TABOO 1: THE LONG-LOST FORBIDDEN GOSPELS

Upper Egypt, 1945: A local farmer named Muhammad al-samman finds a sealed jar buried not too far from the town of Nag Hammadi. Inside it are 13 papyrus codices. On that day he also discovers something that had long been taboo: part of the missing story of Jesus.

For more than 1,600 years, the Christian Church sought to suppress the apocryphal writings known as the Gnostic gospels. To understand the Church’s position, it helps to become familiar with fourth-century history. At a time when the Roman Emperor Constantine declared there would be official tolerance of Christianity, which soon led to its adoption as the state religion, there were hundreds of ways of understanding Christian belief and many different gospels. That resulted in conflicts that would determine the ultimate path of the Christian Church. In the end, the four Gospels we know

today were seen as the key texts of the New Testament, and the rest were banned. But after the codices were found in 1945, new questions arose. Was Jesus married? Today’s practice of clerical celibacy in the Catholic Church is based on the assumption that Jesus never married. But Jesus was a Jewish rabbi—and in keeping with that station, He might have been a husband and father. Today’s Church is largely silent on the subject, but a number of Gnostic gospels spell out the name of a wife: Mary Magdalene, the first to arrive at Jesus’s tomb after the Resurrection. According to the Gospel of Philip discovered in Nag Hammadi, “The Lord loved her more than He loved all other disciples and often kissed her on the mouth.” Did church leaders systematically downplay women’s role in the early Church? Perhaps because Jesus selected a woman rather than Peter as the “rock” on which the Church was to be built?

Another puzzling text: The Gospel of Thomas opens with “These are the secret sayings of the living Jesus,” as written by the twin. Princeton University religious historian Elaine Pagels asks: “Did Jesus have a twin brother, as this text implies?” A sacrilegious concept. Were there pre-christian sources for many of the Church’s beliefs? Biblical scholars Peter Gandy and Timothy Freke cite first-century Roman author Celsus, who saw Christian writings as plagiarized ancient Pagan teachings. The legend of the Egyptian god Osiris is also very similar to the life of Jesus: He was divine but he became human, suffered a cruel death, triumphed over it, and attained everlasting life.

Jesus was a rabbi—so was he also a husband?