaker 19 And if you look at early paintings of Jesus, what he appears with, his most common, what they call attribute, after the scroll for teaching, is a wand.

Speaker 19 So when Jesus turns water into wine, he's holding a wand. When he raises people from the dead, he's holding a wand.

Speaker 19 What is happening is you have this enormous crossover between what we would call religion and what we would call magic. But there isn't really that divide in the ancient world.

Speaker 19 And of course, it's there in the people who come to see Jesus. We know them as three, there weren't three.

Speaker 19 But Magi, which just means magicians, we call them wise men, did not mean wise men, it meant magician.

Speaker 17 Yes, and how many of them were there? That's another great question that we've covered in the past. But it also brings, it's a really nice thing as we start wrapping up, isn't it?

Speaker 17 If you had all of these different texts and all of these different kind of versions of Christianity right at the beginning and how they were viewing Jesus and his story, I'm guessing you get tales from these various Apocrypha.

Speaker 17 I'm guessing you must see them in early Christian art. You know, you don't just see the versions that are shown in

Speaker 17 the four gospels that we know today. Presumably, you can also see in surviving artwork scenes and tales from these various apocryphal works.

Speaker 19 Yes, you can, absolutely. Partly because a lot of these stories are going to be transmitted orally.
A lot of people are not going to be literate either. So they're going to be taking these things

Speaker 19 certainly not literate in the way that we think of literacy. So just say quickly on the paintings, yeah, you see them in early artworks.
You see them in late artworks.

Speaker 19 Like, when you're looking at a painting of Mary standing over Jesus in the manger and they're in a cave, as they often are, that is from the Apocrypha.

Speaker 19 If you're looking at a painting of Hell, that is from the Apocrypha. If you're looking at a painting in which there is a donkey behind the manger of Jesus, that is from the Apocrypha.

Speaker 17 If you see someone getting their hand burned off,

Speaker 19 exactly. There's one of those, and yes, somebody sent me a picture of that from Italy yesterday.

Speaker 19 But I think the thing to think is we kind of we are so book bound, and our books are bound, like they're literally bound when you see a Bible it is in a shut cover it has a big black cover this Bible black cover often you know if you see them in a church they'll often be chained to the pulpit you know these feel like these words were written in stone they feel as immovable as stone to us but there was nothing like that in the ancient world and most people couldn't read them most people were hearing them and those who were forming these stories, I think a really crucial thing to understand is that there were not many.

Speaker 19 So it's an estimated, we assume that Jesus was born, that was it, game over.

Speaker 19 But But you have to realize how tentative the Christian story was and how it took a long time for Christianity to establish itself, in which time it varied a lot.

Speaker 19 So by that year 100, there were probably only 7,000 Christians of any kind, of whom it's estimated only 50 could read.

Speaker 19 So a small handful of people are making decisions that will have staggering, unimaginable to them, I am sure, consequences.

Speaker 17 Absolutely. It's only the fourth century where you see that great explosion.
Catherine, this has been extraordinary.

Speaker 17 My last question, but you kind of mentioned it at the beginning, is that with the ultimate choosing of which gospels are canon and that the rest are apocrypha and I guess then heresy, it doesn't sound like there's almost a council of nicer equivalent in like the kind of deciding.

Speaker 17 Is it just which ones endure and remain the most popular over the centuries?

Speaker 19 So the way I view it is that some were clearly nonsense, many were clearly later. And the oldest ones are the ones that we have, the ones that we have in the Bible.
They were the oldest ones.

Speaker 19 There were possibly, very possibly, ones before that, but they do not exist. M.
R.

Speaker 19 James, who was one of the ones who did the first translation, the first popular English translation of these was very caustic about this.

Speaker 19 He said, you know, they didn't sit around like newspaper editors saying this one's in, this one's out. It wasn't like that.
It was that different groups of Christians would have used different texts.

Speaker 19 And the four Gospels that we know were dominant from, if not the beginning, very early.

Speaker 17 Catherine, this has been such a fantastic chat.

Speaker 17 Last but certainly not least, alongside it's such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast, your book on this topic, which explores all of this and so much more, it is called.

Speaker 19 Yeah, no, it's called it's called heresy. The subtitle is Jesus Christ and the other sons of God.
But it's called heresy because it's a Greek word and it sounds like a bad word to us.

Speaker 19 Heresy came to me in a bad thing. But in ancient Greek, heresy just...
it comes from the Greek word hieromai, which means I take for myself, I choose.

Speaker 19 And in ancient Greek texts, heresy was a great thing.

Speaker 19 It meant that you were using your intellect to choose the answer, the story, the thing that you thought was best. And it's in Christianity.

Speaker 19 Within 100 years, Christians arrive and start calling heresy by far more negative connotations. So Christians start to see it as a poison, a gangrene, a cancer to be cut out.
In the words of St.

Speaker 19 Augustine, it's shit to be voided from the body of the Catholic Church. So that's why I called it heresy.
It was because it is an unacceptable thing.

Speaker 19 But it was once a beautiful thing to think different things, to think for yourself.

Speaker 17 It just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today thank you so much for having me

Speaker 17 well there you go there was catherine nixe the author and journalist talking through the story of the apocryphal gospels and shining more light on the context behind these early centuries of christianity or these early christianities almost 2 000 years ago i hope you enjoyed the episode thank you for listening please follow the ancients on spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor.

Speaker 17 If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, where we'd really appreciate that.

Speaker 17 Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe.

Speaker 17 That's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.

Speaker 7 Dashing through the store, Dave's looking for a gift. One you can't ignore, but not the socks he picks.

Speaker 8 I know, I'm putting them back. Hey, Dave, here's a tip.

Speaker 9 Put scratchers on your list.

Speaker 10 Oh, scratchers, good idea.

Speaker 11 It's an easy shopping trip.

Speaker 7 We're glad we could assist.

Speaker 12 Thanks, random singing people.

Speaker 14 So be like Dave this holiday and give the gift of play.

Speaker 15 Stratchers from the California lottery.

Speaker 13 A little play can make your day.

Speaker 16 Please play responsibly. Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

Speaker 24 Why choose a sleep number smart bed?

Speaker 22 Can I make my site softer?

Speaker 25 Can I make my site firmer?

Speaker 7 Can we sleep cooler?

Speaker 26 Sleep number does that.

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