Uh oh
uh oh
If this is true, I’m going to die laughing.
there’s bazillions of non-canonical gospels that all have zany things in them this isn’t……………what you think it is probably?
First thing I did was look to see if this came from facts-i-just-made-up…. and it didn’t.
Yeah, “the bible” as we think of it today was whittled out of hundreds and hundreds of other books which were, themselves, usually only written down decades (at best) after their first appearance as an oral tradition. When compiling the canon of the Christian bible, some people wanted to keep the Torah (the Old Testament), others felt it was unnecessary. In the end it stayed in. A lot of books didn’t make the cut, though. This is just one of them. Maybe.
The First Council of Nicea was held in AD 325, when Rome still existed as an empire. Its purpose was for the major authorities and thinkers of the early Christian Church to hash out the specifics of Jesus Christ and his relationship to God the Father (two separate Gods or two reflections of one? Divine, mortal, or some inexplicable combination of both? WTF was really up with Mary? Etc.)
Before that point, “Christian belief” was all over the map, and even within the authorities of the Church who were present at the Council, there were a couple of major splits in belief where some very important people came down on differing sides. In fact, one of them was settled by a fist fight between a saint and a dude who’d probably be a saint if he’d won the fight.
At this Council, the bones of Canon law and orthodoxy were laid, and Christian belief took on the fundamental form we can still recognize in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches today (though some of the Protestant churches have since gone waaaaaaaaaaaaay far afield of Catholic and Orthodox doctrine).
So it’s utterly and absolutely possible to (re)discover texts dating from 500 AD or even earlier, which discuss heterodox conceptions of Jesus and other elements of Christian belief. The Catholics and Orthodox will happily tell you that they are interesting and perhaps even important bits of history, but that the Church already decided that this text was not theologically relevant almost 2000 years ago, when most likely the text was not yet lost and the people who were making up their minds about these things had already read it.
Most of the other Christian churches won’t have much to say about it, because unlike the Catholics and Orthodox, most of them don’t recognize the religious authority of any text except the Bible in the first place. (There is a deep irony in that, seeing as it was the pre-schism Catholics/Orthodox who decided what books should go in the Bible in the first place.)
Now all that said, what’s really neat about this text is that, if it’s genuine, we may have finally rediscovered the source document for two apocryphal/heretical texts that the Church HAS known to be in circulation since the 16th century. And never mind the religious angle, that’s some pretty cool history.
(An old roommate of mine did seven years in Catholic seminary before he bailed at the last minute on the idea of being a priest. We used to have a lot of talks about Church history.)