If this isn't some kind of hoax (very big if), I'd be curious to know who was writing/copying what would have been considered very heretical at the time.
The Bible canon was at least semi-established in around the 2nd century, and by the end of the 4th century the canon was very stable. There were still ongoing disagreements between branches of the church, but never over whether a "new" writing should be included, always over writings from the first or possibly early second centuries, or older Jewish writings. An 8th century writing would not have warranted much attention.
IMO the non-canonical "gospels" from after ~150 AD are uninteresting. The interesting stuff, outside of the canon, are the really old writings ( http://earlychristianwritings.com/ ) and the commentary/teachings of early church leaders (http://www.ccel.org/fathers.html ).
is that opinion informed as a believer or as historian?
does your date refer to survived text or assumed date of original writing?
Does not bring any particular degree of enlightenment regarding the life or teachings of Jesus, nor the founding or early history of the Christian church or religion. It might be interesting in its own right, but not for studying that topic.
> "does you date refer to survived text or assumed date of original writing?"
The ~150 AD date that I use to separate interesting from uninteresting? Assumed date of original writing. Oldest surviving text can sometimes help establish that date, but only in a one-directional sense. There are lots of other markers of authenticity or inauthenticity that scholars look for; if you click through to the Early Christian Writings website I linked above, most of the writings have a few-page discussion of their likely age and authorship, and reading through a handful of those descriptions will give you a taste of what a rich field of scholarship there is surrounding the authentication of ancient writings.
> Does not bring any particular degree of enlightenment regarding the life or teachings of Jesus, nor the founding or early history of the Christian church or religion.
have you read mary or judas? in coptic?
they are fascinating if only from the perspective of enlightenment regarding the life or teachigns of jesus, and shine a light on the early machinations that engineered what would later be known as the christian church and religion
see the excerpt from mary in another comment of mine in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11918993
that excerpt brings a fascinating degree of enlightenment at how jesus viewed gender lines that clearly went in opposition to views held by the other disciples
in judas, if you read it in the original coptic you will see that every instance of the proper noun for 'jesus christ', often uniquely abreviated IHC or nXC, is quantified by the attirbutive verb 'laughing', he is the 'laughing christ'.. which for me, was an enlightening view of jesus' life and opinion
I've only had some limited exposure to these traditions (mostly through some medieval philosophy, which obviously intersected heavily with the theology of the time), but it's a fascinating field of study. Not only in terms of how theological texts can change over time and how interpretations of them do the same, but also in how that can contrast with conventionally accepted understandings of what those texts are in the first place.
Actually I found the question banal, and skipped it intentionally. I prefer discussion of ideas, not appeals to authority.
> "they are fascinating if only from the perspective of enlightenment regarding the life or teachigns of jesus"
They're both on the later end of the spectrum, though still early enough that I took the time to read them (in English). They both present views that are consistent with a few other writings (the most famous being Thomas) and at odds with the majority of writings from that era (everything from the canonical writings to the Didache, Clement, Polycarp, and Barnabas.)
I don't see reason to treat them as particularly accurate or insightful. They fit the standard late-Gnostic pattern of "secret knowledge" -- teachings that were supposedly passed down from the only one disciple who heard them but hidden from others, presented as almost entirely dialog between a small group with little narrative structure, without place names or names of "bit characters" or other connections to any sort of actual history. If you're already inclined to believe early Christianity was corrupt and distorted, they certainly fit that narrative, but they don't stand up well to critical analysis.
> I don't see reason to treat them as particularly accurate or insightful.
accurate? i fail to see any reason to assume the four canon gospels are 'accurate'
this is why i said it was 'most interesting' as it will present bias that may inform your definitions of 'uninteresting' and 'accurate'
But they are certainly insightful as to the beliefs of the early church, whether or not they're accurate regarding an actual historical figure named Jesus.
Judas and Mary fail on both counts, though they do give some insight into a secretive movement from the 2nd or 3rd century that focused on ideas about "hidden knowledge".
> "it will present bias that may inform your definitions"
In other words, it's a way to be accusatory. I gave my definitions; you can take exception to them directly instead of via the roundabout approach of questioning my impartiality.
this i can agree with, and is also what i take issue with.. the church intentionally left these other ideas out of their beliefs so of course they would do little in directly granting insight to the beliefs of the early church, but indirectly they do present insight
> Does not bring any particular degree of enlightenment regarding the life or teachings of Jesus
but this i completely disagree with, that excerpt from mary is very enlightening to the life and teaching of jesus
just for clarity:
> I prefer discussion of ideas, not appeals to authority.
are you implying that admitting you believe would grant you the authority by which to appeal?
also, it feels like you are only selectively discussing ideas by refusing to answer the question while espousing others
some other ideas, interesting to discuss:
do you think jesus and mary existed as these texts describe?
was jesus a saviour and son of a god?
do you think jesus discussed somethings only with mary as the gospel of mary excerpt implies?
do you think jesus was married to mary? do you think a definitive answer one way or another would, or should, bear consequence for the christian religion?
So FWIW, I don't think this comment should have been downvoted to gray.
No, I'm implying that trying to label either of us with some particular belief system would result in pointless argumentation that would take the form of "thus-and-such tradition is wrong" rather than discussing the actual ideas being presented. "Oh, you're a believer and thus have been corrupted" or "oh, you're a gnostic and thus can't be trusted" or whatever. That makes for uninteresting and unenlightening conversation. So I keep redirecting us back to the ideas -- what does the historical/manuscript evidence point to?
> "the church intentionally left these other ideas out of their beliefs"
This statement presupposes a timeline in which the ideas in Judas/Mary were present simultaneously with the ideas in canonical and orthodox sources -- that these were two competing traditions in the early days after Jesus' life, and that one became stronger and "suppressed" the other.
That simply doesn't match with the historical data. The actual records we have from inside and outside of early Christianity are filled with disputes, and with criticisms of "false teachings". Yet no disputes or criticisms of gnostic-style (gospels of Judas/Mary) teachings show up until the late 2nd century -- as if those appeared on the scene as brand new teachings, not that they had been competing alongside Christianity. There are also indications from various external (Jewish and Roman) historians that Christianity was relatively powerless, not in position to be able to oppress or destroy rival belief systems up until much later -- and even at its height, the powerful (Constantine, Rome, etc.) had limited reach relative to the spread of writings related to Christianity.
There were lots and lots of disputes in early Christianity, and one particular sect eventually "won". But the disputes weren't about the things gnostic writings talk about; those are a later, separate movement that happened to use names from Jewish/Christian sources.
As for your specific questions:
> "do you think jesus and mary existed as these texts describe? was jesus a saviour and son of a god?"
What I believe is irrelevant. What matters when addressing the various manuscripts is that there's clear indication that early Christians believed Jesus and Mary (Magdalene, presumably) existed as described in the canonical texts, and that Jesus was both the Savior and Divine in some way. And there's a whole lot of evidence that the next 3-4 centuries were filled with argumentation over exactly what that meant. There is little indication that Mary was a particularly significant figure, though plenty of indication that other women (including Jesus' mother Mary) held prominent roles in the early church.
> "do you think jesus discussed somethings only with mary"
Not in the gnostic sense of giving "secret knowledge" only to Mary, or only to Judas, or only to Thomas. The earliest writings about Jesus show him to be a reasonably public teacher, in a traditional Rabbinic style. They show Jesus to have repeated important teachings to different crowds. I also believe Jesus' teachings would be recognizable (but potentially blasphemous) to first-century Jews -- note that many of the questions Jesus addresses in the canonical gospels are questions of Jewish interest, particularly relating to the Roman occupation and some of the major schools of thought regarding the practice of the Jewish religion. The "secret knowledge" expressed in Mary/Judas is very much grounded in a synthesis of Greek/Egyptian ideas that originated at least a century later and probably closer to two.
> "do you think jesus was married to mary? do you think a definitive answer one way or another would, or should, bear consequence for the christian religion?"
I don't think there's any legitimate evidence suggesting such a marriage. But the main consequence it would have on the Christian religion if such a thing were established would be regarding the relation of Jesus to "the church" as a groom and bride; it would not shift any significant doctrinal points regarding, for example, the importance of women. (Those who believe it would are, I believe, misled by certain 20th-century arguments within some segments of Christianity, which are mostly a result of the American church being out of touch with history rather than a result of early Christian doctrine placing women in a subordinate role.)
It's clear from most early Christian writings that there were significant disagreements among different parts of Christianity, including its leadership. Even within canonical texts, there are several places where an author takes the time to criticize someone else's doctrine (for example, there's one famous passage where Paul says of those who require circumcision that they should "cut it all off".) So when I say that those early writings are representative of the beliefs, I don't mean it in the sense of being monolithic, but in the sense of showing what sort of issues were treated as uncontroversial or as background information versus what sort of issues were argued over using strong language. Most of the arguments are, not surprisingly, issues that any scholar of second temple Judaism would recognize.
You can certainly pick up both on threads that were continued, and threads that did not persist. But the particular threads that are seen in writings like Judas and Mary aren't early Christian threads, they're late arrivals from some other tradition. They don't show up, even to be criticized, in any of the oldest writings (it's not until late second century that authors like Irenaeus start criticizing those particular beliefs.) They don't use Jewish literary structures in the way they're taught, but rather, distinctly Greek structures. They're disconnected from history and geography -- for example, the "Gospel of Judas" names only one physical place (the region of Judea) and no people other than Jesus, Judas, Adam, and Eve, and the other names it does use (for angels/spirits/heavenly realms) don't resemble Hebrew or Aramaic names. There are no quotations of Jewish scripture and no references to major issues of debate or concern at the time (such as the Roman occupation, the relationship of Jews to Samaritans, or arguments between Hillel and Shammai over issues like divorce.)
In short, the gospels of Judas and Mary aren't first-century Jewish writings by members of a sect that split from Judaism because of the teachings of a Jewish rabbi; they're at best late second-century Greek/Egyptian-mixed writings that use a handful of Jewish names. If you want insight into that first-century Jewish-offshoot religion that we call "Christianity", look to the Biblical canon, plus the Didache, Barnabas, Clement, Shepherd of Hermas, Tacitus (discussed in detail at the ECW link above), the Signs Gospel, Polycarp, and Ignatius, and look at the sort of arguments they get into and the things they emphasize and the things they criticize. It's not monolithic, but there are obvious patterns.
This didn't particularly change between the first century and the second century, either. It's not like e-mail was invented in between those times to speed up communication. When certain disputes start showing up in the writings, suddenly, at the end of the second century, it's reasonable to conclude that they were new disputes and not disputes that had already been hot-button issues for a century and a half.
Also, don't skip over the rest of my post. It's actually fairly significant that the canonical gospels talk about people and places and name them correctly (archaeological digs show Simon was the #1 Jewish male name in first-century Palestine, and there are 9 different Simons named in the canonical gospels, each one carefully distinguished -- Simon Peter, Simon the tanner, Simon the Zealot, etc. The authors of the canonical gospels show a clear personal familiarity with first-century Palestine, as if they had actually been there.) Gnostic gospels generally don't name people and places outside of some tiny core group. This is a hallmark of being written from a distance, by a non-eyewitness, based on pre-existing characters.
It's significant that the canonical writings and many other early-church writings reference issues like the Roman occupation, Samaritans, and divorce, and heavily quote from Jewish scripture, while writings like the gospel of Judas and the gospel of Mary do not. It's significant that the canonical and other early writings show specific hallmarks of different sects of Judaism (not just in what they argue for, but in what they argue against, or even in the vocabulary they use -- John and Hebrews, for example, both talk about the "logos" but use it subtly differently.) Likewise, it's significant that among the gnostic writings, there's a clear progression/development of thought from the Gospel of Thomas to the Sethian writings, and detectable influences from known historical characters like Valentinus.
It's easy for someone who hasn't studied the topic to overlook these sorts of things, but there is actually a great deal of scholarship from both believers and non-believers about minute details in these writings. These aren't mysterious, unknown, could-subvert-our-understanding writings like the Da Vinci Code and similar works imply. Most of what comes out of scholarly analysis is fairly dry stuff, showing a clear development of gnosticism as a follow-on movement to Christianity.
Further, none of this was directly recorded. It was recorded by a group with a tradition of making things up. It was further preserved by a chain of people with various vested interests.
For any other group of documents the assumption would be they have an accuracy approaching zero.
Assume there are groups A-Z. You have documentation from A talking to Q, Q talking to L, K talking to P. How accurate a picture can you get from that? Well, you can get the language correct... probably.
You can only trace what you have documented in some way or another. But it's not necessary that it be written by friendly sources. For example, you can learn that there was a group teaching that circumcision was required for Christians because some of Paul's writings criticize that group. That doesn't tell us that they were wrong and Paul was right, or even that Paul's characterization of them was totally accurate, only that Paul thought them noteworthy enough to criticize.
What we know of early Christian documents is that they preserved not merely their own positive teachings, but criticisms of other groups. The writings we still have involve a fair bit of back-and-forth. They involve what might be called either "criticism" or "nuancing" of other parts of the same collection of writing. They involve criticism of teachings of other groups.
My contention is that they, either directly or indirectly, preserved every truly-early variant of Christianity that had enough followers for anyone to care -- that, in essence, there isn't a big enough gap in history for a group like the gnostics to have existed and been significant prior to around the mid second century. Because there's no criticism of those ideas, and for a group that loves to criticize, that would be way out of character.
And the documents are well-enough preserved to have not lost that. It's not, as some suppose, that there's a sketchy chain of preservation that we can't follow, and out the far end many centuries later comes a document we can't trace; instead, there's a broad spread of preservation by a bunch of different Christian communities on three different continents, who spoke different languages, and we can trace what sort of changes happened over time from different communities. We don't have to suppose a chain of accuracy-destroying alterations; we can establish fairly high certainty of most of the New Testament at least near the end of the first or start of the second century. Which is different from saying "proven eyewitness accounts" (though there are some things that point toward the accounts being written by people familiar with 1st-century Jewish culture in Palestine; one of the reasons I keep bringing up the names used in the canonical gospels is that they don't match Jewish diaspora names, but instead Palestine-region Jewish names, from the first century.)
There are entire scholarly journals about this stuff. I don't mean "Christians convincing themselves"; there's a good mix of Christian and non-Christian scholars who study Biblical manuscripts and Biblical archaeology and so forth, and there's fairly broad agreement about the various sects that existed in the first couple of centuries. There's disagreement over who was "right", of course, but not particularly over which groups existed or were significant.
The wikipedia page for this particular manuscript gives a brief description of the reasons this is considered a forgery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Jesus%27_Wife
(Yes, I know it wasn't officially decided in an ecumenical council until Trent in 1545, but those three councils effectively settled the question, given the importance of the regions involved.)
Trent was hardly ecumenical, given that the Eastern half of the œkumene wasn't present:-)
Irish monks (at least) copied stuff that they knew they disagreed with - pre-Christian pagan stories, for example. See "How the Irish Saved Civilization" for an example.
It's relevant in a one-directional sense. If you have an early 2nd century papyrus, you know that the original is early 2nd century or earlier -- which is fairly important, in and of itself, when it comes to anything relating to Jesus or Christianity. If you have an 8th century papyrus, you know that the original is 8th century or earlier -- which means very little.
So you have to look for other markers of age/importance/authenticity, such as vocabulary words that were in common use in some specific era. Or markers of inauthenticity, such as... well... a lot of stuff in this article.
Can you elaborate on some of these things and provide some reasoning as to why they are markers of inauthenticity?
The short answer is, the manuscript has no traceable history, seems to have come from someone with motive to create a forgery whose story is inconsistent, was presented along with a forged papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John, and is physically questionable -- the handwriting, shape of the piece of paper (probably cut recently), the quality of the ink, and even the grammar are suspect. It has some grammatical weirdness that appears in a particular, modern, translation of the Gospel of Thomas and nowhere else.
As one goes further back in time, the issue isn't so much about celibacy but about the obligation of sexual continence for those ordained to the ministerial priesthood. In the Christian West, the obligation of perpetual sexual continence (= husband and wife not having sexual intercourse at any time after the husband is ordained) was eventually safeguarded by the obligation of celibacy (= can't be married). In the Christian East, the obligation of perpetual continence was more or less put aside for all but those ordained to the episcopate. Note that Christian monasticism in the East and West entails/ed "evangelical chastity" (cf. the life of Christ and the Apostle Paul; Matthew 19:12, 1 Corinthians 7), so it's a somewhat separate consideration that monks don't marry.
Interestingly, in much of the Christian East periodic sexual continence is still an obligation for married priests, i.e. for some period of time prior to their celebration of the eucharistic liturgy. Such periodic sexual continence (or abstinence) of married clergy is sometimes referred to as "levitical continence" while the perpetual variety is referred to as "apostolic". Some of the early Church Fathers maintained that after Pentecost and the birth of the Church, the Apostles of Jesus dedicated themselves in a total way to the spread of the gospel and their ministry, such that they no longer had sexual intercourse with their wives. The lesser form of continence is then seen to be modeled after the obligations of the levitical priesthood of ancient Judaism. A greater share in the apostolic ministry (bishop vs. simple priest) thus entails a greater obligation of continence. To safeguard that obligation, it is the general practice in the Christian East to only ordain to the episcopate men who have already committed themselves to a life of perpetual continence, i.e. monastic clergy.