The Gnostic Gospels

THE CHRISTIANITY THEY ERASED

In 1945, a peasant farmer in Upper Egypt named Muhammad Ali al-Samman was digging near the cliffs of Jabal al-Tarif when his mattock struck something buried in the desert sand. He had found thirteen leather-bound codices — 52 ancient texts written in Coptic, sealed in an earthenware jar and hidden there roughly 1,600 years earlier by monks who knew what was coming. What he found in that jar was the Christianity that lost the war. Before the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE systematized Christian doctrine and declared competing versions heresy, early Christianity was a sprawling, diverse, intensely alive conversation. There were dozens of gospels. There were Christian communities that celebrated women as equal spiritual authorities. There were teachings that located the divine not in an external deity demanding obedience but within the individual human soul as a spark of the divine light awaiting awakening. There were cosmologies of stunning complexity and power. The Gnostics — from the Greek gnosis, meaning direct experiential knowledge — did not want to believe in God. They wanted to know God. This course goes into what they found.

What You'll Learn