The Apocryphal Gospels

If you've heard of the mysterious and often controversial Apocryphal Gospels, you may have been told that they weren't important, or useful; that they 'didn't make the cut' to be included in the Canonical Bible. Not at all, these early Christian texts were hugely significant and influential as well as completely fascinating. Tristan Hughes is joined by Catherine Nixey to hear stories including the Infancy Gospel of James, where a midwife's hand is burnt off after doubting Mary's virginity, and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, portraying a young Jesus with startling powers and a fiery temper. Together they discuss how these writings reveal the radical thoughts of some early Christians - from alternative crucifixion narratives to magical texts showing Jesus using a wand - and shed light on the vibrant diversity and theological debates of early Christianity. MORE The Wise Men https://open.spotify.com/episode/30JcS3z8gUODOvbR8k47mh Jesus of Nazareth https://open.spotify.com/episode/6qFWoLLNQFgL0FmBhUoKe2 Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor and producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 2:07Tristan Hughes?

  Hey guys, welcome to The Ancients. Today's episode is all about the apocryphal gospels. So those gospels, those accounts of Jesus's life and more, that didn't make it into the Bible. 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. Our guest is the journalist and author Catherine Nixey. Catherine has recently written a new book called Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God. Let's go!

• 2:56Tristan Hughes?

  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The four gospels that make up a crucial part of the New Testament, detailing the life and miracles of Jesus. 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. Today, these writings have been labelled apocrypha. They ultimately were not integrated into the accepted canon of Scripture. And yet, for centuries, many of them remained incredibly popular.

• 3:38Tristan Hughes?

  They revealed how different groups of early Christians learnt different stories about Christ. Today, we're going to explore some of these texts and the extraordinary stories they told about Jesus's life that aren't mainstream today. This is the story of the apocryphal gospels with our guest Catherine Nixey.

• 4:06Tristan Hughes?

  Catherine, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. It's been too long.

• 4:10Speaker 05

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

• 4:13Tristan Hughes?

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

• 4:24Speaker 05

  No, and 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. And I kind of got quite a good Catholic education from my parents, but the Catholic, you were always a little bit vague. I didn't think I understood everything that was going on in church. I thought for quite a long time that God was called Peter, because we seemed to say, thanks, Peter God, all the way through math. 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. 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 their lives, in their stories.

• 5:09Speaker 05

  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. And so the similarities were really obvious. 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. 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 God, why are you going to let yourself be crucified? 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, and God made

• 5:51Speaker 05

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

• 5:55Tristan Hughes?

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

• 6:07Speaker 05

  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. But it really is a much, much better way of looking at it. 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. 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. 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. Whereas now what they say is what you have to imagine is a field of competing saplings.

• 6:52Speaker 05

  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 these years.

• 6:59Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 7:06Speaker 05

  Hmm, 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. Like, there's a bit of variety between different Christianities now. Coptic Christianity will have slightly different books to us. 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. They weren't really that covered up or that secret for centuries. They were hugely popular. And a lot of what, we'll come on to this, I'm sure, but a lot of what we think of as inverted commas, real Christianity, is in fact from the apocryphal gospels. So things such as hell or the donkey that Mary rides on in the nativity. So if any of you

• 7:49Speaker 05

  were Mary's in the nativity, the donkey that you sat on or sung about, that came from an extraordinary apocryphal so-called gospel.

• 7:57Tristan Hughes?

  And also with with the word apocryphal, of course, we say apocryphal gospels, but I know in your book, there are works covered that aren't just gospels. I mean, can the word apocryphal also be given to other religious Christian texts that didn't make it into the Bible?

• 8:13Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly, exactly. So gospel means good news. The word gospel in Greek is eiu angelion, which means eiu in Greek is good, and angelion is news, like an angel is a messenger. 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. 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. 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. They were not directors sitting on their chairs saying, no, that scene doesn't come in. It was a much more organic process. You believe in them, it was guided divinely. If you don't believe in them, you know, you would say it's more like certain groups had certain texts.

• 8:58Tristan Hughes?

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

• 9:06Speaker 05

  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. And then there were other ones that were to us kind of quite radical and quite weird, but that were accepted elsewhere. I think what you have to kind of get rid of in your mind and listening to this again, it's that slightly annoying Christianities rather than Christianity. Because if you were 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,

• 9:50Speaker 05

  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. But actually, other religions at the time when Christianity was around were completely different, depending on where you went. So you would get a different Zeus in Greece to the Zeus Jupiter that you would get in Italy. It was considered normal that gods would change, and it was considered normal that you would adapt your gods. You know, Julius Caesar saw gods as kind of evolutions of the same thing. 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, you know.

• 10:32Speaker 05

  What we say about Jesus is no different to what you say about Asclepius, say. And then they changed their mind.

• 10:37Tristan Hughes?

  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 explore in some really extraordinary details. 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?

• 10:54Speaker 05

  We don't know. Oxford University Press did a book recently of apocryphal gospels and they had forty texts. But, I mean, there were definitely way more. 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. 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. So many more, I'm sure, existed but have been lost.

• 11:25Tristan Hughes?

  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. 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 explored the birth of Jesus, that explored the birth of Christ. Am I not right? Or am I not mistaken?

• 11:44Speaker 05

  You are, you are. Too many negatives, I don't know.

• 11:46Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, I know, I know.

• 11:47Speaker 05

  I don't know, is that yes or a no?

• 11:49Tristan Hughes?

  Am I correct?

• 11:50Speaker 05

  You are, 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 to know more about Joseph. 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." You know, these are the things you want to know about the birth of a deity. You would not want to know about that. And these are the things, these things that the Bible actually bounces over pretty quickly, that the apocryphal gospels really go into in detail. And the birth of Jesus is one that is gone into in enormous detail in, in, in, well, I don't know if this is one of the ones that you're interested in, but.

• 12:28Tristan Hughes?

  Well, I was, 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.

• 12:34Speaker 05

  Oh, yes, yes, go on. Yeah, the infancy gospel of James, this sort of went wildly out of fashion. Had you, I don't know if you'd heard of it before?

• 12:43Tristan Hughes?

  Never, not before reading the book.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  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. It's kind of bounced over. The Bible actually spends more time explaining travel arrangements and tax than it does the actual birth itself. 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. 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. And he is very sceptical 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.

• 13:28Speaker 05

  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. 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. I've thought of Mary a lot and I thought, I really took my hat off to her. I feel she put up with a lot, but after the donkey holiday, I thought she put up with a lot more. 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. And Joseph, so finds a cave. This is a stroke of luck. He finds a cave for her to give birth in. 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.

• 14:13Speaker 05

  It's kind of popular in Europe, more popular in Europe than it is here. 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 in even greater stroke of luck, there's a midwife who turns up. And so the midwife comes in to help. And then Mary starts to go into a really strong labour. Joseph leaves, as is habit in those days. 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 realises that something strange has happened. So he realises that he was watching a shepherd who was about to hit his flock and his arm has frozen in midair. He looks up to the sky and the birds that were flying across, they have frozen also in midair. The stars themselves have stopped moving. So time itself is standstill.

• 14:57Speaker 05

  A God has been born, Jesus has been born, and he goes back into the cave. And the midwife is there, Mary's there, Jesus is there, everyone's very happy. The midwife is so excited, 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 sceptical. 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. 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. 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.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  So the woman comes into the cave and she puts her hands 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. As you would, whoa. 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. And this gospel was enormously influential. So we've completely forgotten its existence. 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. If you see a nativity from a cave, that is not from the Bible, that's from this.

• 16:23Speaker 05

  It changed the calendar of the Catholic Church, it changed the character of the Catholic Church. The Catholic reverence of Mary is thought to come from this gospel. It was enormously popular, its importance is really impossible to overstate.

• 16:37Tristan Hughes?

  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 fore that we have surviving today? That you actually have more information about Mary in these ones that didn't make the final cut?

• 16:55Speaker 05

  Yes, absolutely, it's a really, it's a really good point. 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. You know, there's clearly a huge hunger to know about the mother of God. Of course you would want to know that. 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, does always recognise. 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. 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

• 17:38Speaker 05

  a camel to go through the eye of a needle. There's a nautical 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. Any puzzles that you had with the Bible, they fill in, and that's what these do.

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• 20:32Tristan Hughes?

  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 skepticism around the virginity of Mary when Jesus is born.

• 20:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, Joseph. Never has a man deserved his sainthood more, I think, than Joseph. Yeah, there is. There is a lot of skepticism. So there's a wonderful 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. And there's an extraordinary gospel in which Joseph and Mary, so by this point, they've fled to Egypt and they're traveling through Egypt. 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. 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, you, you, you know, she's obviously claiming it's the son of God.

• 21:27Speaker 05

  He says, I have often thought to myself that perhaps I just had sex with you while I was drunk. And to people who are not brought up Christian, you just think, well, that seems like a reasonable thing for, you know, he's confronted with some odd circumstances. 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. 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.

• 21:59Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 22:17Speaker 05

  Yes, definitely. Without it out, 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. So the virgin birth is only actually mentioned in two of the four gospels. It was not a universally accepted Christian tenet. And it was also, it was incredibly mocked by everybody outside Christianity. So Chelsus, again, of course, he absolutely scorned the idea that there was a virgin birth. 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 in words like Parthenon, that's where that word comes from.

• 22:56Speaker 05

  So he says, he just, 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. And this is when Chelsus also piles in with his comments about his sort of, um, there are not many phoenomenists in the ancient world, as we said. 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. He would have chosen a queen, not a kind of peasant somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

• 23:20Tristan Hughes?

  Well, 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. 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. Dare I say, he's out of control, he's on a rampage, he's murderous.

• 23:42Speaker 05

  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. And when you read it, you can see why. So Jesus to us is milk and honey, is sunbeams and Sunday school Jesus, you know, he suffered the little children, Jesus, he's, 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. So it is with sort of some surprise that we read the ancient texts known as the infancy gospel of Thomas. 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.

• 24:26Speaker 05

  And he's playing by the water, 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. So he's playing by the stream and he's damming the water. And that's lovely, you know, everyone who has a child, it's great to get them to a stream, you have a quiet half hour while they just muck about damming water. But this Jesus is actually a bit more sinister than that because he's not doing it with his hands, 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. 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. And Jesus turns to him in a fury and he says, you insolent, godless, ignoramus,

• 25:10Speaker 05

  what harm did they do to you? You shall also wither like a tree, it's a very weird curse, and bear neither leaves nor root nor fruit. 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 has 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. And it goes on like this and then his. Teacher, he's a bit snitty to his teacher and his teacher whacks him on the back of the head and the teacher falls unconscious.

• 25:54Speaker 05

  And eventually people go and complain to Mary and Joseph, I mean, poor Joseph. And they're complaining because Jesus has, not unreasonably, killed their child and others across because he's deformed their child. And Joseph says to Mary, do not let him outside the door for all those who cross him die. 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.

• 26:20Tristan Hughes?

  I find interesting that that infancy gospel is attributed to Thomas. The one before is attributed to James. But do we think these works were actually originally written by the disciples, by the people who they're attributed to?

• 26:33Speaker 05

  No, no, no, they're much later. They're much later. The James one was earlier than some of the others. It's about probably one twenty, around about that. So they're later than the ones that we have in the Bible. 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.

• 26:51Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 27:00Speaker 05

  Yes, this was popular in India, in the east. I'm not quite sure what they mean when they say India, but Thomas Christians would use this text for a long time, it's believed. 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 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. 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.

• 27:43Speaker 05

  Seems to be, seems to be the kind of likely thing, possibly also a brother. 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. But in this story, one of them, Thomas, does not want to go. And what Jesus does in Instead, he's 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. 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. So he writes out and he even writes him out a receipt. And so, again, this is a kind of underhand duplicitous Jesus. Unlike the Jesus that modern Christians would recognise from the Bible. I mean, not.

• 28:29Speaker 05

  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, you're 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. It's, 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? Why has 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 eighteen twenties, a newspaper man called William Hohn found them.

• 29:12Speaker 05

  And he instantly realised what a hit he had on his hands and he printed them and they caused a huge, huge scandal. From which Hohn really barely, kind of barely recovered, he did recover and he didn't. He spent the rest of his life defending himself for doing this. 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. And you see that there are textures in it that you've not noticed.

• 29:38Tristan Hughes?

  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. 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.

• 29:54Speaker 05

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

• 30:10Tristan Hughes?

  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 heart interview than you might expect. And I remember interviewing Helen Bond in the past and with the story of Jesus and how his message is quite apocalyptic. 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. 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?

• 30:40Speaker 05

  The apocalypses are so much fun. So they are, in the same way that nobody reads Dante's Paradiso, 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. 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. These are not nice. 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 harlot's being punished in really disgusting, genuinely revolting ways. I mean, they, they are this sort of symphony of sadism. And what's interesting about them is that they really puzzled some Victorian scholars because they were just like, how, how is this?

• 31:26Speaker 05

  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, it's not just a bad place. 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 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. So they, in, in, in hell, they find themselves held up by their hair. Or, you know, there's adulterers who find themselves held up by their feet, which doesn't sound that bad until you realize that feet is an ancient euphemism for testicles. So that they are like perpetually suspended. So there are just sort of page after page of this absolutely gruesome sadism.

• 32:10Speaker 05

  And all ancient readers clearly loved it. 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 B.C. before Christ. He has a very similar sounding hell. 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. 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. He's in everybody's hell.

• 32:46Tristan Hughes?

  Is he? Is he actually in the apocalypse texts?

• 32:48Speaker 05

  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'm, I'm, I've no doubt that they would put, put him in if they could.

• 32:57Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, I know there's a link in the Book of Revelation or something that he could be the Antichrist figure. But that's another story, isn't it?

• 33:03Speaker 05

  It's like the kind of good, the, the sort of nice shiny Sunday school bits of Christianity are there in non-Christian texts. But so are these sort of fiery, burny, hellish bits. 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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• 34:43Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 34:49Speaker 05

  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. So these were actively, these were definitely actively destroyed. There was lots of, nobody liked magical texts. 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. They liked architecture, engineering, they occasionally let their hair down with gladiators. But otherwise, they were pretty kind of, you know, they liked concrete, Romans were concrete people with concrete thoughts. They were not at all, the ancient world teemed with ghosts and the supernatural and with magic. You have ancient Roman laws, some of the earliest Roman laws forbid magical practices.

• 35:32Speaker 05

  And so if they're forbidding them, they believe in them. And you get it all the way through. And there were lots of various different magical practices, which when they came to light in manuscripts that, again, that survived on a slender, slender thread into the modern world, 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 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.

• 36:17Speaker 05

  There's an index in the magical book and it's got like, sort of 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. 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. That is what he is seen as by the ancient world. Almost all ancient observers categorised him as a magician or a charlatan or a huckster. But really, it's magic that he's seen as doing. 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. And when you read them, you can see why, because almost any miracle that Jesus does

• 37:00Speaker 05

  in the Gospels will find a counterpoint. Water into wine, absolutely, but not just wine. I mean, I mentioned any, any kind of wine, really fancy wine, whatever vintage you want. You will find loaves, fishes, but you will also get side orders and they also do, um, these magical texts can enable you to have sort of what sounds a bit like salad dressing as well. So it, it was hugely popular. And what is interesting is it wasn't that thought 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 a wand. And if you look at early paintings of Jesus, what he appears with is most common, what they call attribute, after the scroll for teaching is a wand. So when Jesus turns

• 37:43Speaker 05

  water into wine, he's holding a wand. When he raises people from the dead, he's holding a wand. 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. And of course, it's there in the people who come to see Jesus, that we know them as three, there weren't three, but magi, which just means magicians. We call them wise men, did not mean wise men, it meant magician.

• 38:06Tristan Hughes?

  Yes. And how many of them were there? That's another great question that we, we've covered in the past. But it also brings, it's a really nice thing as we, we, we start wrapping up, isn't it? If you had all of these different texts and all of these different kind of versions of Christianity right at the beginning and, and how they were viewing Jesus and his story, I'm guessing you get tales from these various apocrypha, I'm guessing you must see them in early Christian art. You know, you don't just see the versions that are shown in, in the four Gospels that we know today, that presumably you can also see in surviving artwork, scenes and tales from these various apocryphal works.

• 38:40Speaker 05

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

• 39:11Tristan Hughes?

  If you see someone getting their hand burned off, I guess that is.

• 39:14Speaker 05

  Exactly. That's one of those. And yeah, somebody sent me a picture of that from Italy yesterday. 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. So it's estimated, we assume that Jesus was born, that was it, game over.

• 39:55Speaker 05

  But you have to realise how tentative the Christian story was and how how it took a long time for Christianity to establish itself, in which time it varied a lot. So by that year a hundred, there were probably only seven thousand Christians of any kind, of whom it's estimated only fifty could read. So a small handful of people are making decisions that will have staggering, unimaginable to them, I am sure, consequences.

• 40:19Tristan Hughes?

  I see. So in the fourth century where you see that that that great explosion. Catherine, this has been extraordinary. 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 Nicene equivalent i- in like the kind of deciding. Is it just which ones endure and remain the most popular over the centuries?

• 40:45Speaker 05

  So the way I I view it is that some were clearly nonsense, many were clearly later. And the oldest ones are the ones that we have, the the ones that we have in the Bible. They were the oldest ones. There were possibly, very possibly, ones before that, but they have, they do not exist. M R James, who was one of the ones who did the first translation, the the first popular English translation of these, got was very caustic about this. 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. And and the four gospels that we know were dominant from, if not the beginning, very early.

• 41:22Tristan Hughes?

  Catherine, this has been such a fantastic chat. 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.

• 41:33Speaker 05

  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. Heresy came to mean a bad thing. But in ancient Greek heresy, just, it comes from the Greek word hyraeomai, which means I take for myself, I choose. And in ancient Greek texts, heresy was a great thing. It was, 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, within a hundred 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 Saint Augustine, it's shit to be voided from the body of the Catholic Church.

• 42:15Speaker 05

  So that's why I called it heresy. It was because it is, is an unacceptable thing. But it was once a beautiful thing to think different things, to think for yourself.

• 42:24Tristan Hughes?

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

• 42:28Speaker 05

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 42:33Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Catherine Nixie, 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 your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.

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