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  • 6 months ago
Banned From the Bible part 2
Transcript
00:00:00To some, the Bible is the Word of God, perfect and true.
00:00:07But over the last century, other ancient texts have been found, lost or long forgotten,
00:00:13buried in caves or desert sands, that tell different versions of Biblical stories.
00:00:19Things that were translated as part of the Bible that aren't part of our Bible.
00:00:23Written centuries ago by anonymous authors, copied and embellished by succeeding generations.
00:00:28Texts that contain some very unorthodox ideas.
00:00:31Sex is evil, the body is evil, the word is evil.
00:00:35Judas is not the villain of the story, he's the hero.
00:00:38This text certainly does seem to have some homoerotic undertones.
00:00:42These are the ancient texts that were banned from the official canon.
00:00:46Stories that may shed new light and challenge everything we think we know about the Bible.
00:00:58Some time around the year 30 A.D., a crowd gathers in a small village near a lake called Gennesaret.
00:01:18Here, the Jewish residents of this Roman province of Judea witness a miracle.
00:01:28But as the story is told in the Gospel of Luke, some in the throng are fearful.
00:01:33They accuse the healer of casting out demons in the name of Beelzebub.
00:01:38They demand a sign, some proof that this work is done in the name of God.
00:01:48Their suspicion provokes a rebuke from the healer known as Jesus of Nazareth.
00:01:55This is an evil generation.
00:01:58They seek a sign, and there shall no sign be given it except the Son of Man.
00:02:07Then Jesus makes a mysterious statement.
00:02:10He compares his own power to that of one of the Bible's great patriarchs.
00:02:16The Queen of the South shall rise up, for she came from the utmost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon.
00:02:26And behold, a greater than Solomon is here.
00:02:31He says this in the middle of an exorcism of demons.
00:02:37He says, for behold, someone greater than Solomon is here.
00:02:43Why doesn't he say greater than King David?
00:02:46No, greater than Solomon.
00:02:49What does Jesus mean?
00:02:51What does Solomon, the wise king of the Old Testament, have to do with expelling demons?
00:02:56I think it's clear from the New Testament writings that Jesus and his apostles and the authors of the Gospels knew and quoted scripture freely.
00:03:10Some scholars believe that Jesus is referring to a story that is not told in the Hebrew Bible, but in another text, the Testament of Solomon.
00:03:19In this book, Solomon is not only the wisest of men, but a master of demons.
00:03:25Jesus is making an oblique reference to a story that was already well known in ancient Judea and which apparently people accepted as truth.
00:03:36Called the Testament of Solomon, it is written in the first person and describes how King Solomon conjured up an army of demons.
00:03:46There came before my face 36 spirits with faces of asses, faces of oxen, and faces of birds.
00:03:55I wondered and I asked them, who are you?
00:03:59Did Jesus, who is said to have argued scripture with the temple rabbis at the tender age of 12, have access to different sacred stories than those we read in the Old Testament today?
00:04:12The Hebrew Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament, is actually divided into three distinct parts.
00:04:19Though two parts were already well established by the time of Jesus, there was one that may still have been in flux.
00:04:27The first portion of the Bible was set in the Persian period, 500-400 B.C.
00:04:34That is, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the Pentateuch, the so-called five books of Moses.
00:04:43The Jewish tradition understands the five books from Genesis to Deuteronomy as the highest, most direct degree of revelation from God to Moses.
00:04:54Then there is a second category in the biblical canon, those are the prophets.
00:04:59And then there is a third category, the writings.
00:05:02It is this portion, the writings, considered sacred but less integral than the other two sections of the Hebrew Bible, which changed the most over the centuries.
00:05:12It would not be fully established until long after the crucifixion of Christ.
00:05:18It's strange for us to imagine, but there were probably not alternative Bibles, but Bibles that had alternative books that were considered sacred.
00:05:29We know this from some Greek remnants that have come down to us, things that were translated as part of the Bible that aren't part of our Bible,
00:05:39and also from what we found at the Dead Sea Scrolls, things that that community considered part of the Bible that we don't.
00:05:47Did Jesus and his followers know and cite sacred stories not found in the Bible today?
00:05:54What did they know that modern readers don't about the Bible's famous patriarchs, Joseph, Daniel, Adam and Eve?
00:06:02And what about Solomon, whom Jesus enigmatically invoked during an exorcism in the Gospel of Luke?
00:06:08It is found nowhere in today's Bible. Rejected by both Jews and Christians, it would become a coveted document by practitioners of alchemy and Kabbalism.
00:06:19Called the Testament of Solomon, it concerns a little-known side of Solomon's character, that of a sorcerer, a master of demons.
00:06:28The Solomon that we know from the Bible is a man of immense wisdom. In fact, one of the things that's said of him is that he has the wisdom of the people from the East, or the Chaldeans, and the wisdom of the Egyptians.
00:06:39Which means that his wisdom includes astrological lore. It includes magic, as we'll find in the Testament of Solomon.
00:06:46Multiple copies of the Testament of Solomon, written in Greek and preserved by the early Greek Orthodox Church, have been found in Christian libraries in France, England, Greece and Israel.
00:06:57The fact that they all date to the 15th and 16th centuries, led some to believe it had been written around this time.
00:07:04But many scholars working in the early 20th century, suspected the origin of the story was far older.
00:07:10Those suspicions were confirmed in 1945, when an Egyptian farmer made an astonishing discovery in a place called Nag Hammadi.
00:07:20Buried in the earth were ancient manuscripts stored in clay jars, unseen for nearly 1600 years.
00:07:27Dating as far back as the 2nd century, they included several passages that seemed to refer directly to the traditions outlined in the Solomon text.
00:07:36What we can know for sure about when the Testament of Solomon might have been written, is that it had to have been before the year 400, because another text from that date cites it.
00:07:45The Testament tells a different story of Solomon than the one in the Bible.
00:07:51Everybody is aware of the story of the two women who bring their baby to King Solomon, and he decides, I'll divide it in two since both of you claim it.
00:08:01At which point the real mother says, no, no, please just give that child to the other woman.
00:08:06And hence he knows which is the real mother, and of course never really intended to divide the child in half.
00:08:12The alternative narrative in the Testament of Solomon concerns his other great feat, the building of the temple in Jerusalem.
00:08:20The temple is built supernaturally through supernatural agency.
00:08:25Solomon is God's agent.
00:08:28Solomon is not only the archetypal wise man, but the archetypal doer of supernatural deeds.
00:08:37In the text, Solomon explains that he was given a ring of great power by the archangel Gabriel.
00:08:44With it thou shalt lock up all demons of the earth, and with their help thou shalt build up Jerusalem.
00:08:52There's also a lot of Tolkienish imagery here.
00:08:55One ring of power, one ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.
00:09:05Using this ring, Solomon summons Beelzebub himself in order to enslave a host of demons.
00:09:13And I questioned him, and he promised to bring me in bonds all the unclean spirits.
00:09:20One by one he puts them to work building the foundations of his temple.
00:09:26So what's the idea here?
00:09:28That if you can somehow tap into the good side of the force, you can use that to subdue the dark side,
00:09:34and even to cause the dark side to work for good.
00:09:37I think we can see the use of demons as actually a way of saying that the temple is of divine origin.
00:09:43It wasn't a bunch of stone cutters and bricklayers that built the temple.
00:09:48It was these divine beings that Solomon was able to control, and force to spin the hemp, and cut the marble, and put bricks on top of one another.
00:09:59The testament of Solomon, as it exists today, is filled with Christian references, as the demons themselves foretell the crucifixion.
00:10:09And the demons said, we shall lead astray the inhabited world for a long season, until the Son of God is stretched upon the cross.
00:10:18But recent scholarship suggests that despite its Christian trappings, the traditions behind the story may be far older.
00:10:25A lot of the material in it suggests to us that there's an early Jewish core, perhaps from the first century CE,
00:10:32and that it's later reworked by Christians, and then of course preserved and circulated by Christians.
00:10:37It is a view seemingly confirmed by a description of an exorcism found in the works of the Greek historian Flavius Josephus, written in the first century.
00:10:47The manner of the cure was this. He put a ring, one of those sorts mentioned by Solomon, to the nostrils of the demon eye, after which he drew out the deep.
00:10:59Josephus Flavius, who lived in the first century of the common era, wrote in Greek, but he was from the land of Israel.
00:11:06So even though the Testament of Solomon as we know it is a later text, the tradition, the story was there centuries before the text that's come down to us.
00:11:18As Josephus contends, the traditions described in the Testament of Solomon were part of the Jewish rite of exorcism.
00:11:25Does that explain why Jesus, in the Bible's Gospel of Luke, mentions Solomon's name during an exorcism?
00:11:32If so, it shows that the text, once thought to have been written in medieval times, actually has roots in the time of Christ.
00:11:40It was known and understood that Solomon was the archetypal expeller of demons, the great exorcist, as it were.
00:11:51I have no doubt that Jesus is making reference to this story, especially when you combine it with the evidence of Josephus.
00:11:59If the Testament of Solomon was once part of Jewish tradition, those texts have since been lost.
00:12:06But in the Middle Ages, this saga of sorcery was popular with medieval Christian readers.
00:12:11They were more comfortable with the magical content than some of their Jewish counterparts might have been.
00:12:17There is within Judaism a sort of tension between the rationalistic elements of the tradition, those which follow law, reason, common sense, and the more fantastic elements of the tradition.
00:12:34Not just angels, demons, and magic, but even the supernatural powers of prayer.
00:12:43The mystical path is fraught with danger, there's no doubt about that.
00:12:48And according to the mystics, the Kabbalists, one is not allowed to enter the mystical orchard unless one is at least 40 years old and has a full belly.
00:12:58Which means full of the knowledge and wisdom of the Torah.
00:13:02Because it is so very dangerous, fraught with danger, you can be led astray, you can even lose your sanity.
00:13:09This is the fate of Solomon, according to this excluded text.
00:13:14But it is not demonic forces that cause Solomon to lose his grip on reality.
00:13:18Solomon can definitely handle demons with no trouble. It's women that's his problem.
00:13:24One of Solomon's wives is a pagan, and he makes a token sacrifice to her gods to appease her.
00:13:30He listens to his pagan wife, who of course is worshipping foreign gods, and his heart is drawn away from the true God of Israel.
00:13:39And what happens as a result? He loses the very wisdom that made him great.
00:13:45He begins to speak gibberish, no one understands him anymore, and he becomes a laughing stock.
00:13:50In the end, the Testament of Solomon, with its emphasis on both the building of the Temple of Jerusalem and the coming of Christ, proved too much of a hybrid to fit in either Jewish or Christian canon.
00:14:03It's not in the Hebrew Bible, therefore, it's not Old Testament, and it's not about Jesus, so it's not New Testament either, so it's kind of fell through the cracks.
00:14:12Other biblical texts would also vanish into this void, only to be rediscovered centuries later.
00:14:18Among them would be a strange tale that claims to predate the story of Adam and Eve, one rarely discussed inside a church or synagogue due to the taboo subjects it raises.
00:14:30Infanticide, feminism, and demonic sex.
00:14:41You are watching Band from the Bible 2 here on the History Channel.
00:14:48All the world knows the story of Adam and Eve as told in Genesis.
00:14:53But few know the story that is not found there, that of Lilith, the mysterious first wife of Adam.
00:15:00After God created Adam, he said, it is not good for man to be alone.
00:15:05He then created a woman from the earth, as he had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith.
00:15:12Two texts excluded from the Bible tell her story in detail.
00:15:17The first is called the Zohar, also known as the Book of Splendor, most likely a 13th century creation.
00:15:24The other, called the Alphabet of Bansira, is a collection of texts compiled in the Middle Ages.
00:15:30Though both are medieval, they are said to rest on traditions dating back to antiquity.
00:15:35According to these traditions, Lilith was the first wife of Adam, created before Eve.
00:15:42At the very beginning, it wasn't just Adam who was created from the dust of the ground.
00:15:49Adam and his mate, his partner Lilith, were co-created from the same dust, the same ground, at the same time.
00:15:59Separate and equal.
00:16:05Unfortunately, Adam didn't quite see it that way.
00:16:08And the time came when he began to insist that Lilith be subservient to him.
00:16:14Lie beneath me, woman, he said.
00:16:18She refused.
00:16:20That the reason Lilith was rejected as Adam's wife was because she insisted on equality.
00:16:26Lilith decided at that moment to pronounce the divine name.
00:16:33Four letters in Hebrew which spell the name of God.
00:16:38Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh, which are never to be vocalized or pronounced.
00:16:44But when she pronounced them, this gave her such great power that she flew away into the heavens.
00:16:53According to Bensirah, three angels are dispatched to bring Lilith back, to no avail.
00:17:00Said the Holy One, if she agrees to come back, it is good.
00:17:06If not, she must permit 100 of her children to die every day.
00:17:10They told her God's word, but she did not wish to return.
00:17:14With Lilith gone, these alternative texts have God presenting Adam with a second wife, Eve.
00:17:23Adam's second wife, whom he now demands from God, Eve, is taken from his rib, not created from the ground at the same time.
00:17:33So he is allowed to say, submit to me, wife, and she is supposed to do it.
00:17:40Lilith, cast out of the garden, is now a demon, doomed to lose 100 of her own offspring each day for her defiance.
00:17:48But she will take her revenge on the descendants of Adam and Eve.
00:17:52She would henceforth afflict the children of Adam's second wife to afflict pregnant women, to afflict newborns, and even to molest young men who sleep alone, thereby spawning her race of demonic children.
00:18:13It is this reference to Lilith as a demon that provides a clue as to the origin of these texts.
00:18:19Lilith herself appears to be an ancient monster, dating to prehistoric times.
00:18:24Ancient carvings found in Egypt, Greece, Babylonia, and Sumeria are thought to portray her.
00:18:31There's reference to her in an ancient Babylonian relief sculpture that pictures a woman with bird talons flanked by owls,
00:18:39who is connected with an ancient goddess known as Lilith, or Lilith.
00:18:46The root suggests night. The Hebrew word Lila means night.
00:18:51So there's an idea that she's a night demon, perhaps a blood-sucking night demon of some kind.
00:18:58She is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and in some translations of Isaiah in the Old Testament.
00:19:04There too Lilith shall repose and find a place to rest.
00:19:11There shall the owl nest and lay and hatch and brood in its shadow.
00:19:16That's the solitary mention of Lilith in Isaiah.
00:19:19She's part of a list of various characters, all of whom are nefarious,
00:19:23all of whom don't seem to be the kind of people that you'd want godly people to associate with.
00:19:29If they had backstories, we've since lost them.
00:19:32But how did Lilith get from Isaiah into the center of the story of Adam and Eve?
00:19:38The answer lies in an ancient Jewish tradition called Midrash.
00:19:42When you read the Bible, you find missing pieces in characters you know well,
00:19:48and you find also names that have no story at all.
00:19:54When the rabbis come across an unidentified person in the Bible who has no history,
00:20:00they always try to relate it to something else in the Bible.
00:20:04Rabbinical scholars in the ancient world would pore over the sacred writings,
00:20:08looking for clues or coded references to fill in these mysterious gaps.
00:20:13And sometimes it's the coincidence of two similar words being used in the same place,
00:20:19or two similar incidents.
00:20:22Sometimes we don't see the basis because we don't read the text in the original with the care that they did.
00:20:29But they never believe that God just drops in someone and says nothing about them.
00:20:34The rabbinic traditions that fill in the gaps in the Bible are called Midrash.
00:20:40And Midrash comes from a Hebrew word that means to root out or to investigate.
00:20:47It was an apparent discrepancy in Genesis that first led ancient rabbinical scholars to expand the story of Lilith through Midrash.
00:20:55In it, there are two different versions of God's creation of woman.
00:20:59The first suggests a simultaneous formation with man.
00:21:03So God created man in his own image. Male and female, he created them.
00:21:10The second comes a few pages later.
00:21:14God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep.
00:21:19And while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs.
00:21:23Then the Lord God made a woman.
00:21:26There are two stories of how a woman is created in the Bible.
00:21:33Rabbinic tradition saw the first story as the creation of a different woman.
00:21:39Sometime in antiquity, rabbinical scholars tried to reconcile the two versions of Genesis.
00:21:46They wanted to know just who this unnamed first woman was.
00:21:51Eventually, they linked her with the female demon mentioned in Isaiah
00:21:55and created a sacred text that connected the two.
00:22:02Human beings have a powerful, creative impulse.
00:22:06And if you say to them, here's this story and it's done,
00:22:09the first thing they want to do is say, no, it's not done.
00:22:12I have a great idea about a way in which it could be continued.
00:22:15We're reading the artwork, the masterworks of ancient Jewish writers
00:22:20who needed to express themselves.
00:22:23It was Lilith, they wrote, who rejected both Adam and God's will to become this demon,
00:22:28a creature of the night, a devourer of sexual and natal essences.
00:22:32It was this tradition of Midrash that the Zohar and Bensirah would draw and expand upon.
00:22:38They would paint Lilith as the succubus, the seducer in the night.
00:22:43She would come to be blamed for the nocturnal emissions of unsuspecting men.
00:22:47Lilith, it was said, could kill an infant in the womb or in the cradle.
00:22:51These are ancient fears linked with legends that were old even when the Bible was first written.
00:22:59Stories about a Lilith-type character always existed from the first firesides.
00:23:06Lilith takes the mythological space of the evil woman,
00:23:12which is a space that exists in almost every series of mythologies.
00:23:17Part of it is the discomfort with sexuality,
00:23:20and part of it is the human imagination creating devils, demons,
00:23:25all sorts of difficulties to explain evil in the world.
00:23:29Whatever fear people had about death of children, which was very common in the ancient world,
00:23:36that got put on Lilith also because clearly that wasn't God's will,
00:23:41it had to be some malign evil force that was taking their children away.
00:23:48Throughout history, Lilith would be feared, especially in Kabbalistic and Orthodox circles,
00:23:54where amulets of protection are still worn to guard against her.
00:23:58But her story, that of an evil but powerful woman,
00:24:01would find no place in either the Jewish or Christian canons.
00:24:07What made, in particular, male religious leaders so uncomfortable about Lilith,
00:24:12was that she was associated with seduction,
00:24:15and also that she was associated with full equality.
00:24:20For thousands of years, there was no equality between male and female religious figures and religious leaders,
00:24:27in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, any established religious tradition.
00:24:33But another lost text will show that even a submissive woman can be too much for the Orthodox canon,
00:24:39especially if she is a pagan priestess obsessed with one of the greatest patriarchs of the Bible.
00:24:46Joseph, when he marries a daughter of an Egyptian priest,
00:24:49that's going to send up a red flag for a lot of people.
00:24:52Why did Joseph marry a shiksa?
00:24:54This isn't quite kosher.
00:24:56You are watching Ban from the Bible 2, here on the History Channel.
00:25:11We hear her name only once in Genesis.
00:25:14We are told that Pharaoh himself gave her to Joseph,
00:25:17he of the coat of many colors, who would go on to save his people from famine.
00:25:21She is part of his reward for interpreting Pharaoh's prophetic dreams.
00:25:25And he gave him to wife Aseneth, the daughter of Pentaphrase, priest of Heliopolis.
00:25:34Then Joseph went out to the land of Egypt.
00:25:37This is all today's Bible says about her.
00:25:41As to how and why she was chosen for Joseph, it is mysteriously silent.
00:25:46Joseph is, of course, one of the most beloved figures of the Hebrew Bible.
00:25:50He's the one who was sold into slavery by his brothers,
00:25:54taken down to Egypt, became a slave only to rise to the very top
00:25:58and save the rest of his family, his tribe,
00:26:01and bring them to prominence down in Egypt before the final Exodus.
00:26:07Joseph's predecessors, Jacob, Isaac, Abraham,
00:26:11all married women about whom we know a great deal.
00:26:14And it's inconceivable to the reader of the Bible that Joseph all of a sudden
00:26:19goes and marries somebody about whom we know nothing.
00:26:21And so it almost seems to demand that there be a back story here
00:26:26so that we can understand who this woman is and why she deserves to marry Joseph.
00:26:32One of the things we find in biblical narratives is that they're often very terse, very short.
00:26:37Now, often behind those terse stories there are legends that are circulating.
00:26:44What led to this unorthodox marriage?
00:26:47Who was this non-believer who would help found a Jewish dynasty?
00:26:51These are answered in an ancient text called Joseph and Aseneth.
00:26:56But no one is sure exactly when it was written or by whom.
00:27:00Some theories place its origin in the first century B.C. in Alexandria, Egypt,
00:27:06a city known for its library and population of scholarly Jews.
00:27:11In form, it resembles a Midrash, a sacred document written to explain issues left dangling in the Bible,
00:27:18one that may have evolved from an older oral tradition.
00:27:22People expand on these stories often because there's something problematic in them.
00:27:26Joseph, when he marries a daughter of an Egyptian priest,
00:27:29that's going to send up a red flag for a lot of people for whom they're wondering,
00:27:33how is this sort of intermarriage possible between a Hebrew and a daughter of not just an Egyptian,
00:27:38but an Egyptian priest?
00:27:39So one of the reasons that people might tell a story like this is to explain how it is that happened,
00:27:45and they might add details and shadings that make the story more palatable to them.
00:27:51The text of Joseph and Aseneth begins in Heliopolis, the Egyptian city of the sun,
00:27:57where Joseph has been sent to collect corn for storage during a time of plenty.
00:28:02It is here he meets a priest named Pentaphrase.
00:28:06And Pentaphrase had a virgin daughter of about 18 years of age,
00:28:11more beautiful than any other virgin in the land.
00:28:14Aseneth has rejected many suitors, including Pharaoh's own son.
00:28:20Finally, Pharaoh decrees that she will become Joseph's wife as a reward for his loyal service.
00:28:26But for Joseph, bound by his religious traditions,
00:28:29it would have been an impossible gift to accept, even at Pharaoh's command.
00:28:33She is both hereditary royalty and also sort of biological royalty.
00:28:39That is, she's beautiful and intelligent, and she's also a princess.
00:28:43So all those things together, she's only missing one component.
00:28:46She just needs to be a Jew.
00:28:48But at first, it is Aseneth who balks at the match.
00:28:52From Aseneth's standpoint, why would she accept an Israelite?
00:28:57Here's a man who is a foreigner, a fugitive, a former slave.
00:29:03She doesn't want to accept Joseph until, of course, she meets him face to face.
00:29:09She's sitting at her window.
00:29:11She looks out, and she sees a handsome young man, and she falls madly in love.
00:29:17And so she is now madly in love with Joseph, her betrothed.
00:29:20She goes down to meet him, and Joseph's response is,
00:29:24I can't kiss you, I can't marry you.
00:29:27You worship idols, and I worship the true God.
00:29:31So Aseneth is now deeply, deeply distressed.
00:29:36She took sackcloth and sprinkled herself with ashes and wept bitterly.
00:29:41And lo, the ashes underneath her were like mud because of her tears.
00:29:46For seven days, Aseneth meditates and finally prays to the God of Joseph.
00:29:51In response, God sends an archangel to her who appears to her bathed in fire,
00:29:56but assuming Joseph's pleasing form.
00:29:58What follows is a mysterious ritual that does not appear anywhere else in either Jewish or Christian traditions.
00:30:05He has her eat from a honeycomb that she finds magically in her room.
00:30:10And these bees arise out of the honeycomb and encircle her.
00:30:14And the bees came up from the cells of the comb and all flew in circles round Aseneth,
00:30:21from her feet right up to her head.
00:30:23And yet more bees settled on Aseneth's lips.
00:30:26And they build a honeycomb on her lips.
00:30:33They purify her lips that were once lips that offered praise to dead idols.
00:30:39Honey and like nectar is a traditional food of the gods, the milk of paradise.
00:30:45And this idea that honey is fed to her is an idea of immortality and greatness that runs throughout mythology.
00:30:58There is also seemingly a sexual image to the honeycomb.
00:31:03Whether that's the primary intention of the text or not is unclear,
00:31:08but it certainly is alive, I think, in the story of the two of them coming together.
00:31:14Now purified, Joseph can take Aseneth for his own.
00:31:19She has been converted into a perfect Jewish wife
00:31:22and an important symbol for a community increasingly concerned with the issue of conversion.
00:31:27There were large numbers of converts in the Greek and Roman world coming into the Jewish faith.
00:31:33And there's reason to believe that this text came about in order to justify those converts coming into Judaism.
00:31:42It's hard for modern people to imagine, but as many as one tenth of the entire Roman Empire was Jewish.
00:31:50The story is intended, I believe, to reinforce the idea that there are sincere and loving converts
00:31:58whom the Jewish people should welcome and whom they should embrace.
00:32:02But early in the second century A.D., the Roman Emperor Hadrian began passing laws restricting the rights of Jews,
00:32:09and the number of Jewish converts dwindled.
00:32:12This may have been when Jews abandoned the story of Joseph and Aseneth.
00:32:16Composed in Greek and set in Egypt, it was never a contender for inclusion in the Jewish canon of biblical writings.
00:32:23From a rabbinic point of view, there could have been a problem with this text if it were, in fact, about the temple in Heliopolis.
00:32:32Because rabbinic Judaism is a Jerusalem-centered Judaism, and the idea of another temple would have been highly problematic.
00:32:38But the growing Christian movement in the Greco-Roman world of the first and second centuries was also deeply concerned with the question of conversion,
00:32:46and they would embrace the story of Aseneth.
00:32:49It was not preserved by Jews because, again, the Hellenic influence was so strong in it, but didn't bother Christians at all.
00:32:58And they preserved it. They copied this text, and that's why we have it today.
00:33:03Though dozens of copies of Joseph and Aseneth written in Greek, Armenian, Syriac, and Latin have turned up in Christian libraries,
00:33:11it was never part of Christian canon, either.
00:33:13From a Christian point of view, I'm not sure there was that much that would have been objectionable in this sort of text.
00:33:18It wouldn't have been considered for inclusion in the canon because it wasn't about Jesus,
00:33:23it wasn't about Jesus' earliest disciples, and it would have been more a retelling that people would have read for enjoyment.
00:33:33But other texts came out of Alexandria that would become, for a time, part of the Christian canon.
00:33:39They were called apocrypha, or hidden writings.
00:33:42For the most part, they document the lives of characters unknown in the traditional Bible.
00:33:47But there is one familiar name within their pages, that of a humble Israelite named Daniel.
00:33:53But the story found here paints him in a very different light.
00:33:57The biblical story emphasizes more Daniel's secondary status and humility.
00:34:03Here, he's a superstar.
00:34:05You are watching Banned from the Bible 2, here on the History Channel.
00:34:18It is a version of the Hebrew Bible that has provoked controversy since the time it was first recorded in the 3rd century B.C.
00:34:26It's bigger than the Old Testament and included things that were ultimately not regarded as authoritative within the Jewish tradition.
00:34:35Commissioned by the Egyptian ruler Ptolemy II to enrich the Library of Alexandria,
00:34:40it was to be a Greek translation of the Jewish sacred writings.
00:34:44This would make the writings accessible to scholars from around the world.
00:34:48The work would become known as the Septuagint.
00:34:51The story is that there were a group of Jewish sages living in Alexandria in Egypt,
00:34:58who were commissioned independently to produce a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.
00:35:05They gathered together when it was all completed in a great council and compared them.
00:35:10And sure enough, they were all identical.
00:35:13Because they were all identical, we know that the Septuagint must be inspired divinely.
00:35:19It was said that around the year 200 B.C., Ptolemy commissioned six Jewish scholars from each of the 12 tribes of Israel,
00:35:2772 translators in all, to undertake the great work, which is where the Septuagint gets its name.
00:35:34Actually, they were 72 sages, although the Septuagint actually means 70. Easy number to remember.
00:35:42This story, however, may have actually been invented to bolster the claim that the Septuagint was the most authentic version of the Hebrew Bible
00:35:50at a time when there were several different editions in circulation.
00:35:53Some scholars have suggested there were at least three textual traditions.
00:35:58A Palestinian tradition, a Babylonian tradition, which evolved as today's traditional or Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible,
00:36:07and a third Egyptian tradition, separate from the other two, which is represented by the Septuagint.
00:36:14None of these traditions agreed entirely.
00:36:17It is the Septuagint that is the longest of all the versions of the Hebrew Bible that have appeared throughout history.
00:36:24It contains a dozen additional texts not found anywhere else.
00:36:29What is contained in these additional Septuagint texts?
00:36:33Some are prayers or proverbs, but most are historical accounts documenting the lives of characters unknown in the traditional Bible
00:36:41or presenting characters named there in a very different light.
00:36:45The most well-known among these is Daniel, the Israelite famous for being thrown into a lion's den by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in today's version of the Bible.
00:36:56He's a pious Israelite who refuses to worship the pagan deities, and as a result, of course, he suffers persecution.
00:37:03Eventually, he's thrown into a lion's den, but the lions open not their mouths and do not touch him.
00:37:13That's the classic story.
00:37:15The Daniel of the Septuagint is seen in the same setting with the same characters,
00:37:20but the events in this version present a very different picture of Daniel himself.
00:37:25The difference between this story and the biblical story of Daniel is in this story Daniel is much more assertive,
00:37:32much more heroic, much more a traditional cast of someone who stands out and is noticed by others.
00:37:40The biblical story emphasizes more Daniel's secondary status and humility.
00:37:46Here, he's a superstar.
00:37:48In the Septuagint version of the story, called Bell and the Dragon,
00:37:53Daniel takes it upon himself to prove to the Babylonians that they are worshipping a false god.
00:38:00Now the Babylonians had an idol called Bell, and the king worshipped it and went daily to adore it,
00:38:06but Daniel worshipped his own god.
00:38:09Food offerings, grain offerings are brought to the deity every day,
00:38:15and they disappear for some mysterious reason, and it must be that the deity is devouring them.
00:38:21That's what gods do.
00:38:23They eat the sacrifices, and this is proof that Bell exists.
00:38:28But Daniel challenges that belief head on.
00:38:31Daniel said, O king, be not deceived, for this is but clay within and brass without,
00:38:38and did never eat or drink anything.
00:38:43Daniel says, look, I can solve this.
00:38:46He spreads ashes across the floor of the temple.
00:38:51The doors of the temple are sealed and locked so that no one enters, no one exits.
00:38:57The next day, the doors are opened.
00:39:04Sure enough, the food is gone.
00:39:07But there are also footprints in the ashes leading to a secret door.
00:39:12The fraud is exposed.
00:39:15It's obvious that Bell's own priests are stealing the food to trick everybody.
00:39:21In the next chapter of Bell and the Dragon, the king challenges Daniel,
00:39:26showing him another Babylonian god, a dragon-like creature.
00:39:30Wilt thou also say that this is of brass?
00:39:36He eateth and drinketh.
00:39:39Thou canst not say that he is no living god.
00:39:42To prove that this is no divine creature,
00:39:47Daniel mixes a noxious potion into cakes and feeds them to the beast.
00:39:52The dragon ate them and burst open.
00:39:55Then Daniel said, see what you have been worshipping.
00:39:59In Bell and the Dragon, it is for this offense that Daniel is thrown into the pit.
00:40:04So we do see sort of a different Daniel in these two stories.
00:40:07In one, Daniel is passively resisting the culture in which he finds himself.
00:40:13He is continuing to pray to his god.
00:40:15And in the other story, Daniel is actively resisting the culture
00:40:18by actually going off to kill this dragon.
00:40:22Because the Daniel saga appeared so late,
00:40:25in just the last few centuries before the birth of Christ,
00:40:28Jewish scholars resisted, including Daniel in the canon.
00:40:32The Jewish belief in the time of Christ was that prophecy had ceased.
00:40:37And so inspired writing, which made a book authoritative,
00:40:42could not be attached.
00:40:43It was written too late to be viewed as the inspired prophetical word of God.
00:40:49But in the end, the story of Daniel would be included,
00:40:52though in an abbreviated form.
00:40:54We have evidence to believe that Daniel was very nearly booted out.
00:40:59But it was just so doggone popular that he couldn't keep it out.
00:41:04The people loved this book.
00:41:06My guess is they said, look, if we've got to canonize this book,
00:41:10we'll canonize the shortest version.
00:41:12Certainly not the one we find in the Egyptian tradition.
00:41:16In Greek, we're going to take the Babylonian tradition.
00:41:19And that's what they did.
00:41:21So while other versions of the Hebrew Bible include the story we are most familiar with,
00:41:26that of Daniel and the lion's dead,
00:41:28only the Septuagint contains his battle against Belle and the dragon.
00:41:33But it was this longer and more fantastic version that would, for a time,
00:41:37become part of an even wider tradition.
00:41:39The early Christian community had the enlarged Greek Bible that was adopted mainly in the West,
00:41:47and took with them throughout Macedonia, throughout the Italian peninsula,
00:41:52ultimately to us here in modern times.
00:41:55It was the early church fathers in the second and third centuries who translated the Septuagint into Latin.
00:42:02These additional texts that the Jews and later most Protestants would come to reject,
00:42:07would be retained by the Catholic Church.
00:42:10These and other texts would be called Apocrypha, meaning hidden writings.
00:42:15The way rabbis approached texts that they found heretical,
00:42:19and the way early church fathers approached texts that they found heretical,
00:42:22is that rabbis largely ignored them.
00:42:24And the church fathers recorded them and argued against them,
00:42:28which for us turned out to be a great benefit,
00:42:30because we have, then, records of what these texts were about,
00:42:34because there are people engaged in an argument with them.
00:42:37It was an argument that would only intensify as the early Christian church
00:42:40struggled to decide which texts should be included in the second part of the Bible.
00:42:44The New Testament.
00:42:47There was a flexibility and fluidity in the first generation,
00:42:50maybe even into the second generation in Palestine,
00:42:53because the Gospels, the New Testament writings were not written down yet.
00:42:56It is here that the real battle would begin,
00:42:59as competing Christian sects fought over what would be considered the Word of God,
00:43:03and what would be condemned as heresy.
00:43:06Though the conflicts and bloodshed would intensify, in many ways,
00:43:10it would simply be a continuation of a tradition begun long before.
00:43:15The one way in which we might change people's image of the Bible
00:43:19is that there weren't a set of books that got passed around generation to generation.
00:43:25There were libraries of books.
00:43:27And along the way, some of them got embraced and some of them got cast out.
00:43:32And we can guess at why, although we don't know for sure.
00:43:36But it seems as though the books that were retained were the books that were religiously acceptable,
00:43:43that were literarily moving or touching,
00:43:48and also were the books that helped coalesce the community and bring them together.
00:43:55And those three factors seem to have decided which books, in the end,
00:43:59wound up in the Bible and which books were banned.
00:44:02We have to remember that when you pick up a book that is bound,
00:44:06it doesn't mean that it was bound forever.
00:44:16You are watching Banned from the Bible 2, here on the History Channel.
00:44:23Vercelli, one of the oldest towns in northern Italy,
00:44:26can trace its earliest settlement back to 600 B.C.
00:44:31It is here in a dusty church library that amazing ancient manuscripts,
00:44:36dating from the 5th to the 10th centuries, were rediscovered.
00:44:40Among them was a 7th century copy, in Latin,
00:44:43of a much earlier text called the Acts of Peter.
00:44:47It recounts the life of one of the original 12 apostles of Christ.
00:44:51But the events told here are not found in today's biblical scripture.
00:44:56The Acts of Peter, which is one of the 5 acts of various apostles outside the New Testament,
00:45:03was written in the last quarter of the 2nd century.
00:45:06And it seems to have assembled together various episodes about the life of Peter
00:45:12that may have been circulating either orally or in writing before,
00:45:16and were assembled into a sort of a life of Peter.
00:45:19The Acts of Peter is set after the crucifixion,
00:45:23when the apostles were proselytizing and recruiting Christian converts.
00:45:29In this extra-canonical text,
00:45:31Peter is portrayed much as he is in the Bible,
00:45:34a bold and impetuous apostle.
00:45:36He is the kind of leader that God himself calls on
00:45:39to confront an evildoer known as Simon Magus.
00:45:44God showed him a vision, saying unto him,
00:45:48Peter, that Simon the sorcerer whom thou didst cast out of Judea,
00:45:53hath again come before thee at Rome.
00:45:59Peter has met this man before.
00:46:02That earlier encounter is documented in the Bible.
00:46:05And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles' hands
00:46:11the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money.
00:46:14But Peter said unto him,
00:46:16Thy money perish with thee,
00:46:18because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased.
00:46:22The New Testament says that Simon repented and was baptized,
00:46:27and ends the story there.
00:46:31But in the Acts of Peter, the story continues.
00:46:35Simon reappears in Rome performing miracles.
00:46:41The problem is that Simon Magus does these miracles
00:46:43and people become convinced that in fact he's the representative of the true God
00:46:47instead of Peter and Paul who really are the representatives of the true God.
00:46:56Peter goes to Rome to confront Simon.
00:46:59It is here, one evening just after nightfall,
00:47:02that Jesus appears to Peter and calls for a public showdown with Simon.
00:47:08Peter beheld Jesus clad in a vesture of brightness,
00:47:12smiling and saying unto him,
00:47:14Thou shalt have a contest of the faith,
00:47:17and many more shall be converted in my name.
00:47:22There ends up being an actual contest in the Roman forum.
00:47:26What you have actually is a very public slap-down.
00:47:31It's in the center of the Roman world,
00:47:33and not only are the locals watching, but everyone is watching.
00:47:38It's the center of the world.
00:47:40The contest focuses on who has the power of life and death.
00:47:45The prefect of Rome sends in a slave,
00:47:49and Simon Magus is to kill the man,
00:47:51and Peter is to raise him from the dead.
00:47:53So Simon Magus speaks a word in the man's ear.
00:47:57Plum, he falls down dead.
00:48:01Peter leans over and speaks a few words to him.
00:48:06And the man rises from the dead.
00:48:11Well, people think that's more miraculous than killing him,
00:48:16and so they decide Peter is one.
00:48:18But Simon, according to the acts of Peter,
00:48:20has one more wonder to demonstrate.
00:48:22He announces that he will fly over the city of Rome.
00:48:26In fact, he does it.
00:48:27He jumps up in the air and starts flying over the temples.
00:48:31Peter calls on a higher power.
00:48:34And Peter cried unto the Lord Jesus Christ,
00:48:37O Lord, let him fall from the height and be disabled.
00:48:40And he fell.
00:48:42Then every man cast stones at him and went away home,
00:48:45and henceforth believed Peter.
00:48:50So Peter ends up being the more powerful of the two.
00:48:53He's the true apostle of God.
00:48:56Ever since the acts of Peter was rediscovered,
00:48:59religious scholars have debated
00:49:01whether Simon is supposed to be seen as a pagan
00:49:04or, as his earlier baptism suggests, a Christian heretic.
00:49:08Though this fantastical tale was never part of the New Testament,
00:49:11it paints a revealing picture of early Christianity
00:49:14as a time of intense competition for converts
00:49:17and a battleground of diverse and opposing viewpoints.
00:49:24The older view that historians held for centuries and centuries
00:49:27was that originally Christianity was a monolith.
00:49:30It was one thing.
00:49:31It was taught by Jesus to his apostles,
00:49:33who taught it to their followers,
00:49:35who taught it to their followers,
00:49:36and it was always this one thing.
00:49:37But every now and then a heretic would come along
00:49:39who would pervert some aspect of the truth.
00:49:42What scholars have recognized since the early 20th century
00:49:45is that that model is probably not right,
00:49:48that actually early Christianity was far more diverse than that,
00:49:52that in fact there were lots of different groups in Christendom
00:49:55that taught a lot of different things,
00:49:57and all of these groups were competing for converts.
00:50:00When we look back into this earlier time,
00:50:02there was no golden age of Jesus.
00:50:04There was no day or decade or century
00:50:07in which everyone agreed in the church.
00:50:10And that's very much like today,
00:50:12in which we have various different sects.
00:50:14Some of the divisions in early Christianity
00:50:17were far more basic, fundamental, and radical
00:50:21than the divisions we have today
00:50:23between, say, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Catholics even.
00:50:29It has been largely in the 20th century,
00:50:32with the discovery of caches of ancient texts
00:50:35in desert hiding places and forgotten libraries,
00:50:38that a fuller scope of these divisions has been revealed.
00:50:41We know that because other books have been discovered,
00:50:44and we've seen from these other gospels, for example,
00:50:47that it was a much more complicated picture
00:50:49than this traditional view allows us to believe.
00:50:52We may think that early Christianity was just one thing,
00:50:56but we now know that it wasn't that simple,
00:50:59that we have people who taught all sorts of things
00:51:02in different times and they all had traditions
00:51:04that go back to the apostles that supported their point of view.
00:51:07They all had books that supported their points of view.
00:51:10What the presidency of the Acts of the Apostles
00:51:13outside the New Testament tells us
00:51:15is that there are profound distinctions
00:51:18between various groups of Christians,
00:51:20and not minor little things about the dates or something,
00:51:23but major issues.
00:51:25What were these differences
00:51:27that these extra-canonical books spelled out?
00:51:29What ideas did they contain that were so problematic?
00:51:32One issue, as controversial then as it is now,
00:51:35would appear again and again
00:51:37in the texts deemed unfit for canon.
00:51:40As far back as our earliest Christian author,
00:51:43the Apostle Paul,
00:51:44Christians are wondering about sexual relationships.
00:51:47They all hear Peter's preaching about celibacy
00:51:50and decide that they're not going to have sex
00:51:52or intercourse anymore.
00:51:53You are watching Ban from the Bible 2 here on the History Channel.
00:52:04She is still revered as a saint in some parts of the world today.
00:52:09Said to be a companion of Paul the Apostle,
00:52:12her story would come to be known in the Acts of Paul and Thecla,
00:52:16a chapter in the extra-canonical Acts of Paul.
00:52:19It appears so early and in so many fragments
00:52:22that some scholars theorize that Thecla may have been a real person,
00:52:26one revered as much as the Virgin Mary.
00:52:29Yet her story is nowhere to be found in today's Bible.
00:52:33The actual composition of the Thecla text dates roughly to 170 A.D.
00:52:38But it really is representative of a broader Thecla movement.
00:52:42For example, the Cult of Thecla, if you want to use that language,
00:52:47essentially what you have is a movement that began in the Caspian,
00:52:51in that area, certainly Syria and Antioch.
00:52:53And you have it going south through Palestine to Egypt
00:52:56where it became very popular.
00:52:57The worship of Thecla, if you will, as a saint,
00:53:01is spread all the way across.
00:53:03It's in Armenia.
00:53:04It's in Egypt.
00:53:05It's all the way to the Cathedral of Tarragona in Spain.
00:53:09You can still see on the altarpiece in Spain.
00:53:12She's up there almost with Mary.
00:53:15Almost on a par with Mary.
00:53:17Even though the story is outside the New Testament.
00:53:21The reason that Thecla is largely unknown today
00:53:25may be because of a controversial doctrine among early Christians
00:53:28that came to be closely associated with her.
00:53:31Known as asceticism,
00:53:33he called for complete sexual celibacy.
00:53:36The idea of Christian asceticism actually goes all the way back into the New Testament.
00:53:41One can make a case that Jesus himself preached an ascetic message.
00:53:45That's debated.
00:53:47But it's certain that the Apostle Paul, to some extent, preached an ascetic message.
00:53:52And it is to Paul that Thecla's story is closely tied.
00:53:56Thecla was allegedly one of Paul's disciples, a female disciple.
00:54:01And the reason she became so interested in Paul
00:54:04was because Paul was preaching a doctrine of renunciation
00:54:08in which he proclaimed that the people who would be saved,
00:54:11who would be made right with God for those who are chaste and virgin,
00:54:15who didn't ever have sex.
00:54:17Paul, as depicted in the Acts of Paul and Thecla,
00:54:21is a more dogmatic proponent of celibacy than he is in the Bible.
00:54:25In the New Testament, he tells the Corinthians
00:54:27that celibacy is a choice, not a requirement.
00:54:30Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement, for a set time,
00:54:38to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again,
00:54:42so that Satan may not tempt you.
00:54:44And he says, I recommend that to you, it would be very nice if you were all celibate.
00:54:49But he says, and this is very important, he says, we all have our own gifts.
00:54:54Some people can be celibate like me, some people not.
00:54:57So he never says, ever, ever says, you must be celibate.
00:55:02But in the extra-canonical acts of Paul and Thecla,
00:55:05it is a different message that Paul brings to the Roman provinces of Asia Minor,
00:55:10one that causes the local men to complain about him.
00:55:14He deprives young men of wives and maidens of husbands,
00:55:18saying, there is for you a resurrection in no other way,
00:55:21unless you remain chaste and pollute not the flesh.
00:55:24Paul's call for celibacy in this alternative text attracts many women,
00:55:32including a virgin named Thecla.
00:55:34She is so swayed by Paul's words that she rejects Themiras, her wealthy fiancĂŠ.
00:55:40Her fiancĂŠ is enraged, he's one of the leading men of the city,
00:55:44and he drags her before the local tribunal,
00:55:47who decides that she's broken a law that's so important
00:55:53that she deserves to die.
00:55:58Burn her that will not marry,
00:56:00in order that all the women that have been taught by this man may be afraid.
00:56:06It is here that the acts of Paul and Thecla recounts its first miracle.
00:56:11So they're going to actually burn her at the stake,
00:56:13but then God does this great miracle and sends down a thunderstorm
00:56:17and puts out the flame, and she manages to escape,
00:56:20and she goes off with Paul on his missionary journeys.
00:56:25The two travel to Antioch in Syria, where the pattern is repeated.
00:56:29Another influential wealthy man falls in love with her,
00:56:33and what does she do with that when he tries to seduce her in the middle of the town square?
00:56:39She rips his cloak, she embarrasses him in public,
00:56:42and so he takes her to the governor, and once again we find Thecla in a perilous situation.
00:56:48This time it leads to a strange spectacle in the local arena.
00:56:52The most extraordinary scene in all of early Christian literature, bar none,
00:56:57because once again she's in the arena, typical,
00:57:01but then instead of the audience breaking down pagans against Christians,
00:57:05it breaks down first of all women against men.
00:57:08All the women, that is all the pagan women, are on her side.
00:57:12When the wild beasts are released to kill her, the female animals protect her.
00:57:18A she-lion, which was of all the most fierce, ran to Thecla and fell down at her feet.
00:57:24At that, the multitude of women shouted aloud.
00:57:28And it's this very gendered imagery of the female lion protecting her from the male bear, the male lion.
00:57:35And finally, she's protected by a queen who faints in the audience,
00:57:40and thus has Thecla pardoned.
00:57:47Throughout the acts of Paul and Thecla, it is the women who are the heroes,
00:57:51while Paul, the scholarly missionary whose letters take up nearly half of the New Testament,
00:57:56is portrayed in a less sympathetic line.
00:57:59He lets Thecla accompany him, but refuses to baptize her, implying she is not yet worthy.
00:58:05When trouble starts, he does little to defend her.
00:58:10He's gone. I mean, she's in the arena fighting for her life, and he's on the road out of town.
00:58:16In the arena, Thecla performs a final act of faith.
00:58:21There's a huge tank of water there, maybe with sharks or something in it.
00:58:26And she jumps in, because Paul has refused to baptize her, and she baptizes herself.
00:58:33God approves of it, because he sends a lightning bolt to kill all the sharks, as it were.
00:58:39And so she baptizes herself.
00:58:41Now, this is fairly radical feminism.
00:58:43If the men won't baptize you, baptize yourself.
00:58:47Though Thecla remained popular, the acts of Paul and Thecla was suppressed.
00:58:52Tertullian, a second-century church father, dismissed it as a forgery.
00:58:57Tertullian disparages the stories about Thecla, because Thecla, in these stories, according to Tertullian, is acting like a man.
00:59:05Women are not allowed to baptize, even baptize themselves, I suppose, whereas Thecla obviously does baptize.
00:59:14Women are not allowed to preach the word, but Thecla does preach the word in this book.
00:59:19So Tertullian, and others like him, rejected the Thecla stories on the grounds that they didn't have the proper view of women.
00:59:28Whether it's Thecla in the second century or Thecla today, the role of women in the early church, or the role of women in the churches today, continues to be a fairly contentious issue.
00:59:39It is Thecla's celibacy, ironically, that may have branded her a feminist in the ancient world.
00:59:45Women, when they were young, were under the authority of their fathers.
00:59:50When they got married, they were under the authority of their husbands.
00:59:54In either case, they're under the authority of a man.
00:59:57Ascetic women, who don't engage in sexual activities, don't have to get married, and so they're not under the authority of a man.
01:00:04We have to recognize that for a woman to actually choose celibacy is a fairly radical thing.
01:00:09There is a side of Thecla that would have been deeply offensive to those who were promoting and asserting sort of a male patriarchal model.
01:00:19It is this fight over celibacy that will split the early church and lead to the banning of certain texts from the Bible.
01:00:27Among them will be one that recounts a mysterious appearance of Jesus some three decades after the crucifixion.
01:00:35You are watching Band from the Bible 2 here on the History Channel.
01:00:52The story of how the Apostle Peter died would circulate for generations.
01:00:56It would inspire high art and deep introspection.
01:01:00But on this subject, the Bible is silent except for the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John,
01:01:06which some think prophesies a difficult end for Peter.
01:01:13He said to Peter,
01:01:15When you grow old, you shall stretch forth your hands, and another shall gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go.
01:01:22The earliest mention of Peter's death appears in the first century AD in a letter by Clement, Bishop of Rome.
01:01:33It is recounted in more detail in the concluding portion of the Acts of Peter, also known as the Martyrdom of Peter,
01:01:40which has been found in more than half a dozen ancient languages, some dating to the second century AD.
01:01:45Peter is said to have been martyred, crucified, in Rome.
01:01:53And the reason the Acts of Peter implies was the contentious issue of celibacy.
01:01:58And there were gathered also unto Peter the concubines of Agrippa the Prefect.
01:02:04And they, hearing the word concerning chastity and all the oracles of the Lord, were smitten in their souls.
01:02:13The lead-in to the martyrdom story is that the Prefect of Rome, Agrippa, presumably the Prefect of the Praetorian Guard,
01:02:21has four mistresses.
01:02:23And they all hear Peter's preaching about celibacy.
01:02:26And decide that they're not going to have sexual intercourse anymore with the Prefect, which of course infuriates them.
01:02:35And then more and more women of the Roman aristocracy decide that they're going to observe celibacy.
01:02:42And these are married women, so they're demanding marital celibacy.
01:02:46Many other women also, loving the word of chastity, separated themselves from their husbands.
01:02:51And there was great trouble in Rome.
01:02:56In the first century AD, under the Roman Emperor Augustus,
01:03:00strict laws have been passed to ensure that the birth rate among the upper classes did not decline.
01:03:06The idea that the Roman aristocracy, especially the female members of the Roman aristocracy, would stop having children,
01:03:14all of this is subversive to Roman patriarchy, to Roman customs, and especially to the needs of the aristocracy.
01:03:21They decide to crucify Peter, because he is subverting the Roman system, breaking up Roman families.
01:03:29But the idea of mandatory celibacy as a part of religious asceticism was equally controversial among early Christians in the second through fourth centuries.
01:03:38Paul preached an ascetic message, and Jesus may have, because they were apocalypticists.
01:03:45An apocalypticist is somebody who maintains that God is soon going to intervene in this evil world, and overthrow the forces of evil, and bring in a good kingdom to earth.
01:03:55The reason this leads to asceticism is because you shouldn't be attached to the things of this life.
01:04:03But when the end of the world did not come, the idea of celibacy became more problematic.
01:04:08Well, one very practical reason would be, of course, if you insist that the only true Christians are celibate ascetics,
01:04:16you are going to need a massive conversion race, because you will have no internal procreation.
01:04:22It was this idea of total celibacy, or extreme asceticism, which the church would later brand as heretical, that ensured that the Acts of Peter would find no place in the official canon.
01:04:36But the story of his martyrdom would continue to be read long after other parts of the text were dismissed.
01:04:44The story in the Acts of Peter is that Peter is in the city of Rome, and he's convinced by some of his Christian friends to leave Rome so he doesn't suffer martyrdom.
01:04:56It is on the road leading out of Rome that Jesus appears to him, and Peter asks a famous question.
01:05:02And he says to Christ in Latin, Quo Vadis Domine, Quo Going Lord.
01:05:08And as he went forth out of the city, he saw the Lord entering into Rome.
01:05:13And the Lord said unto him, I go into Rome to be crucified.
01:05:17And Peter said unto him, Lord, art thou to be crucified again?
01:05:21He said unto him, Yea, Peter, I am being crucified again.
01:05:25Peter understands he's going in his place. Peter is leaving, Christ is coming.
01:05:30In the New Testament, Peter denies knowing Christ in order to avoid arrest.
01:05:36But in the Acts of Peter, he is prepared to fulfill his destiny.
01:05:40He goes back full of joy and rejoicing, because now he's going to suffer the same fate as his Lord, and he goes back to be crucified.
01:05:50But he will be crucified upside down.
01:05:55It seems to me that of all the elements of this story, at least the martyrdom aspect is plausible.
01:06:02What the historian Josephus says was the Roman custom of crucifying people, sometimes in strange, unusual, ghastly positions even, just for fun, just for sport.
01:06:14This is the kind of story that has a ring of truth to it.
01:06:20The strange, inverted image that resulted was portrayed again and again in medieval art.
01:06:26So much so, that a story sprang up to explain it.
01:06:29The usual explanation is, Christ was crucified in the normal upright position.
01:06:35Peter had betrayed Christ, so he wasn't worthy, as it were, of being crucified like Jesus, so he asked to be crucified upside down.
01:06:45But that, although it's in the Christian tradition, is not, is absolutely not at all, the reason given in the story.
01:06:52And when they had hanged him up after the manner he desired, he began again to say,
01:06:59Learn ye the mystery of all nature.
01:07:02For the first man, whose race I bear in mine appearance, was born head downwards.
01:07:08Peter gives this little speech to bystanders, where he indicates that the world has grown topsy-turvy ever since the appearance of Adam.
01:07:17Adam came into the world like babies, head first.
01:07:22By being crucified upside down, Peter sees everything the right way.
01:07:27What is left to us is right to him, what is down for us is up for him.
01:07:32So he has clear vision.
01:07:34And I think most people reading that would not know what on earth he's talking about.
01:07:38This strange statement, which some scholars see as unorthodox, if not downright heretical, could be one of the reasons the text was deemed unworthy for inclusion in the Bible.
01:07:52But others think it is the celibacy at the start of the story that is the bigger problem, if only because of the popularity of the movement that embraced it.
01:08:00You would not still have copies of the Acts of the Apostles that are outside the New Testament, unless there was a large group of people for whom celibacy, celibacy even within marriage, celibacy instead of marriage, was a life choice and a vocation.
01:08:19These were the texts that defended them on a very popular level even.
01:08:25So it doesn't look like an esoteric elite group.
01:08:28The ascetics would not be the only challengers to the Christian Orthodoxy.
01:08:33There would be other sects that claim to have secret scriptural knowledge, sometimes of unthinkable things.
01:08:40What is it that they knew?
01:08:42There is the traditional mark and then there's the secret mark.
01:08:44There is the secret mark.
01:08:45This text certainly does seem to have some homoerotic undertones.
01:08:53Get 0% financing with no payments till July.
01:09:00You are watching Banned from the Bible 2, here on the History Channel.
01:09:03In 1958, one of the strangest and most controversial finds in religious scholarship occurred.
01:09:15A young theology scholar from Columbia University named Morton Smith was exploring the Greek Orthodox Library of Mars Saba in the Judean Desert near Bethlehem.
01:09:24He was searching for old manuscripts that might have been used to make the bindings of other books, a practice common centuries ago when paper was a rare and precious commodity.
01:09:36As Smith later told the story, he found just such a fragment handwritten in 18th century Greek.
01:09:42It appeared to be a copy of a much older letter, authored by no less than the powerful 3rd century church leader Clement of Alexandria, writing to a person identified only as Theodore.
01:09:55What it suggests is something straight out of the Da Vinci Code.
01:09:58In the letter, Clement claims that the church is in possession of a different version of the Gospel of Mark than appears in today's Bible.
01:10:09It was after the martyrdom of Peter, Clement writes, that Mark came to Alexandria to record a more complete version of the Gospel based on his and Peter's notes.
01:10:19He composed a more spiritual Gospel for the use of those who were being perfected.
01:10:28It is most carefully guarded, being read only to those who are being initiated into the great mysteries.
01:10:35This version, which has never been found, is briefly quoted in the Clement letter.
01:10:40It will come to be called the Secret Gospel of Mark.
01:10:43Here we have Clement quoting certain passages which he says were deleted from the Book of Mark.
01:10:53There is the traditional mark and then there is the secret mark with the secret knowledge just for the initiates.
01:11:00The idea that there are secret Christian mystical writings and versions of the Gospel, available only to the most enlightened,
01:11:07is a concept closely linked with unorthodox sects of Christianity like the Gnostics, which sprang up in the second century AD.
01:11:16There were a wide range of ways of being Gnostic.
01:11:20There were very many different Gnostic groups with different Gnostic mythologies, different Gnostic beliefs, different Gnostic ethics.
01:11:28And so we use this as an umbrella term to talk about a lot of different groups that had this emphasis on knowledge as the way of escape from this material world.
01:11:37When we get into the second century, there does seem to be evidence for what we would call a standard text and an enlightened text.
01:11:45The question is the degree to which this exists in the first century.
01:11:48We don't have to look to a text like the secret Gospel of Mark to find the idea that Jesus had secret teachings.
01:11:54If we look at the Gospel of Mark, the one in the canonical Bible, we find that Jesus said different things to his disciples and said,
01:12:00To you, I teach these secret teachings, and to other people, they're going to hear them in parables. They're not quite going to understand them.
01:12:07So already very early on in the tradition, there's a sense that there are secret texts.
01:12:10But Clement and other early church leaders declared Gnostic beliefs to be heretical and denied the existence of secret Gospels, something that this letter, if authentic, seems to contradict.
01:12:22Clement is the one who's supposedly writing this letter.
01:12:25But yet at the same time, everything we know about Clement would suggest that he didn't support the notion of a second document, or secrets, or a secret knowledge, or the notion of initiates to a higher level.
01:12:40Clement of Alexandria didn't support the Gnostic movement, and yet this document suggests that he in fact did.
01:12:46If it did go back to Clement, well, yeah, then it would change the landscape quite a bit.
01:12:52And in some ways, it really does sort of argue for the role of the mystery religions within development of this segment of Christianity that we find in Alexandria.
01:13:04In the letter Morton Smith published, Clement writes that another heretical sect, the Capucrations, known for their licentious acts, has gained unauthorized access to the secret Gospel of Mark.
01:13:16Now they are spreading a corrupt version of what was found in the secret text, which Clement then quotes in the letter.
01:13:23What the secret Gospel contains appears to be an extension of the story begun in the traditional Gospel of Mark.
01:13:31There's one passage in Mark that references Jesus at the city of Jericho, and then suddenly he leaves.
01:13:40Why does the story mention Jericho, and then nothing happens there?
01:13:44It looks like something is tantalizingly missing from the Gospel of Mark.
01:13:49What could it be?
01:13:51Secret Mark fills in what happened.
01:13:54The excerpt describes Jesus raising the woman's brother from the dead in a passage that some think echoes or even expands upon the Lazarus story related in the Gospel of John.
01:14:19Jesus stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand, but the youth, looking upon him, loved him, and began to beseech him that he might be with him.
01:14:32We have the story of a young man whom Jesus raises from the dead, and who begs thereafter to spend a night with Jesus,
01:14:46where upon Jesus reveals to him the secret of the kingdom of God.
01:14:57And that very language sounds very Gospel-ish, like it links with actual language from the Synoptic Gospel.
01:15:05When it was late, the young man went to him. He had put a linen around his naked body, and he remained with him through that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.
01:15:17What is the secret of the kingdom of God that Jesus reveals to this young man?
01:15:22What kind of relationship did Jesus have with this young man? Of course, it gets very controversial.
01:15:28He goes to Jesus wearing nothing but a linen cloak, and they spend the night together.
01:15:34This text certainly does seem to have some homoerotic undertones.
01:15:38This, it seems, is just what the heretical Carpocratians are suggesting.
01:15:45Clement complains that they have made changes to the text, adding the words naked man to naked man,
01:15:52a suggestive phrase not present in the original secret Gospel.
01:15:56The secret mark does not tell us, and one is not forced to assume that there was any physical intimacy between Jesus and this young man.
01:16:04This simply may have been some kind of link with initiation rites in the ancient Near East to the mystery religions,
01:16:14and perhaps some kind of throwback to Edenic innocence in the Garden of Eden that this detail is relayed to us.
01:16:24If secret mark is a continuation of events described in the Bible's Gospel of Mark,
01:16:29it could explain a mysterious reference found later in the Bible text during the arrest of Jesus.
01:16:36At the point of Jesus' arrest at the Garden of Gethsemane, traditionally we're told the disciples all flee from him.
01:16:45But Mark, and only Mark, adds a little tidbit.
01:16:49And one, a certain young man, followed him, having thrown a linen cloth around his naked body.
01:16:57Who is this young man? Could it be the same one mentioned in the secret Gospel of Mark?
01:17:04It leads some serious researchers to believe that secret mark does belong in the Gospel of Mark, and it tells us who this man is.
01:17:12But did the secret Gospel of Mark ever really exist?
01:17:17Many scholars suspect the letter and the excerpt of secret Gospel it contains is nothing more than a clever hoax.
01:17:24One perhaps perpetrated by Morton Smith himself.
01:17:28That skepticism stems from the fact that Smith published photos he took of the document,
01:17:33while the actual letter, purported to have been left at the library, has since vanished.
01:17:38He took photos of it, and we don't have a record of it. It's lost.
01:17:43There have been speculations about whether it's a forgery, or whether it really is authentic,
01:17:48and it's just very difficult to determine. Unless you have the actual document, it's impossible to prove either way.
01:17:54When Morton Smith died in 1991, some expected a deathbed confession, but they were disappointed.
01:18:01And he never, in a sense, offered a recantation or anything about the text.
01:18:06And there are letters that are in people's possessions where he seems very sincere and very interested in his find,
01:18:14as though it really is a legitimate find.
01:18:17Every few decades, it seems, a find like Smith's emerges to confound scholars and provoke debate.
01:18:23And that this entire discipline, the study of ancient texts, is very much in flux.
01:18:30And the landscape of scholarship changes from year to year, sometimes from moment to moment.
01:18:36But few discoveries have surpassed the furor caused by the document that has surfaced most recently, the so-called Gospel of Judas.
01:18:45It rewrites the events leading up to the Passion.
01:18:49It stands completely at odds with what the New Testament Gospels themselves say.
01:18:52Top History Channel dot com, your source for all your History Channel favorites.
01:19:05It is called the Gospel of Judas, and it paints a very different portrait of the disciple who has been reviled for centuries as the man who betrayed Jesus.
01:19:19Little is known about where and when it was written, but an early copy of the text is thought to have been hidden in a tomb on the east bank of the Nile River, near the Egyptian village of El Minya.
01:19:32The decaying document, written in ancient Coptic, first surfaced in the 1970s and was offered for sale several times in the 1980s.
01:19:42Exorbitant prices were named, but not met, and it disappeared again until it resurfaced long enough to be identified by two Yale University scholars in 2000.
01:19:53Their conclusion, this was a copy of the long-lost Gospel of Judas, recorded around the year 300 A.D.
01:20:02The Gospel of Judas is first mentioned by Irenaeus, a church father living in what is now France, and he was the Bishop of Lyon, who was writing his book against heresies around the year 180 or 185.
01:20:17And he mentions a group of Christians that had the Gospel of Judas, and what he says about this Gospel of Judas seems to coincide with this book that's now been discovered.
01:20:25The events in the newly recovered Gospel follow the canon story closely. As in the Bible, Judas Iscariot is the disciple who identifies Jesus with a kiss so that the Roman guards may arrest him, and has paid 30 pieces of silver for his betrayal.
01:20:40But this text offers a very different reason for his action.
01:20:45According to the Gospel of Judas, there was a special, unique relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and Judas.
01:20:52Jesus said to him, Step away from the others, and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom.
01:20:59It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal.
01:21:06This theme of secret knowledge leads most scholars to date the origin of the text to about 150 A.D., and link it to the early Gnostic movement.
01:21:16These were individuals who sought knowledge, which is what Gnostic means, people who sought a higher level of knowledge, the secrets, the mysteries of the universe.
01:21:26And the Judah story is one of those secrets that is not necessarily for everybody.
01:21:33In 1945, at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, a cache of Gnostic writings was found.
01:21:39The texts were probably hidden there after they were declared heretical by the early church.
01:21:44The early Christian church fathers who became Orthodox, who represented the point of view that became dominant within Christianity, saw Gnostics as very dangerous.
01:21:56And they wrote a number of books against them, presumably because they were very popular.
01:22:01A major tenet of Gnosticism was that the physical world was a barrier to be overcome.
01:22:07And this idea, not the Bible's traditional 30 pieces of silver, is what provides the motivation in the Gospel of Judas.
01:22:16Judas had intimate conversations with Jesus for days before that Passover meal, in which Jesus revealed to Judas the mystical Gnostic secrets of the universe, culminating in a simple directive.
01:22:34Truly I say to you, Judas, you will exceed all of them, for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.
01:22:44Somehow, there's an understanding that the inner man has to come out, the inner person, the individual inside of bodies of flesh must be released.
01:22:56He must be, as it were, taken out of the prison.
01:23:01Now, that's a different theology.
01:23:03It presumes that Jesus is the spirit.
01:23:06He's not a true human being.
01:23:08His body is simply a fleshly encasement, which must be stripped away from him.
01:23:13And Judas is the one who does it.
01:23:15It stands completely at odds with what the New Testament Gospels themselves say.
01:23:22In the Gospel of Matthew, for example, Judas is completely filled with remorse at what he's done.
01:23:29To turn that into a very good thing would be to contradict Scripture.
01:23:34Jesus has to die, and Judas is the disciple, not some evil individual, not the great villain of all time, but one, in fact, who knew Jesus perhaps closer than any of the others, who was destined to do this.
01:23:51But their spirits did not dare to stand before Jesus, except for Judas Iscariot.
01:23:57Judas said to him, I know who you are, and where you have come from.
01:24:02The Gospel of Judas implies that it is Judas' status as the apostle closest to Jesus, as much as his so-called betrayal, that turns the other disciples against him.
01:24:13And it hints at how that animosity may have played a role in his ultimate fate.
01:24:22Matthew is the only Gospel which narrates the suicide of Judas.
01:24:26The other place where Judas' death is mentioned is in the book of Acts, which is written by the same person who wrote the Gospel of Luke.
01:24:33In Acts, though, Judas doesn't hang himself. What happens is he bursts forth from his midst, and he spills his intestines on the ground.
01:24:44But the Gospel of Judas suggests a different end. Judas said, For I have seen a great vision. In the vision I saw myself as the twelve disciples were stoning me and persecuting me severely.
01:24:58This idea of competition among the apostles, and the existence of a predominant apostle, seems to have been one of the causes of dissent among early Christians.
01:25:09We have evidence that early Christians lined up with some of Jesus' followers about as far back as you can go.
01:25:16Some Christians aligning themselves with Philip, some with Andrew, some with Thomas, some with Mary, some with Peter, et cetera, et cetera.
01:25:23This allowed, then, for the kind of the infighting among these groups, as different people claimed that their apostle was the chief apostle.
01:25:32It's probably the normal process of trying to see how are we going to run this community?
01:25:38Jesus is gone. Who's in charge?
01:25:41Some scholars see these texts as evidence that almost from its inception, there was not a single Christianity, but many.
01:25:49The significance of this discovery of the Gospel of Judas is that it contributes to our understanding of just how diverse early Christianity was.
01:25:58But the early church had little tolerance for this diversity.
01:26:03Sects like this were not welcome in Christianity, because in those formative years and decades, it was vital to come up with a single overwhelming doctrine that everyone must adhere to.
01:26:17Christianity was a faith that focused on an orthodoxy, a right way of thinking.
01:26:22And if you deviate from that, then what we have is not a single faith, but multitude of splinter groups that will become extinct.
01:26:32The Gnostics would be just one of many early Christian sects that were suppressed, persecuted, and eventually all but wiped out.
01:26:39Christians in the second and the third centuries had wide-ranging debates and battles, battles for belief.
01:26:46Only one group emerged as victorious from these battles.
01:26:49Only one of these groups ended up growing and growing and growing, and as it grew, it shunted to the side the others until it got so large that it could declare that it was the orthodox point of view.
01:27:01And once it got to that point where it had conquered all opposition, it rewrote the history of the engagement and claimed that it had always been the majority.
01:27:11And those are the books that we inherited, the ones that claimed that this is the view that we've always had.
01:27:16Well, now we know that that's not true.
01:27:19Those early unorthodox Christians who were vanquished left little behind.
01:27:24But a few fragments of their beliefs, their stories, and their traditions have survived.
01:27:29And it is these lost texts that continue to provoke debate centuries after they were written.
01:27:35It's the struggle between those that want to argue for the rule of faith and apostolic tradition,
01:27:42and for those that want to argue for a diverse notion of what Christianity is in the plural.
01:27:48It is a conflict involving questions both of scholarship and faith, and one that will not be settled any time soon.
01:27:55And just when we think that the very last word has been said, the landscape changes, and usually in completely unexpected ways.
01:28:03And sometimes we think we're really onto something, and then someone comes along and debunks the whole thing.
01:28:09But that's the beauty of it all.
01:28:12It means that it's an ongoing mystery as well as an incredible detective saga.
01:28:19The
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