Bible Secrets Revealed: The Forbidden Scriptures Lost to Time (S1, E3) | Full Episode

this program explores the mysteries of the bible from a variety of historical and theological perspectives which have been debated for centuries are there chapters in the bible that are there are a number of earth-shattering texts that we will likely never see in our lifetime stories that have been sensing these are books that allegedly were providing hidden or secret teachings and entire characters that have disappeared any book that didn't have the backing of influential people gets cast out 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 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 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] the bible every year global sales of this 2 000 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] 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 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 4th 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 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 a 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 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 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 condemn anyone who believes this 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 content 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 believed to have been written over a period of time between 300 bc and 100 a. d 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 and the time leading up to the formation of christianity of all the secret texts i think that the book of enoch in many ways is the most forbidden at some point before the 4th 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 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 surreal conundrum because this idea that the rebellious angels have a power that can rival god is something that is very threatening to traditional church [Music] in the book of enoch the offspring of the watchers and mortal women are described as giant warriors called nephilim [Music] 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 are 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 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 of the story is that the reason god decides to destroy the earth is because these nephilim were on the earth 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's 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 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] [Music] upper egypt december 1945 a group of farmers unearthed 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 agnostics 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 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 hamadi 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's 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 these scriptures these texts 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 [Music] different bishops believed 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 and 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 in 367 a.

d 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 are 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 the penalty for copying and or even keeping any of the gnostic texts would have been increasingly severe it could have even led 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 hamadi so that 2000 years later we could find them 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 of baptism the communion were important those are all material acts which virtually all the gnostic groups tended to dismiss is unnecessary among the nagamati texts the best known and maybe the most important is the gospel of thomas it is a collection of just over a hundred things 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 the gospel of thomas it's not interest 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 is it possible as the gnostic gospel suggests that jesus so-called missing years were spent traveling to places like india and the far east [Music] 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 [Music] 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 be something else 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 acme 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 a. d the story is told from the perspective of mary magdalene herself [Music] there's a lot of controversy about mary magdalene right in the bible she's portrayed a certain way [Music] 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 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 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 [Music] 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 two thousand 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 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 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] in the book of genesis the story of adam and eve virtually ends with the couple's expulsion from the garden of eden [Music] except for the tragic story of their firstborn 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 the interesting details and it's not included in the bible thought to have been written in the first century a.

d 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 lies after their expulsion from the garden of eden it also reveals many interesting details about the couple's family life [Music] 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 were ever told about in the traditional bible 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 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 [Music] 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 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 [Music] egypt this archaeological site located in the sinai peninsula is believed to have once been a religious center built by the israelites between the 8th and 9th 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 ashira 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 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 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 [Music] the bible rails against idolatry this idea of worshiping 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 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 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 apocalypse for centuries this ominous word has evoked thoughts of utter destruction armageddon the end of days but the word apocalypse actually has a much less sinister definition [Music] derived from the ancient greek term apocalypses 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 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 returns 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 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 i 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 written in the second century a.