In AD 180 Bishop Irenaeus of Gaul (now Lyons, France) faced the challenge of selecting four gospels out of the hundreds that circulated throughout Europe, Greece, Egypt and Asia Minor. At a time when the earth was understood to be flat and have four corners, he chose four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Bishop Irenaeus wrote, “There are four winds, four directions on the compass, four elements and four pillars of the church, therefore there must be four gospels.” He mentions many of the discarded gospels by name, in particular those of Thomas, Philip, Judas and Mary Magdalene. By his very account we know that they existed.

In AD 318 Rome ceased its persecution of the followers of Jesus, now called the Christ or “Christened One.” Seven years later the Roman Emperor Constantine held council in Nicea (present day Iznik, Turkey) to unite the many Christian sects in Europe and establish a uniform doctrine under the Roman Empire.

The primary objective of the council was to determine the spiritual versus terrestrial essence of the Israelite called Jesus and his relation to the Creator/Father.

Any connection of Jesus to the feminine was set only in terms of salvation, since the feminine was associated with the fallen world of procreation and original sin. (In AD 591 Pope Gregory the Great drew the moral conclusion that Mary Magdalene was not an apostle and teacher who was close to Jesus, but a repentant prostitute. In 1969 the Second Vatican Council apologetically removed this label, which had debased her memory for close to 1,500 years.)

The Council of Nicea placed Jesus as a uniquely divine incarnation with the Church of Rome as his earthly representative: priests, bishops, cardinals and the Popes took the place of Jesus on earth, omnipotent intermediaries between humankind and Father God.

Central to the goal of establishing a unified church was the extermination of the many Gnostic sects whose precepts were arrived at through intuition and the knowledge of self through transcendence. Such an intangible could not be harnessed by an institutional oligarchy. The danger of Gnosticism was that “inner knowing” negated the need for a conduit, i.e., an authoritarian church. Furthermore, some Gnostic Gospels portrayed Mary Magdalene’s position in the life of Jesus as that of intimate consort.  As Gnosticism did not possess an effective system of organization, for it is a solitary path and its adherents were no match for the military forces of Rome, its adherents were annihilated.

In 1945 in Nag Hammadi, Northern Egypt. two brothers were looking for fertilizer at the base of cliffs where the Nile bends on its way from Chenoboskeia to Pabau. As they searched, the brother called Mohammad Ali, hit a hard object concealed under the ground. It proved to be a huge earthen jar closed with a shallow red dish. At first Mohammad Ali was afraid to open the jar, lest a jinn might be closed up inside it. He summoned the courage to break the jar, hoping that it might contain gold. Out tumbled, not gold, but thirteen books bound in gazelle leather. These leather-bound papyrus codices proved to be more than gold for they contained fifty-two Gnostic tractates, close to 1,800 years old, written in Coptic—the form of the Egyptian language in use during later Roman imperial times. The farmers brought the books home to their mother who summarily began to burn them for fuel. Thankfully the farmers had the presence of mind to stop the massacre and brought the remaining twelve codices to an antiquities dealer. Slow in coming to public attention, this discovery ultimately altered established precepts of Christian doctrine for all time.

Unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered the same year, the Nag Hammadi codices were ensnared in greed and political battles: antiquities dealers trying to get rich, political roadblocks and the competitive atmosphere of academia.

In 1952 the Jung Foundation in Zürich, Switzerland bought the twelve codices in and stored them in a safe-deposit box. In 1961 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) intervened, setting up a committee to arrange publication. The Nag Hammadi documents were finally translated and presented to the public in 1970, inspiring Dr. Elaine Pagels, Princeton Historian of Religion, to write the 1979 bestseller, The Gnostic Gospels.

The twenty-six page Gospel of Judas, discovered in 1978, was buried for 1,700 years in the Egyptian desert and was plagued by the same dynamics that hindered the Nag Hammadi codices: lost in the netherworld of the antiquities market for decades, abandoned in a safe-deposit box in Hicksville, New York for sixteen years, it was eventually rescued by antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos in 2000. In 2001 the thousand broken fragments of papyrus were transferred to the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Basel, Switzerland for restoration and translation.

The same verse may be found quoted in more than one chapter. For example, references to love will be found both in the chapter “Relationship to Others” and in the chapter “Love.” Quotes concerning enlightenment will be found in the chapter “Relationship to Self” and “Awakened Perception.” Jesus’ words on truth will be found in the chapter “Anxiety” and the chapter “The Spirit of Truth,” etc.

Other quotes may seem repetitive in that Mark, Matthew, and Luke often intersect and echo one another. They are what is referred to as the “Synoptic Gospels,” the term coming from the Greek ‘syn,’ meaning “together,” and ‘optic,’ meaning “seen.” Scholars agree that the Gospel of Mark was written first between AD 65-80, followed by Matthew, AD 80-100 and Luke AD 80-130. Forty-five percent of the Gospel of Matthew mirrors the Gospel of Mark and 41% of the Gospel of Luke mirrors the Gospel of Mark—their original Quelle  (Source). Only 20% of the Gospel of Matthew is unique to Matthew and 35% of the Gospel of Luke is unique to Luke; 23-25% of Luke and Matthew are borrowed from one another.

The Gospel of John, AD 90-120 is considered to be the most unique of the four and is not included as a Synoptic Gospel, although John echoes the style of Mark and his Passion narrative resembles that of Luke.

It is a well-known fact that the gospels, now preserved in historical archives, are copies of copies of copies. In the first century of the Jesus movement the tradition was oral; Mark, Matthew, Luke and John did not write the gospels whose names they bear. Although carbon-14 dated from the second to the fourth centuries, the Nag Hammadi Papyrus and the Gospels of Judas and Mary Magdalene are also considered to be copies of copies of copies, originating before the time of Irenaeus.

What is remarkable is that these Coptic scripts, unearthed some 1,800 years after they were banned and buried, corroborate the Canonical Gospels; a testimony to the veracity of the teachings and the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

In AD 180 there was a 97% illiteracy rate. Today that number stands on its head with close to 99% literacy in North and South America, Europe and the Middle East Basin. We can now read with an open mind.