The Gospel of Mary Magdalene is one of the so-called Gnostic books that refer to the history of Christianity. Not much is left of it, except what has been found in earthenware jars at Nag Hammadi in Egypt and subsequently pieced together by scholars.

It has, of course, played quite a part in the mystery that is played out in The Da Vinci Code and other books that cast doubt on the Roman view of Christianity. Here is what is left of it:

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

Chapter 4
(Pages 1 to 6 of the manuscript, containing chapters 1 - 3, are lost. The extant text starts on page 7…)

. . . Will matter then be destroyed or not?

22) The Savior said, All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots.

23) For the nature of matter is resolved into the roots of its own nature alone.

24) He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

25) Peter said to him, Since you have explained everything to us, tell us this also: What is the sin of the world?

26) The Savior said There is no sin, but it is you who make sin when you do the things that are like the nature of adultery, which is called sin.

27) That is why the Good came into your midst, to the essence of every nature in order to restore it to its root.

28) Then He continued and said, That is why you become sick and die, for you are deprived of the one who can heal you.

29) He who has a mind to understand, let him understand.

30) Matter gave birth to a passion that has no equal, which proceeded from something contrary to nature. Then there arises a disturbance in its whole body.

31) That is why I said to you, Be of good courage, and if you are discouraged be encouraged in the presence of the different forms of nature.

32) He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

33) When the Blessed One had said this, He greeted them all,saying, Peace be with you. Receive my peace unto yourselves.

34) Beware that no one lead you astray saying Lo here or lo there! For the Son of Man is within you.

35) Follow after Him!

36) Those who seek Him will find Him.

37) Go then and preach the gospel of the Kingdom.

38) Do not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed you, and do not give a law like the lawgiver lest you be constrained by it.

39) When He said this He departed.

Chapter 5
1) But they were grieved. They wept greatly, saying, How shall we go to the Gentiles and preach the gospel of the Kingdom of the Son of Man? If they did not spare Him, how will they spare us?

2) Then Mary stood up, greeted them all, and said to her brethren, Do not weep and do not grieve nor be irresolute, for His grace will be entirely with you and will protect you.

3) But rather, let us praise His greatness, for He has prepared us and made us into Men.

4) When Mary said this, she turned their hearts to the Good, and they began to discuss the words of the Savior.

5) Peter said to Mary, Sister we know that the Savior loved you more than the rest of woman.

6) Tell us the words of the Savior which you remember which you know, but we do not, nor have we heard them.

7) Mary answered and said, What is hidden from you I will proclaim to you.

And she began to speak to them these words: I, she said, I saw the Lord in a vision and I said to Him, Lord I saw you today in a vision. He answered and said to me,

9) Blessed are you that you did not waver at the sight of Me. For where the mind is there is the treasure.

10) I said to Him, Lord, how does he who sees the vision see it, through the soul or through the spirit?

11) The Savior answered and said, He does not see through the soul nor through the spirit, but the mind that is between the two that is what sees the vision and it is […]

(pages 11 - 14 are missing from the manuscript)

Chapter 8:
. . . it.

10) And desire said, I did not see you descending, but now I see you ascending. Why do you lie since you belong to me?

11) The soul answered and said, I saw you. You did not see me nor recognize me. I served you as a garment and you did not know me.

12) When it said this, it (the soul) went away rejoicing greatly.

13) Again it came to the third power, which is called ignorance.

14) The power questioned the soul, saying, Where are you going? In wickedness are you bound. But you are bound; do not judge!

15) And the soul said, Why do you judge me, although I have not judged?

16) I was bound, though I have not bound.

17) I was not recognized. But I have recognized that the All is being dissolved, both the earthly things and the heavenly.

18) When the soul had overcome the third power, it went upwards and saw the fourth power, which took seven forms.

19) The first form is darkness, the second desire, the third ignorance, the fourth is the excitement of death, the fifth is the kingdom of the flesh, the sixth is the foolish wisdom of flesh, the seventh is the wrathful wisdom. These are the seven powers of wrath.

20) They asked the soul, Whence do you come slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?

21) The soul answered and said, What binds me has been slain, and what turns me about has been overcome,

22) and my desire has been ended, and ignorance has died.

23) In a aeon I was released from a world, and in a Type from a type, and from the fetter of oblivion which is transient.

24) From this time on will I attain to the rest of the time, of the season, of the aeon, in silence.

Chapter 9
1) When Mary had said this, she fell silent, since it was to this point that the Savior had spoken with her.

2) But Andrew answered and said to the brethren, Say what you wish to say about what she has said. I at least do not believe that the Savior said this. For certainly these teachings are strange ideas.

3) Peter answered and spoke concerning these same things.

4) He questioned them about the Savior: Did He really speak privately with a woman and not openly to us? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did He prefer her to us?

5) Then Mary wept and said to Peter, My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I have thought this up myself in my heart, or that I am lying about the Savior?

6) Levi answered and said to Peter, Peter you have always been hot tempered.

7) Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries.

But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well.

9) That is why He loved her more than us. Rather let us be ashamed and put on the perfect Man, and separate as He commanded us and preach the gospel, not laying down any other rule or other law beyond what the Savior said.

10) And when they heard this they began to go forth to proclaim and to preach.

As published by: The Gnostic Society

Catastrophic failure destroys your mistakes and wipes the board clean. So, start again.

That’s the message of this little story, probably true, but certainly indicative of the spirit of the great inventor, Thomas Edison. We don’t know the author of this piece.

Start Over

It was a cold December night in West Orange, New Jersey. Thomas Edison’s factory was humming with activity. Work was proceeding on a variety of fronts as the great inventor was trying to turn more of his dreams into practical realities. Edison’s plant, made of concrete and steel, was deemed “fireproof”. As you may have already guessed, it wasn’t!

On that frigid night in 1914, the sky was lit up by a sensational blaze that had burst through the plant roof. Edison’s 24-year-old son, Charles, made a frenzied search for his famous inventor-father. When he finally found him, he was watching the fire. His white hair was blowing in the wind. His face was illuminated by the leaping flames. “My heart ached for him,” said Charles. “Here he was, 67 years old, and everything he had worked for was going up in flames. When he saw me, he shouted, ‘Charles! Where’s your mother?’ When I told him I didn’t know, he said, ‘Find her! Bring her here! She’ll never see anything like this as long as she lives.’”

Next morning, Mr. Edison looked at the ruins of his factory and said this of his loss: “There’s value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God, we can start anew.”

What a wonderful perspective on things that seem at first to be so disastrous. A business failure, divorce, personal dream gone sour … whether these things destroy an individual depends largely on the attitude he or she takes toward them. Sort out why it happened, and learn something from the blunders. Think of different approaches that can be taken.

Start over.

With the publication of the National Geographic translation of the newly-discovered Gospel of Judas, plus the issues developed in Dan Brown’s novel , don’t conventional Christians feel under pressure these days? No, not everyone does.

The Revend Robin Griffith-Jones, a 49-year-old Anglican cleric, is the present Master of the Temple, a 12th-century church near Fleet Street in London named after its founders, the Order of the Knights Templar. Readers of Dan Brown’s novel will know that the Master of the Temple plays a role in the book.

The Times (London) today interviews the Master about Da Vinci, the Temple, his own book about Brown’s novel and the role played in it by his small church. Griffith-Jones has some remarkable and, to some, quite surprising things to say.

On John’s Gospel, for example:

Griffith-Jones seems agnostic on the issue. He claims that John, rather than giving an eye-witness account, was trying to bring the story alive to early Christians as a series of faith-affirming surprises, the last and greatest experienced by Mary in the garden on Easter Day. In that case, I say, aren’t Brown and St John both really novelists? “No! Good heavens, they don’t read like novels! … Like [Dan] Brown, then, Griffith-Jones is trying to rescue Mary Magdalene from centuries of error and fear. His next book will be about her and the role of women in the early Church.

But is he “glad Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code“. “Yes, in the larger setting of the responses that it’s made possible from churches. In itself, it just sort of hangs there and can mislead people, but it does give an astonishing opportunity for churches to respond and clarify things in an open and upbeat way, and for that I’m very glad.”

So what are the gospels? “We must rediscover them as forms of mystagogic texts.” Mystagogic? “Initiating the reader into a mystery. Once you recognise that this is what the texts are, they come alive in a most humane way.”

Indeed. That’s the secret that the Gnostics knew, but the early church, founded as it was on political imperatives, did not. We suffer from that missing element to this day.

The Da Vinci Code and the Secrets of The Temple, by Robin Griffith-Jones is published by the Canterbury Press in the UK.

Read the whole article.

Giotto’s fresco “Judas’s Kiss” from the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (AP).

A fragile ancient manuscript written in Egypt in the 4th century AD, known as The Gospel of Judas, claiming that Judas Iscariot was not the betrayer of Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, was published yesterday by National Geographic.

A detailed account of the document and its history, including how it was discovered near Beni Masar in Egypt in the 1970s, features in a two hour documentary due to be screened on the National Geographic cable and satellite television channel on Sunday at 9pm.

The Times (London) reports: “It will argue that the original Gospel of Judas was probably written by the Gnostics — members of a 2nd Century AD breakaway Christian sect, who became rivals to the early Church. They thought that Judas was in fact the most enlightened of the apostles, acting in order that mankind might be redeemed by the death of Christ. The apocryphal account of the last days of Jesus’s life portrays Judas as a loyal disciple, who followed Jesus’s orders in handing him over to the authorities and thus allowed him to fulfil the biblical prophecies of saving mankind.”

The manuscript is thought to be a copy of a still earlier Gospel of Judas, which may have been written about 150 years after Jesus’s death by Greek scholars, then translated into Coptic, the language of Egyptian Christians.

Craig Evans, the Payzant Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, said: “The Gospel of Judas turns Judas’s act of betrayal into an act of obedience. The sacrifice of Jesus’s body of flesh in fact becomes saving. And so for that reason, Judas emerges as the champion and he ends up being envied and even cursed and resented by the other disciples.”

Elaine Pagels, the Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University, commented: “Whether or not one agrees with it, or finds it interesting or reprehensible, it’s an enormously interesting perspective on it that some follower of Jesus in the early Christian movement obviously thought was significant.”

Some of the 31 pages are being exhibited at the National Geographic Museum at Explorers Hall in Washington. Once the conservation process is complete, the document will be sent back to Egypt to be housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

Dr Simon Gathercole, a New Testament expert from The University of Aberdeen, said: “The so-called ‘Gospel of Judas’ is certainly an ancient text, but not ancient enough to tell us anything new about the real Judas or Jesus. It contains a number of religious themes which are completely alien to the first-century world of Jesus and Judas, but which did become popular later, in the second century AD. An analogy would be finding a speech claiming to be written by Queen Victoria, in which she talked about The Lord of the Rings and her CD collection.”

James Catford, Chief Executive of the Bible Society, stated: “It really would be a miracle if Judas was the author of this document, because he died at least 100 years before it was written. It may yield some interesting insights, but there’s nothing here to undermine what Christians have believed throughout the centuries.”

Judas, if such a man existed, may not have written this document, but it certainly reflects a strong mystical theme among the early Christians, one that Jesus seems to have shared with his closest disciples. The Gospel of Thomas, another Gnostic document, reveals this side of him. Roman politicians were quick to snuff out this light, though, surmising that it was too specialist for popular consumption.

Now we have the chance to reassess this view of Christianity in an age when spirituality is supplanting religion in the popular mind.

May this signal a way forward for Christianity in the 21st century?