“What is the gospel of Philip?”……Answer: Similar to the gospel of Thomas, the gospel of Philip is a collection of sayings, supposedly of Jesus. The gospel of Philip focuses a great deal on the "sacrament of marriage" as a "sacred mystery." The gospel of Philip does not claim to have been written by Jesus' disciple […]

Gnostics Gnostic Gospels & Gnosticism A one-sentence description of Gnosticism: a religion that differentiates the evil god of this world (who is identified with the god of the Old Testament) from a higher more abstract God revealed by Jesus Christ, a religion that regards this world as the creation of a series of evil archons/powers […]

“What are the Gnostic gospels?”……The Gnostic gospels are writings by early “Christian” Gnostics. After the first century of Christianity, two primary divisions developed – the orthodox and the Gnostics. The orthodox Christians held to books we now have in the Bible and to what is today considered orthodox theology. The Gnostic Christians, if they can […]

“What is the gospel of Judas?”……Answer: Sometime in the 1970s, in a cave in Egypt, a copy of the "gospel of Judas" was discovered. The circumstances of the discovery have been described as shady, with those who possessed the copy asking for exorbitant amounts of money for the codex. For decades, no institution was willing […]

“What is the gospel of Mary (Magdalene)?”……The gospel of Mary was discovered in the Akhmim Codex in Cairo, Egypt, in 1896. It was not made public until 1955, when it was published due to the popularity of the Nag Hammadi library. Written in Greek and Coptic, the gospel of Mary codex is dated to the […]

“What is the gospel of Thomas?”……The gospel of Thomas is a Coptic manuscript discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. This manuscript contains 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. Some of these sayings resemble sayings found in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Other sayings were unknown until their discovery or even run […]

“What is the pseudepigrapha?”……The pseudepigrapha are the books which attempt to imitate Scripture but which were written under false names. The term "pseudepigrapha" comes from the Greek pseudo meaning "false" and epigraphein meaning "to inscribe," thus, "to write falsely." The pseudepigraphical books, sometimes broadly called the Apocrypha, were written anywhere from 200 BC to AD […]