if anyone saw LOST GOSPELS on bbc 4 last night you may well know what im on about. it showed th many gospels that didnt make it into the bible. many such as peters, marys thomas (i think) in total there is 23 (i think again) missing.

BBC 4 are showing several really interesting programmes about the gnostic gospels, the Nag Hammadi Library and the Dead Sea Scrolls. It helps people to focus on trying to know and understand the true teachings of Christ, and not the baggage that the Church added to manipulate the people.

yea it had that on lost gospels

Did the programe mention the book of enoch by any chance.

How can they still call them "lost" if they have been found?

And the "many gospels that didnt make it into the bible" were not "lost."

So why didn't they make it into the Bible?

i know peters wasnt because it said jesus was mortal. but to the answer by zoro, they were lost. buried by monks and forgotten. dead sea scrolls were FOUND

I've since caught up on this documentary. (It's quite good)

The Gospels of Thomas, Mary and Philip did not toe the official line as regards Christianity.

Actually it seems that which gospels made it in and which didn't was down to the whims of a paticular pope.

It's slightly funny to think, all these Protestant sects, they rely on a Bible which was put together by a Pope.

And so "Man" continues to twist religion to fit his own agenda. Thus it has always been so huh.

the suppression of mary madegelene hmm thought so.

Does the fact that, some were delibertely omitted, for some ones personal reasons, make the existance of God less likely?

the mant gospels didnt make it because of the popes perosnal reasons.

What it does is muddy the water in respect to those folks who claim the book is the literal word of God. What if some of the present books had been omitted while others of the 'lost' books were added. Would they still make the same claim?

I say include all of the early church writings and let people make up their own minds. Someone from seventeen hundred years ago is deciding what is truth and what isn't. None of the writers were alive at the time of Christ.

The only truth is that there is no truth in the bible.

Actually Fire, I would have to disagree. Jesus told a pharasee that if he wanted eternal life he needed to love God and love his neighbour as himself. Conversely, to love our neighbour is to love God. Can there be a more universal truth than love? The bible goes on to say that Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

These are the sort of truths that I can live with.

I meant as the first bible was made to fit the pope, that many things that could be truth we omitted/edited to glorify.

Well okay then!

the apocrypha always were a highly dangerous competitor to the truth beyond the official "truth" of the popery. they are very interesting to read; you can find translations on the web.

being a pagan, i am at liberty to decide in which parts of all this ancient paperworks i trust, biblical or non-biblical.

Wrong old Fire, the only truth is that, no one knows wether the bible is true or not.

No one knows its true and know one knows it aint, we only think one thing or we think the other, er.... sorry there also those that just dont think period, Which catagory would you place your self in my good man?

Yes its ok, just cos you come from Chappletown dont mean i wont talk to you, i dont look down on you at all.

I recommend that you visit a Muslim country governed under sharia (Islamic law) and publicly announce that you are a pagan.

I can assure you that it will be a memorable experience for you.

where i live i can be a pagan as much as i want to. there is no need for me to go to a totalitarian or/and theocratic country and get beheaded, flogged or stoned for my beliefs. i do not feel an urge to do so.

In which country do you live?

definitely not in yours. although i have been to your country pretty often. and behaved well, even being anarchist and pagan. i know how to behave when abroad.

The great religious historian, Eusebius, ingenuously remarks that in his history he carefully omitted whatever tended to discredit the church, and that he piously magnified all that conduced to her glory”
{Robert Green Ingersoll. "The Ghosts". (1877).}

The gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius himself, indirectly confesses that he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace, of religion. Such an acknowledgment will naturally excite a suspicion that a writer who has so openly violated one of the fundamental laws of history has not paid a very strict regard to the observance of the other; and the suspicion will derive additional credit from the character of Eusebius, which was less tinctured with credulity, and more practised in the arts of courts, than that of almost any of his contemporaries.
{Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 3 (1776).}

"That it will be necessary sometimes to use falsehood as a remedy for the benefit of those who require such a mode of treatment"
{Eusebius. The title for chapter 32 of the twelth book of Evangelical Preparation}

In a book where Eusebius is proving that the pagans got all their good ideas from the Jews, he lists as one of those good ideas Plato's argument that lying, indeed telling completely false tales, for the benefit of the state is good and even necessary. Eusebius then notes quite casually how the Hebrews did this, telling lies about their God, and he even compares such lies with medicine, a healthy and even necessary thing. Someone who can accept this as a 'good idea' worth both taking credit for and following is not the sort of person to be trusted.
{Richard Carrier, Footnote 6 from "The Formation of the New testament Canon"}

"Someone who can accept this as a 'good idea' worth both taking credit for and following is not the sort of person to be trusted."

just perfect.

The bible has been proven false a long time ago. Some good reading can be found in the books of:

Ahmed Osman (bible scholar)
Hyam Maccoby (bible scholar)
David Fideler (ancient history scholar),

Even Christian apologists and religious scholars like Crossan, et al have published books denying the virgin birth, the crucifixion and the resurrection, and the trinity.

TT if you make fun of chapeltown (right spelling) proves that you are sad and practially walkers Bit£h!

Cant help it mate, Truth Teller by name, Truth Teller by nature. Straight undiluted truth is the only thing you get from me.


Are you from that dump. er i mean from Chapletown then? i really had no idea

Unfortunately down here in South Wales we don't get digital TV. We're stuck in the dark ages still getting used things like electricity, machines that can actually fly and the new horseless carriage everyone is talking about.

All puns aside, it all sound very fascinating, but it also sounds like these program producers have been reading the Davinci Code. That goes on about lost gospels, and the fact that some of them may have indicated that Jesus may have been an ordinary man, and that Mary Magdalene may have been carrying his child at the time of the crucifixion.

Most of you guys have raised really interesting issues in this post. Times are changing people are starting to question the validity of our whole religious structure.

JC, it really has nothing to do with the DVC, it look at the dead sea scrolls for example, the gospel of peter, mary and there is alot of juicy gossip in them.

Hey Fire, did you say they showed the lost Gospels on TV?

Yea (on BBC4)

I think then that there is something amiss here my friend, because if the Lost Bibles were on CH4, they are obviously not lost, are they?

omg not that question again...

http://www.nbc10.com/family/16947935/detail.html

not as lost as first thought.

I don't know why they call it the 'Lost Gospels' as they really weren't lost... just rejected when the 'powers that are' decided they weren't going in the collective works of the Gospels (i.e. the Bible). They were deemed not suitable.

I guess we are lucky that we have the opportunity to see these other gospels now.

As to what Jesus said about loving ones neighbour being tied to having eternal life, I would tend to agree with that through this line of reasoning.

Now I figure that there is a balance on the planet and in general energy gets shifted around rather than disappearing because if it always just disappeared then slowly the world would just evaporate and since it hasn't done that, well there must be a general system of conservation.

Even with something like the hole in the ozone layer - the space that was ozone has just become something else - things transform. And yeah, you could stretch this outside the planet to the universe as well I would suppose - but for simplicity of argument lets assume that things recycle on the planet.

What happens to our flesh - well that gets turned into dirt basically, pushing up daisies and what not. That is tangible and we can see that process. However, I'm inclined to think that there is also a level of energy associated with the human body that does not decay.

I say this because I think of scientific evidence of the ability to do things like remote viewing, which involves telepathically connected to the mind of another person and drawing what they are looking at. A couple of physicists did these experiments at Stanford University, under rigorous controlled experiments and the results were very convincing.

Then there have been my own experiences, were I was successful in just directing my thoughts to a couple of people, putting a suggestion in their mind that they followed through on (without any words being said and quite particular requests that were completely filled), dreams that ended up connecting to real places and numbers of relevance to persons in my dreams and also the odd occasion of astral travelling, where you find yourself walking around your house at night, seeing everything clearly, then starting to wonder why you are there, realizing you've left your body and snapping back into it quick smart with a start. That is a really weird sensation - one minute you are moving about and the next, when back into the body, you are locked in it and it takes a bit of effort to get it to move and wake up. Not an experience I can say I am fond of.

Now you might think - astral travelling, what rubbish? But actually, a lot of stories, particularly by people who had near death experiences or floated up out of their bodies on the operating table and watched what was going on and told the doctors what they saw the doctors doing afterwards (in a manner like there was NO WAY the patient could have seen what they saw). I remember one such story about this, where someone was being operated on and they ended up outside of the building but quite a few floors up and they saw a shoe sitting on a ledge - a ledge I might add that was nowhere near where they had been in the hospital and obviously quite unnoticed by people in general. When the hospital staff went to check it out - there was the blimmin' shoe.

So yeah, I do think there is an energy inside of our bodies that we can actually direct beyond the bounds of our bodies, which clearly says to me that it is something more than body matter that decomposes, it is a different kind of energy and my guess is that this energy gets recycled, I don't know whether just into other humans, whether in whole or in part, basically I don't know HOW it is recycled but I do think it is perpetual and in that sense has an immortality that our body lacks.

So I guess the thing to learn from what Jesus said is to love your fellow man because you might die tomorrow and some part of you becomes part of his child born 9 months later, or some such. What I am trying to get at is that we've all got to share this energy, this immortality is possessed by us collectively, so if we shit on the next person in a sense we are shitting on ourselves and perhaps putting our own immortality at risk (you know, like we end all exterminating each other and then there is nowhere for our energy to go).



Actually, thinking on it a bit more, it must be that this type of energy doesn't just come from humans but all manner of things that have life. That is because our population keeps growing while other living things die off, so we must be consuming their animation.