Cultish: Nicaea & the Lost Gospels, Pt. 2

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YouTube channel today, subscribe and hit the bell. See you there, guys. All right, welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Koltish, entering the kingdom of the

Kolts. My name is Jeremiah Roberts, one of the co -hosts here. I am joined once again by Andrew, the Super Sleuth of the show.

Good to have you back as we are following a very interesting linear Indiana Jones timeline with a little red line going across from Egypt to the

Roman Empire and all that. We got papyrus, we got Roman empires, we got a little bit of everything going on this episode.

How have you enjoyed this episode so far, Andrew? Oh man, I'm loving it. Just right after we finished the first episode,

I told Wes before a little break, I was like, dude, I'm going to go back and listen to that episode like four or five times for myself and just try to memorize a bunch of stuff.

It was, there were so many gold nuggets in there and I'm just very thankful for Wes and his time to help us out, to help us think through some of these issues that are very important for us to be well -versed on.

Awesome. Well, Wes, appreciate you joining us again, man. It's good to have you back on. Yeah, I appreciate that.

I wish that academia and archaeology was actually like Indiana Jones. It's a lot more boring and staring at dead languages than it is running through ancient caves with giant boulders chasing you.

At least hopefully like the first three movies, not the last two because there's only three in canon.

Speaking of canon, there's only three Indiana Jones movies. Let's be particular about that. That being said,

Andrew's probably laughing here because it's always my movie stuff that comes up. But yeah, let's jump in. So we were kind of talking about Constantine and talking about the political thing.

We're kind of really talking about Diocletian. Constantine, his conversion, becoming a

Christian, take us into that. What's the story behind that? Because according to the narrative that gets pushed, he was a

Christian by the time he made this political decision. What's the real, what do we know from sources and everything?

What's the real story of Constantine's conversion to Christianity? Yeah, you know what's interesting?

Here in my office I have, and if you're just listening to this on audio, you might not be able to see it, but I have an actual coin from 307 to 337

AD that has Constantine on it. It's a Constantinian Roman coin, which was gifted to me by a mentor of mine,

Jim Parker, who taught at Southern Evangelical Assembly for a long time. It has the sun god

Sol on the back. So this is clearly before his conversion because the coinage changes.

It has Constantine's face on one side, and then it has Sol Invictus, the conquering sun, on the other side.

So there obviously was a time when Constantine was not a Christian, when he was a sun worshiper.

There's evidence that up until about 323, Constantine did appear to have a level of allegiance to the sun god.

Eusebius' writing, The Life of Constantine, appears to make it clear that there does come a dramatic shift in Constantine's thinking away from paganism and exclusively to Christianity in around 323

AD. So it's here at the famous Battle of Milvian Bridge that the narrative of Constantine's conversion takes place.

So the story goes that Constantine prayed for divine intervention and had seen some sort of vision in the sky, which he or his advisors had interpreted as coming from the

Christian god. So Constantine's victory appears to have been positively favored towards him in the direction of Christianity.

So some stories say that he saw the vision of the Cairo, those first two letters of the word

Christos, Christ in Greek, what looks like a PX, and then he heard the words, in this conquer.

Others have him just having a vision of Christ and being moved by that.

But either way, it's at this point that you have some sort of shift in Constantine's perspective.

Whether that story is actually historical or not is a separate situation. But either way,

Constantine has this shift in his orientation away from sun worship, which is sun as in S -O -N in the sky, and towards Christianity.

Now, prior to Constantine's conversion, Christianity had been an illegal religion, which we talked about last time. And Christians weren't allowed legal rights or rights to assembly and were pretty heavily persecuted, particularly as we mentioned under Diocletian.

And it's in this time period that Constantine, as I mentioned last time, meets with Licinius, who's running things in the east, and they meet at Milan, which is in Italy, and they issue the

Edict of Milan, which decriminalizes Christianity in 313. And it did significantly affect

Christians as it decriminalized Christianity and allowed them to worship in public and also declared that any property or possessions that had been confiscated from Christians leading up to that time would be returned.

So, there's a huge shift within his perspective towards being very… what's the word

I'm looking for? He's not anti -Christian, but very pro -Christian, but not in a way that sets

Christianity up. Constantine sometimes is referred to as the emperor who made Christianity the official religion of Rome.

He didn't actually do that. That's under an emperor later. But he did decriminalize

Christianity and appears to, at some degree, whether you want to argue that he had a conversion, he at least verbalizes some sort of conversion.

Yeah. So, why form a council then in 325

AD? So, what was the impetus behind that? Was he the one that formalized the council? How exactly did that work?

Because just… sorry to add in, but because Nicaea and Constantine, those two things kind of go hand in hand in the argumentation of this is how they decided what would be in the canon, what would not be according to how people would articulate that narrative.

Yeah, yeah. So, the Council of Nicaea is kind of this easy, let's put a pin in a geographical area and on the timeframe of history as to when the books of the

Bible were established. The problem with that narrative is that there's no historical evidence for it.

I mean, we actually have the documents that come from the Council of Nicaea. We have the

Nicene Creed, which has been set at the center of historical Christianity for the last however many thousand plus years.

And then we have some writings that come out from that. But this council had nothing to do with any books of the

Bible, not to mention the Gnostic books that are sometimes ascribed to it, the

Bible. Because at this point in history, Gnosticism that we sort of alluded to last time, we talked a little bit more about Gnosticism, but Gnosticism in general, this idea of secret knowledge, the

Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Gnostic Gospel of Philip, those types of things, it had almost completely died out by this time in the fourth century.

Gnosticism had its heyday between the middle of the second and middle of the third centuries. And by the fourth century, it had almost completely lost traction.

So it wasn't like Constantine was kind of vying for the

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John over and above Peter, Thomas, Philip, and Mary. The Gnostic Gospels were really, if not out of favor, they were completely ignored because they weren't even on the table.

In fact, if you read anything that comes out of the Gospel or the Council of Nicaea, what you find is that they're quoting the

New Testament documents as if they have authority already. So it's not like they're voting on anything or they're making some kind of list.

The argument of Nicaea was concerning the place of the deity of Christ, not even that Jesus was

God or not. And everybody at the Council of Nicaea believed Jesus was God. The argument was whether this bishop from North Africa named

Arius, who argued that there was a time when the sun was not, who believed that Jesus was

God, just believed that he was a lesser positioned God in the

Godhead because he was created by the Father, everyone at the Council of Nicaea believed Jesus was

God. So in that sense, the argument was about how do we understand the position of Christ within the

Godhead. Does that make sense so far? Maybe in contrast to that,

I'm going to read another just a segment from Medium, just so you can kind of get an idea of where the narrative would differ in contrast to what you're saying.

So this is from the article from medium .com. He's talking about the first Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, and he talks about all the different people that converged together, which you talked about.

But he says, quote, Constantine was given absolute power to wield a state faith, carefully selecting

Christian thinkers who represented a particular point of view. Constantine, along with Hoschus of Corduba, a confidant who had planned to support the emperor in defining a state religion, along with the

Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, who was driving force in incorporating many texts from ancient

Egyptian scripts, which have been translated into Greek for the Roman Empire, stealing the basic tenets of Christian ideology.

Constantine became solely responsible for the content of the newly formed Nicene Canon of Christianity.

With this new Christian Bible, contents were to be used for further political agendas that had little to do with religion.

So his argument is that this is a huge political thing and that Constantine would have had a lot of power or political motivation with making this move at Nicaea.

So that's what he articulates. This brings back so many memories of Dan Brown and Da Vinci Code a little bit, but that's what he's saying.

So in contrast to that, how would you bounce back off of that or push back on that? Yeah, it's interesting.

I remember when Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code came out and how much it affected the church. And I think later on when

I started studying church history, I realized that if even Christians knew a little bit about church history, the

Da Vinci Code would never have made the splash that it made because the testimony of church history is so different than what's communicated in the

Da Vinci Code that the red flags would have gone up immediately. And this is one of those, right?

We have no surviving minutes or recordings from the Council of Nicaea while it was happening.

There are, however, some primary sources. So we have the creed and the list of church leaders who signed it.

We have 20 canon rules. So nothing to do with the canon of the New Testament, but an official list of rules that were passed, none of which, by the way, have anything remotely to do with the contents of the books of the

Bible or which books of scripture are in or not. We also have a synodal letter that was released by telling churches that the council was going to be held.

And we have a letter, a later letter written by Eusebius, who was the

Bishop of Caesarea, and Athanasius, who was at the time just a secretary who was present.

He later becomes a bishop in North Africa. But we have those documents.

So we actually have primary source documents written in the

New Testament that we can translate, that we can say, okay, what was going on here? And none of that has any hint or indication that it had anything to do with the canon of scripture, what books are in scripture, what books are considered inspired.

So who was there? Well, this is where actually the article that you just read,

Jeremiah, actually gets some facts right, or at least in terms of the quote, unquote, official facts.

We're not actually sure who is there, but numbers range from 200 to 318. Now, what we can say is it's somewhere in the range of that.

Now, we get the official number. What was the number that he used in that article?

I think it was 318, wasn't it? Is that what he said? I think so. I had to pull it back up.

I want to. Because I think that that's what Athanasius, that's the number of the individuals who he says were there.

Now, it's probably somewhere in the range of 250 to 300. Now, Constantine's involvement, as far as we can tell, was in an opening statement he gave where he pleaded with the church leaders to establish peace and truth among themselves.

But the extent of Constantine's participation within the council is completely unknown. Anyone ascribing sort of a central or pivotal role is basically making an argument from silence.

We have no evidence that Constantine played any pivotal role. We just know that he pleaded with them to establish peace because he was sick of them arguing.

You don't want the Christians arguing because if there's Christians on one end of the empire and the other end of the empire, you want them to be peaceable.

And Eusebius, in a later writing, seems to put some emphasis on Constantine's oversight, but Constantine himself doesn't seem to do that at all, which is if you're an emperor and you actually did have a lot of power at this thing, you'd think you would emphasize that in some sort of later writing, but he doesn't do any of that.

Trevor Burrus No, that's good. I mean, just to think about that, that's where political – where Constantine's at, him just wanting to seek the peace and even his direct involvement.

You think about right now in the United States here, obviously we have the Biden administration, and you go to every other week, there's probably some highlight footage of somebody on some sort of committee.

Ted Cruz is interrogating some lady about something, and she's given some sort of wishy -washy, like how much could a woodchuck chuck of wood answer?

But it's like, yeah, Biden's the president, but he's probably not in that room when whatever that hearing's going on.

When you look at C -SPAN, there's always some sort of meeting going on with something. You have all these different government agencies, and just because you have one person who's the president doesn't mean he's intimately involved in all of them.

But that's really interesting because usually what's articulated is that Constantine is just sitting there in the middle of this, kind of like George Montgomery Burns, like, yes, it's all coming to plan.

But according to primary sources, there's no really record of him just being there.

He wanted it to happen, to have this peace happen, but he wasn't – there's no evidence that he was actually even directly there, like at Nicaea?

Well, we know he was there at least at the beginning. Okay. And I mean, if we can say one thing about politicians is they want to take credit for things, right?

You know, whether we're talking about Biden, where you guys are, or Trudeau, where I am, politicians love to take credit.

And yet we have no evidence of any sort of direct influence or coercive involvement of Constantine at Nicaea whatsoever.

And so I think that does speak volumes because if this was a power grab, if this was a power move, why not situate yourself advantageously?

I mean, when I was in Egypt, one of the things that stood out to me is that there are lots of inscriptions that we know of pharaohs who say that they won certain battles where we know they did not win battles, but they were draws.

But they portray themselves as if they did win the battles because nobody likes to make a giant megalithic structure that says it was a draw.

That's not great. And so what you do is you say, well, I actually won and I established peace.

And that's far better than saying, you know, there were an equal amount of people destroyed and killed on my side as there was on the other side.

And we just stopped the battle there. And so we have a situation where Constantine has an opportunity to communicate a direct involvement at this thing, and he doesn't.

And so was Constantine involved in Nicaea? Now, although we're not actually sure what the level he was involved, he was involved, but everything we know about Nicaea or Constantine's involvement, it has nothing to do with the books of the

Bible. And the council was called to establish what was the majority view of Jesus.

And the way that scripture was used points unanimously to the recognition of books that had already been recognized and established as scripture.

So Nicaea quotes the scripture. It doesn't argue what is and isn't scripture. What's up, everybody?

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Let's flush that out just a little bit too. Thinking as someone goes, okay, I concede West that they did not formalize the canon at Nicaea, but what they did do is they actually as people were the ones who chose what

Christian doctrine was. It's them. They created the Christian doctrine. There was no agreement of Christian doctrine before then.

They even had varying forms of scripture, let's say, in their interpretations, but it was here men determined what the doctrine was and it has influences.

How would we respond or think theologically about that? Well, I think that what that does is it ignores the previous 300 years of church history where Christians who are showing up at Nicaea, some of them very well may have had a few less limbs due to persecution because of the faith that they held onto.

One of the issues immediately before the Council of Nicaea was an issue related to the persecution that we've been talking about over these last two episodes where Christians were asked to call

Caesar Lord and those who wouldn't do that were either thrown in prison or were faced physical harm to do so.

You had what was called the Donatist controversy where there was when

Christianity was decriminalized and Christians were let out of prison and were coming into the woodwork of the church, there was a big discussion as to do we allow within the context of church discipline these

Christians to be part of our church community? Those who literally said that Caesar was

Lord over and above Jesus being Lord, are they allowed to be within the church?

And there was a legitimate question as to if you were baptized by someone who gave the pinch of incense on the altar of Caesar, is your baptism legitimate?

These were questions that the early church had because this was a big issue. And so the Donatist controversy was a big issue within the early church and this is leading up into the context of the

Council of Nicaea. So there's been persecution for their profession of the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit being co -equally and co -eternally God. Now that language comes out of Nicaea, so they wouldn't have necessarily used the

Trinitarian formulaic language that we use today, but they would have believed it in some form or another because it's scriptural, it's biblical, it comes from the pages of scripture.

And so they're leading up to Nicaea, they already understand who they believe

Jesus is, they already understand how they understand that fitting within the context of the

Godhead and within the understanding of the revelation of God. And so to then say that, okay, well,

Constantine calls this committee, he calls this council, and he's going to tell them what to believe.

Well, there are people showing up at the Council of Nicaea who had family members who had died in prison, who maybe had lost limbs because of persecution.

Are you really telling me that Constantine's going to say, actually, you believe this now?

And they're going to be like, well, I guess if Constantine said it, we're going to believe it. Is that really truly realistic to what we see happening in history?

I don't think it is. I think the Christians were willing to go to their deaths for their profession of faith.

And so if we hypothesize the Da Vinci Godesque argument that then

Constantine, the Roman Emperor, who Christians have already been willing to die under, is going to say, these are the books, and this is the doctrine that they're just going to roll over.

I think that's a pretty silly narrative given the previous 200 years of church history.

And so the question I have then, and just continuing off of what you're just saying here, is that, so in this article he talks about, he makes some emphasis on some things post

Nicaea. And this is what, some things that he says is, he says, so some roughly 760 books, many of which were firsthand gospels of the life of Jesus, did not make it into the first Nicene Creed, which is the foundation of every

Christian church to this day, all decided by one man, Emperor Constantine, absolute ruler of the world's greatest empire and the world's largest faith.

He goes on to say, although the Nicene Creed did not officially decide upon the content of the

Christian Bible, Constantine made it very clear which gospels he considered acceptable. He commissioned a creation of 50 copies of the first Christian Bible, which contained only the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

So what happened to the other gospels? Of the other seven councils recognized in whole, or in part, by both the

Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Church's ecumenical, all were called by the Roman Emperor, who gave them legal status across the entire

Roman Empire. And then he continues and says that there were additional councils, and one in 382

AD, a church council banned all other gospels from being read anywhere. All other books, many which were cherished by true

Christians for generations, these scriptures had been relinquished for fear of persecution and imminent death.

And then he basically goes on to say, back when we talked at the very beginning of the episode, this was the case up until these gospels were rediscovered in the 1800s.

So maybe my question would be, how would you respond to that? But also one thing maybe we only kind of touched on a little bit, the relationship of actual

Gnostics and the Gnostic gospel, because there is a narrative sometimes that is perpetuated that it's actually the

Gnostics who were under immense persecution because of their belief in Gnostic gospels.

That seems to be what he's implying. So what's your take on all that? I would love to see his primary sources, because they're non -existent.

I don't fault people who espouse these types of narratives, because I think they're just going on what they are told.

I think this is a lot of parroting of, I've heard these things said over and over and over.

They're in the Da Vinci Code. They're in TikTok and YouTube videos. Joe Rogan is espousing them.

This person is communicating them, and that person is repeating them. And so I think it's unfortunately a product of our time, of the internet age, where we don't have people who are questioning things enough to go to the primary firsthand sources.

So now this person, I believe, has a PhD, right?

They have doctor on the front of their name, at least. So they should know better,

I guess. I don't know what their PhD is in. If it's in, mathematics, then that's irrelevant to the topic.

But this is a combination of me feeling a little bit of empathy and having a little bit of a headache, because you hear these things so often.

But like I said at the beginning, the fact is there are no primary sources for it. And it's often portrayed as if the early

Christians are just given a pile of books and they have to choose. Like I said before, it's not a matter of choosing.

The early church recognized the books that had been given to them by the apostles, right?

The church was a product of scripture. Scripture was not a product of the church. And I get a lot of pushback on that from both my conspiratorial friends and my

Roman Catholic friends, because they want to also see the scripture as being established by the

Roman Catholic church. But I don't think that history bears that out. I think that what the unanimous communication of the early church is that they knew the books that had been handed down to them.

And the conversation of canon was one of clarifying what are the books that come from either an apostle or someone who knew an apostle of someone who knew

Jesus or someone who knew someone who knew Jesus. So are there questions about some of the books that end up in our

Bibles? Yes. But it's books like 2nd and 3rd John and 2nd

Peter, because there are a lot of letters that are being purported to be written by Peter and a lot of letters that are being purported to be written by John.

We got to make sure we're doing our homework on this. And so any of the question of the books is one of the church doing due diligence to let the dust settle on the canon.

But by the time you get to Nicaea in the 4th century, that conversation, as far as I'm concerned, is over.

And so even the canons after that are saying, here's what scripture is, they're not putting a pronouncement on that.

They're just establishing what was already held at that point. Nicaea understands what is scripture.

And we know that because we have conversations leading up to that.

We have canon lists that are leading up to that. Do canon lists differ? Yes, they do.

But by the time you get to Nicaea, you have the established 66 books of the

Protestant canon. And there's a conversation about what we refer to as the Apocrypha or the

Deuterocanonical books that are in the Catholic Bible. I think that's almost a separate conversation. But I think if we're retrieving the earliest books that get us to the time frame of Jesus, we're talking about the 27 books of the

New Testament. And if we're talking about the Jewish canon, we're talking about the 39 books of the

Old Testament Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevim, and the Ketuvim. And so the

Gnostic Gospels, these other writings, did they exist? Yes.

But like I said, they've almost completely fell out of fashion and belief by the time the fourth century happens.

The Gnostics were a dying group. They were a dying group by the time that the

Council of Nicaea is called. They're fragmented. Even calling the

Gnostics, I think, does a disservice because the Gnostics aren't one group.

It's kind of like, I don't know, have either of you guys been to India? No, I've considered at one time potentially going on a mission trip, but that was eons ago.

Yeah. Because Hinduism is a very confusing religion because I've been to India.

In fact, this is an entirely different conversation. I actually had a short -lived Bollywood career. But I went to India in 2012 to be a special skilled extra in a

Bollywood movie. And you talk to Hindus and one Hindu is telling you that Hinduism is polytheistic.

And you walk down the street and you talk to another Hindu and they're saying, no, no, no, Hinduism is monotheistic.

They're just all different representations of the same God. And then you walk further and you talk to another Hindu and they're telling you that Hinduism is non -theistic.

There is no God. The universe just has different avatars and representations of the universe who is an impersonal force itself.

And so that's kind of what you're dealing with in Gnosticism. And we have this overarching concept of Gnosticism.

But realistically, Gnosticism is not one thing as much as it's an umbrella term.

And so the Gnostics were not unified themselves. And so you have differentiations throughout the

Gnostic Gospels of what they're even communicating. The single thread being that Gnosticism is communicating what is the antithesis of biblical

Christianity. Because the Greek word means knowledge.

And the Gnostics believe that you gained salvation through understanding secret knowledge.

So how about I put it this way? In historical, grounded, biblical

Christianity, salvation is something that's outside of yourself done on behalf by the finished work of Christ's work on the cross.

So along the lines of 2 Corinthians 5 .21 and Hebrews 10 .10, that for our sake the

Father made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in Christ we might become the righteousness of God.

And by that will of the Father, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

However, in the range of Gnostic belief, salvation was something inside of you that you realize that you unlock via secret knowledge.

So it's not just that Jesus is divine. Jeremiah and Andrew are divine.

And you actually have aspects of that divinity that upon realization through understanding of secret knowledge, you're able to attain salvation and overcome the material world.

So that goes back to the docetic thing that I was talking about.

The material world is evil. The spiritual world is good. You unlock that by secret knowledge. That's completely passe by the

Council of Nicaea. So any type of discussion about the gospel of Thomas, gospel of Peter, gospel of Mary, gospel of Judas being contention, that wouldn't have even been on the table because the

Gnostics were a dying group by that time. Yeah. Andrew, do you have any questions real quick?

Because I want to get a kind of a breakdown of some of those gospels. But go ahead. What's on your mind,

Andrew? Yeah. What are some of those early primary sources we have of people speaking of certain books in the

New Testament, like affirming sections? Not really affirming, but recognizing books that we have today in the

New Testament. What are some of the earliest primary sources for that? And I just want to comment real quick. It makes sense to you that people like Joe Rogan or some of those other popular figures like to try to make arguments in favor of Gnosticism because they themselves look for knowledge and secret knowledge through drug use and means of other things.

So of course, you have to deny and try to reinvent what happens historically, especially with biblical

Christianity, because if biblical Christianity is true, then what you're doing is false and it's also sinful. So there's got to be some way to try to justify the actions that you're making.

And one way to do it is you have to deny who God is and you got to deny his word in order to feel justified or even righteous in sinful decisions, which makes sense to me why they would look to attack it.

But historically, as Wes has been shown, those arguments just do not stand up. They don't stand up.

Yeah. You can understand why it's palatable to the modern audience who is kind of sympathetic to these new age ideas that the divinity is unlocked in you.

And then you find these ancient Gnostic Gospels and that's what they're communicating. I mean, there's other things that you probably don't realize that are problematic within them.

I mean, the last line of the Gospel of Thomas communicates that women are not worthy of salvation and that every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.

That's the last line of the Gospel of Thomas. So transgenderism aside, that's kind of the message.

And that leads into a whole other conversation. But you're exactly right.

These ideas are far more palatable. And I think we want conspiracy.

We like conspiracy. The history of the canon of scripture in some ways is more complicated than we can imagine, but in other ways is far more simple.

And we don't like simple. We want there to be suppression. We want there to be conspiracy.

And so to simply say, well, okay, but what are the earliest books that get us the timeframe of Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?

Oh, that's boring. What about these other ones that are more exciting that portray Jesus as a pagan mystic?

Well, those are more interesting. Well, okay, they might be more interesting, but Jesus was a first century

Jew. So what's more likely? That Jesus was a pagan mystic who is more palatable to the pagan audience, or that Jesus was a

Jewish Messiah who made audacious claims, claims to be God himself, predicted his own death and resurrection, and then did it.

And I don't know about you guys, but people who rise from the dead have more credibility and authority than people who don't rise from the dead.

And so that's not palatable for an ancient pagan audience. And so I think it's far more realistic to say that the pagan mystic

Jesus comes later and is appropriated and written back onto the lips of Jesus than the actual first century

Jewish Jesus who was a Jew, who did live in the first century and is communicated as such within Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

So a lot of times, Wes, when I'm going through the grocery store, I will see some book by Time Life, you know, it's every six months, there's always some book with some hidden books of Jesus, some secret things of Jesus.

You always see, it's like every six months to a year, there's something on Time Magazine, Time Life, Life Magazine, maybe

I'm mixing them all up together. But there's always something on, mentioning about particular gospels. So I'll mention a few and kind of maybe summarize what they are and what would be the main reasons why

Christians wouldn't accept them. So you mentioned before, the first one is the Gospel of Thomas. If you just reiterate, where does that come from?

What's the dating of that? Why wasn't that included within the canon? And was it a vast grand conspiracy to suppress that?

What's it all about? And why wasn't that chosen? Why would Christians back then say, this is a no go?

Yeah, this is a great one. Because when I went to Egypt, I actually got to go look at the actual Gospel of Thomas.

It's in the Coptic Library in Cairo. And it was a really unique experience because the travel guide who

I was with, I didn't know very much about it. And so I was actually translating in front of him the

Gospel of Thomas in Coptic, which is ancient Egyptian, for him and giving a lesson to some bystanders as to what the

Gospel of Thomas was. So that was a very unique experience. And then we headed out into the Nag Hammadi Desert, where it was discovered by these

Egyptian farmers in 1945 and brought back to this little village called

Al Qasr, which we also traveled to, told that story in the 45 degree heat, where a sandstorm hit.

It's quite the narrative. You're going to have to stay tuned to apologeticscanada .com for the drop of all that story.

But the Gospel of Thomas exists in four manuscripts. The earliest are three

Greek fragments, P1, which contains verses 26 to 31 and verses 77.

And then P oxy 654, which contains verses one to seven.

And then P oxy 655, which contains verses 36 to 40. And then there's the famous fourth century copy written in Coptic, which was part of the

Nag Hammadi Codex II, which is the one that I had the unique opportunity to go see and actually view myself and translate through.

And I think what we see there within the Gospel of Thomas is, you know, it can be dated to the second century.

I think it's probably the earliest of these Gnostic Gospels. Some argue that it's proto -Gnostic, that it actually predates what we call

Christian Gnosticism. And there are hints of the Gnostic flavor to it coming onto the scene, but that is not full -bred

Gnosticism quite yet. And you could argue that. But either way, there's a Gnostic flavor to it.

And so it's popping up in the second century, which is still, mind you,

Thomas is dead because the second century is long after the disciple would have been living, but it's not a

Gospel as we think of it. So let me throw it out to you guys. When you think of, when I say, okay, what does a

Gospel look like? What do you think of? What Jesus did on the cross, the good news, the news of the eternal

God taking on flesh and dying on the cross for my sins. That's the Gospel. Yeah. Yeah. But also for me,

I remember there's some books I had in my assembly of just books in my house growing up as a kid where I kind of loved the historical part of the

Bible. When you think of the Gospels, it correlates to real things going on in the culture.

So I remember one thing that blew my mind as a kid is the story of when Jesus goes out and he says, when he's about to do the last supper, and I think he says, like, look for a man, like carrying a pot on his head.

And I guess what was very interesting, if I remember, is that the reason that would have stuck out like a sore thumb, because usually it was like the women who did that.

So it's kind of like one of those like cultural nods and, you know, there's mentions of coins, you know, like Jesus mentioned the coin.

And when you were holding up the coin, I was like, oh, Peter, Caesar went to Caesar's, you know, that's actually something that was done.

So you kind of see there's things that in the gospel that coincide with real physical low places, they're holding, they're mentioning items that are real intangible, they're just incongruent and in proximity that would have been taking place in the first century.

So there's like a real gritty historical tangibility when you read through the Gospels that also coincides with the theology as well, too.

Yeah, amen. Yeah, I think what you're both communicating, Andrew and Jeremiah, is that there's this narrative, right?

There's this narrative which communicates something that's tangible, which you can place on a timeline and actually represents people and places and times that exist in history.

That's not what you get in the Gospel of Thomas. So unlike the, say, the Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which have the beginning, middle and end of the story, the life, or arguably the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the

Gospel of Thomas is just a list of sayings. It's 114 sayings of Jesus between his disciples and Jesus.

So Peter says this, Jesus responds. Mary says this, Jesus responds. It's back and forth like that and that's where you have,

I mentioned the last line of the Gospel of Thomas, where they say, let

Mary leave us for women are not worthy of life. You know, something that is always very good to say in front of a group of people.

And Jesus says, don't worry because I'm going to make her to resemble you.

And then like I said before, every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven. But it's that back and forth.

It's just that someone says this, someone else says this, someone else says this, someone else says this.

That's all 114 verses. And that's what we have fragmented in those early Gospel fragments, but collated in its entirety within the fourth century

Gospel of Thomas found in the Nag Hammadi library. And I think what you see there is a development within the text.

So you see, and one of the things we can point to, and I have an article on my website on WesleyHuff .com

about why I did the Gospel of Thomas late. One of the reasons for that is I think we see a clear development between our earliest

Greek manuscripts and our later Coptic manuscripts. Coptic being the language, like I said before, of ancient

Egyptian. And what they do is they portray Jesus once again as a Greek pagan mystic.

And so I think it's representing a later development that's making Jesus more palatable to that audience.

But fundamentally, what we're dealing with is a writing which is coming later, which is ascribed to an early follower of Jesus, but realistically has no connection to the historical

Jesus who walked the dusty streets of first century Galilee and Judea and died and rose again.

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Talk to you later guys. And then also one thing that's mentioned in the article is the gospel of Peter.

You did mention earlier how I mentioned things that are heretical. And again, what he implied, and a lot of times would be implied if you're walking down the shopping mall from going to a

Whole Foods, there's probably one right now. I'll leave and I'll probably go to Sprouts going to grab some food on the way home. And there's probably going to be a magazine and pretty much put my money on that, right?

Let's just say they bring up the gospel of Peter is probably going to be asserted in that magazine or article. Oh, well, this is something that, you know, the same

Peter who denied Jesus, who, you know, was restored at the end of the gospel of John and was crucified upside down.

Like, Oh, he actually kind of wrote, he has his own firsthand account too, but somehow that was lost and that gives a different perspective.

But that was, again, then the Constantine narrative comes in, oops, that, uh, the Constantine narrative comes in that somehow this was taken out.

So all that being said, gospel of Peter, what, what do we know about that? Why, why would this, would this be, why would this be a no go?

Why, why wasn't this picking picked as far as it goes? Yeah. Well, the simple answer would be that, um, the earliest you can date the gospel of Peter is one 50 ad, which is, uh, long after Peter's dead.

So if that comes up, if you only have a couple of minutes, all you need to say is I'm interested in the actual historical sources that get me to Jesus and the gospel of Peter in it, the gospel of Peter disqualifies itself because we can date it no earlier than one 50, probably more between one 50 and two 50 ad.

So that's an outright disqualification. Secondly, the gospel of Peter not only communicates this docetic heresy, which denies the physicality of Jesus, but it also communicates a complete lack of understanding of Jewish, uh, practice at the time.

And one of the reasons for that is that, you know, you read the resurrection stories in the gospels and they're actually rather matter of fact, you know, it would have been really great if the gospels in the

Bible told you exactly what happened at the resurrection. Wouldn't that have been a great way to know what it looked like for Jesus to come out of the tomb.

The gospels don't tell us that they actually record what happens after the fact the

Roman guards run away and then you have the women coming to the tomb and the tomb is empty. What we have in the gospel of Peter is actually the camera rolling on the resurrection event.

And this was, this stands out to me pretty, uh, starkly because when I did one of my language exams for my doctoral, um, requirements,

I was given a section of the gospel of Peter, this section of the resurrection event to site translate.

So it stands out really stark to me because, um, it was kind of like I was put in the moment and I had to site translate a section of the gospel of Peter on the spot.

Uh, but what we see in that section of the gospel of Peter is the camera rolling on the resurrection, the tomb opens and Jesus comes out and his heads are in the, his head is in the clouds.

He's like a giant nine, 90 foot tall Jesus. And there are angels flanking him on either side and the cross comes out of the tomb and the cross comes out of the tomb and the cross is prophesying.

But not only that, the thing that sticks out that actually identifies the gospel of Peter as not being first century is that the gospel of Peter, what

I think is that it's actually an apologetic against the bad testimony of the women being the first eyewitnesses of the tomb.

So the women being the first eyewitnesses of the tomb is actually quite embarrassing within a first century context because women are not good eyewitnesses.

The gospel of Peter corrects that by having the Jewish and Roman officials camping out in front of the tomb, which is something that would never have happened.

A Jewish priest would never have camped out in front of a tomb, a body, which would have made him virtually unclean over Passover weekend, right?

It's just, it's not going to happen. And yet that's exactly what is portrayed in the gospel of Peter. So whoever is writing the gospel of Peter has no understanding of Jewish custom and cultural practice of religious purification.

It just would not have happened. But they're trying to correct the fact that the biblical gospels say that the women were the first eyewitnesses and that's obviously bad eyewitness testimony.

So who do we want there? We want everybody who's a good eyewitness testimony. We want Romans and we want

Jewish priests. Okay, let's put them there. But this, along with the dating, disqualifies it by the content that is included within the gospel.

This just does not represent someone who is in first century Judea, nevermind

Peter, who is a first century Jew, who understands the cultural practice of the day.

Yeah. Andrew, what's on your mind? I was thinking too, what's interesting about the gospels and the epistles that we have is the uniformity of even like the teaching of doctrine.

Like it's all very uniform. It's cohesive. It flows together. The thoughts make sense.

There's no contradictions on who Christ is, what the gospel is, what our salvation is.

But in terms of these lost quote unquote gospels, like the gospel of Mary or the gospel of Peter, gospel of Thomas, are they uniform?

Right? Are they actually cohesive in teaching altogether the same thing? Or is every single one of them contradicting to the other one?

Right? Because you would think that the gospel of Thomas, unless a woman makes herself a man, right?

But then we have the gospel of Mary. Well, she probably shouldn't have a gospel unless Mary became a man or something, and then had some, you know, something to say about Jesus.

So in these lost gospels, is there a uniformity between them or are they all contradictory? No, there's no uniformity between them because the

Gnostics were a very fragmented group. And so that they're not necessarily corroborating with one another, which is something we don't see with the gospels either.

But one of the things that have been highlighted by individuals like there have been some scholars recently, like Lydia McGrew, who's done a good job of this in her published books on undesigned coincidences in the gospels, which looks at the background details of the gospels and how they actually fit within one another to confirm the evidences of what's going on.

So let me back up. So an undesigned coincidence is an instance when you have one or more independent historical accounts and they interlock in such a way that would be unexpected if the story were simply fabricated wholesale.

So a good example of that is the feeding of the 5 ,000 is in all four gospels.

So if you go to the feeding of the 5 ,000 story in John, John says that a large crowd was coming towards Jesus.

And so Jesus turns to Philip and asks where they might buy bread. And this might be a question,

Andrew, you've never asked yourself, but why did Jesus ask Philip where to buy bread?

It's a strange question, isn't it? Yes, it is. Yes. Yeah. But actually,

Philip is not the character who would actually make sense to buy bread because Matthew is a tax collector.

He would have had an understanding of the economic situation of the area.

Judas is said to have hold the money bag. So he would have had the know -how of what the group had so that when they went to Starbucks, they would have been able to get their chai lattes and spend the exorbitant amount of money that costs.

But if we go from John to the gospel of Luke, it says that on their return, the apostles told

Jesus all they had done and he took them and withdrew to a part of a town called Bethsaida. So Luke doesn't tell us that Jesus asked

Philip, but he tells us that actually the location of the event happens in Bethsaida.

He tells us the, not the who, but the where of the situation. Well, if we actually go back to the gospel of John and we go to a little later after the story of the feeding of the 5 ,000, it says that a bunch of disciples came to Jesus or they came to Philip rather, who is, and it says from Bethsaida and Galilee, that's

John 12, 21, and asked them, sir, we wish to see Jesus. So it's very interesting when we ask the question in the story of the feeding of the 5 ,000, why would

Jesus ask Philip where to buy bread? Well, if you read the gospels in tandem, you actually find out that Philip was a local, but you only find that out when you put the pieces together and figure out that when you look at the details that the gospels don't necessarily tell you outright.

So these background details, what are called undesigned coincidences, are something that say a detective is looking in a case where they have multiple eyewitnesses of a singular event.

These are found all throughout the gospels and Acts actually as well, where you have background details that fill in the gaps.

Why would Jesus ask Philip? Well, it's a question that you might not ask yourself, but actually another gospel tells you that Philip was a local, and then

John tells you that this event is happening in Bethsaida. So when you actually read them in tandem, you find out

Philip is actually the most, he's the character that Jesus should be asking because he's from that, that's his hometown.

So when Jesus asked, where should we buy bread? Philip would have actually known, well, these are things you don't find in the gospel of Judas, the gospel of Peter, the gospel of Mary, because they're not worried about these kind of ancillary details that fill out the story.

They're worried about the very bare bones. And sometimes they actually get these details wrong because like I said before, they're not being written in the places that they're purporting to write in.

So you don't find undesigned coincidences in the apocryphal and Gnostic gospels. So, wow.

I feel I'm going to have to listen to this. I'm going to have to listen to this after and post -production a couple of times, just because that's a lot of information that just, it's just informative because like I said, the average person, like even

Christian, like don't really truly understand this sort of stuff. And then when you don't understand this, and all of a sudden you get placed with this objection, it's very easy to kind of go into fight or flight mode and like, oh no, like what is,

I never heard of these extra gospels. Like, how do I deal with this? How would I wrestle with this? But, so like two other gospels, this came up in the article and what were the first one was the gospel of Mary Magdalene.

There's that, but then there's another one too. It's called the gospel of Judas. And a lot of them read the gospel of Judas part of me is like, well, that seems kind of dark that obviously that didn't really have a happy ending.

So I wasn't really sure what that sort of account would be, but what do we know about those two gospels?

Yeah. You'll find that these other gospels, they don't choose the characters that are associated with the inner circle of Jesus.

And one of the reason for that is they're kind of working as the antithesis to individuals like Matthew and John.

And they're almost portraying that the Orthodox community is wrong and that they've kind of dispersed the actual individuals within the early

Jesus community that you should center around like Judas, right? Judas was the one who betrayed

Jesus. Well, what if actually Judas wasn't the bad guy in the story? What if he was actually one of the good guys?

So let's center around that. But the problem with that is once again, all these gospels are late.

The gospel of Mary is coming around 400 AD. So, you know, the fifth century is a long time after Mary ever lived.

The gospel of Judas is coming around no earlier than the late second century, probably 180 to 350

AD. So between the late second century and the mid fourth century. So we're not dealing with something that actually gets you to the historical time frame of Jesus.

So I routinely say when people bring these things up first, you should ask them if they've actually read them.

Because one, I think more than a necessary way to deal with these issues is to say, okay, you read them and you come back to me and tell me why they're not in the

Bible. Because they're so crazy and they make absolutely no sense.

People think that because the gospels contain stories of miracles that, well, that's obviously fabricated.

But then you go and you read these and you're like, I can't make heads or tails of these. Well, that's on purpose because they're designed to be full of secret knowledge.

They're designed to be incomprehensible. And actually, if you're enlightened, you understand them.

And that's kind of the crux of the Gnostic gospels is that they're confusing on purpose.

And so anybody who's actually read these, who says they understand them is probably a liar, but giving them the benefit of the doubt, if they've read them, which they probably haven't, they probably realize, well, this isn't purporting to communicate history to me.

This isn't like the gospel of Luke who's saying that he's writing an orderly account from eyewitnesses who came before him.

That preface to the gospel of Luke is very clear in his purpose and thesis statement that he was not an eyewitness.

So he's going to interview and record eyewitness accounts.

But that's not what we find in the gospel of Mary or the gospel of Judas. What we're finding there is secret knowledge that's supposed to unlock your divinity, but it's very, very confusing.

The gospel of Mary isn't actually purported to be written by Mary. It's about Mary, which is where it gets its name from.

But it's not actually claiming to be written by Mary, which actually the gospel of Judas and the gospel of Thomas are.

But even those kind of divulge that there's problems with it because the gospel of Thomas, the first line of the gospel of Thomas says that these were written by Thomas, Didymus, and it uses those two words as its title.

Well, Thomas in Greek means twin, and Didymus in Coptic means twin.

So whoever wrote the gospel of Thomas didn't realize that Thomas's name already meant twin.

And so he's saying it twice. It's like saying, I, Wesley, Wesley wrote this.

It doesn't really make any sense. Twin, twin. So yeah, twin, twin. So it already read flags itself as someone who doesn't understand

Greek, who doesn't understand what that name means. And Thomas, the actual

Thomas as a twin, would almost certainly have known what his name meant.

And Andrew, do you have any thoughts as well, too, as we're starting to wrap up here? Now, just talking about this,

I keep thinking about, just because of the context of where I live, I just keep thinking about Joseph Smith and the book of Abraham.

I know it's a little bit different, but just how there's red flags that just stick out in terms of forgeries or when there's something that's just blatantly untrue, it usually will manifest in some way in the writing itself from supposedly translating ancient papyri, but then finding out that what was supposedly translated from an account of Abraham was something totally different.

It just seems like this is almost the same thing. It's not, of course, a translation of a papyri, but it's falsely ascribed literature in a sense where it just doesn't make sense in the long scheme of things.

That's just what my brain just keeps thinking about. It's very interesting how a lot of these accounts that are untrue, they just can't really hold any water, really.

There's so many holes in them. So that's just what my brain's thinking about. Yeah. I think as someone who focuses on this area, time and time again, the manuscript evidence, the internal evidence, the external evidence is constantly verifying for me the reliability and the verisimilitude, that's a big word, but it just means the appearance of truth, the verisimilitude of the biblical gospels and the outing of these others.

This doesn't stop in the ancient world. The gospel of Jesus' wife is a 21st century forgery.

The secret gospel of Mark is a 20th century forgery. The gospel of Barnabas is a 15th century forgery.

So it's not like the ancient world is the stopping point for people trying to put words on the lips of Jesus.

This goes right up to the 21st century, to our own day, where Harvard academics are falling for this stuff.

The gospel of Jesus' wife was a big embarrassment for Karen King and Harvard University, where she was fooled by this fragment that was a legitimate ancient fragment that someone had basically forged a text on top of.

And so these things happen. But the question that comes back in my mind as a historian is, okay,

I want to know about Jesus. I'm staking my life on Jesus. What are the sources that get me back to him?

And whether we're dealing with the ancient world or the modern world, or every time we put a shovel in the sands of Egypt, I go to Egypt and I suffer through that heat.

And all I'm reminded of is the confidence I have in the text of the

Bible, and the fact that these books get me back to the time frame of Jesus and the words of our

Messiah, who was the word made flesh, who dwelled among us.

And I can have confidence in that. Thank you for saying that, man. I was going to ask you this question, but you already answered it, is that the person in that article, he mentioned how the discovery of these papyrus in Egypt that shook the foundations of Christianity, the secret political conspiracy that had been secreted for centuries, and all of a sudden it's been exposed.

But in contrast to what that person was articulating, as someone who has actually been to Egypt and has actually physically handled the original manuscript of the

Gospel of Thomas, you can say with confidence, no, this actually just confirms my faith all the more.

Which goes to show that this is truly, like I said, we deal with this stuff from a Christian perspective mainly because in contrast to cults where it's, hey, you can't question that, this is a dogma that can't be questioned, it's like, no, actually when you take these questions, objections, and you do have to wrestle through it sometimes, and even sometimes it can be a little scary.

I know times where I was in college and my world religions professor brought objections to me, and I was like, oh no, what's that?

I've got to figure that out. But when you wrestle through it and you come out the other end, there is this awesome confidence that comes out of it.

And so I'm hoping that's people will take away that these claims that get articulated by people like Lex Friedman, like guests on the

Lex Friedman podcast, or Joe Rogan, or kind of the digital, all the big talkers and the digital areopaguses of different podcasts way larger than ours, when you actually dig through these claims, they don't add up to just the basic fundamental level of how do you figure out what reliable history is in regards to primary sources and all this.

I mean, this has been such an encouragement. I really appreciate it. Yeah. I mean, you don't need to go to Nag Hammadi.

You don't need to go to Elmenia, or Cairo, or Oxyrhynchus, or Jabar al -Tarif to discover that when you look at the

Gospel of Thomas and you read, these are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which

Didymus Thomas Judas wrote down, you don't need to be there to see that actual document.

And worry about it. Because the reality is, the biblical

Gospels are the words of Christ. They are. And so you don't need to travel to Egypt, although it was an honor to do that and stand in the places where these things were discovered.

But it doesn't take that kind of trip. It doesn't take that kind of even seminary education.

The words of Scripture have been handed down faithfully to us by individuals, whether they're

Christian or not, who have taken the time to do that faithfully.

And so we can have confidence in that as Christians standing 2000 years down the road.

And so whether it's the New Age person claiming that the Gnostic Gospels are that which hold secret truth, or whether it's the

Muslim claiming that the Gospel of Barnabas actually holds a secret knowledge that Jesus was never crucified.

Whatever it is, I think you don't have to deep dive, although I would encourage you to.

I would simply say, you know, the crux that all this comes down to is the earliest source material that gets us to Jesus, or someone who knew

Jesus, are the 27 books of the New Testament, and specifically the four -fold

Gospel canon of biographical material on Jesus. That is Theanobstas, that is

God -breathed, that is communicated to the life of the believer, and has the message of truth that can save you from your sin.

No, amen. I appreciate that, man. And just real quickly, where can people go and again, find you if they want to find out more about you and all your adventures and adventures to come regarding Egypt and everywhere else?

Where can they find you, all your whereabouts, where you are, and what's in store?

Yeah, I hope there are more adventures to come. But yeah, WesleyHuff .com and ApologeticsCanada .com,

that's where we'll be dropping all the information and the three series that we're going to be releasing on Can I Trust the

Bible, where we show that documentary of us heading out to Egypt, of looking at these places, and reading these firsthand sources, and telling those stories, and giving you confidence that you can trust what you have when you hold a modern

English translation is a translation of what was originally given by those authors. And so WesleyHuff .com,

I have videos, I have infographics, and I appreciate so much you guys being willing to have me on and let me platform that.

Your guys' ministry is also a big encouragement to me as a regular podcast listener.

Awesome. Thank you so much, man. We appreciate that. We'd love to have you on again. So all that being said, I appreciate you all listening and supporting us.

All that being said, we will talk to you all next time on Cultist, where we enter into the kingdom of the cults. Talk to you guys soon.