Why Some Ancient Gospels Didn’t Make The Cut (January 4, 2026 Sunday School)

Presenter: GPPC Parish Associate Rev. Kit Schooley

What happens when the eyewitnesses are gone, the libraries are empty, and communities stretch from Syria to Africa with different memories of Jesus? We step into that world and explore how early Christians tried to make sense of a Savior they never met, zeroing in on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the contested ground where heresy and orthodoxy first took shape.

We start by mapping the East–West split: a bustling network of congregations in Syria and Asia Minor, a quieter Rome, and traditions that diverged on details as basic as a cave birth versus a stable. From there, we unpack why names were attached to texts long after the fact, how “gospel” once meant heroic storytelling, and the criteria the church eventually used to sift canon from curiosity. Then we wade into three striking childhood scenes—a clap that sets clay sparrows flying, a five-year-old who stuns a teacher with claims of preexistence, and a quiet workshop miracle that stretches a short plank to size—asking what these stories reveal about power, piety, and the desire to fill narrative gaps.

Along the way, we tackle the big questions animating the second and third centuries: Is the Kingdom something we await or something we cultivate within? How did Gnostic ideas about matter, spirit, and hidden knowledge shape debates on sin and salvation? Why did later leaders reject pre-baptism miracles, and why did public verifiability matter to canon formation? By reading these texts in their context—missionary aims, anti-Jewish edges, and philosophical crosswinds—we see orthodoxy emerging not from certainty but from centuries of wrestling, memory, and community judgment.

Stay to the end for a preview of our next stop: the Gospel of Mary and the disciples’ struggle with authority, voice, and spiritual insight. If this journey into the formative centuries deepened your curiosity, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review with the one question you’re still turning over.

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Transcript

Setting The Post-Eyewitness Era;

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Let's start.

unknown 0:03

Sure.

East–West Christian Worlds Mapped;

Names, Authorship, And Orthodoxy;

Big Questions: Kingdom And Resurrection;

Enter Gnosticism And Heresy Frames;

Why The Infancy Gospel Emerged;

Story One: Clay Sparrows On Sabbath;

SPEAKER_03 0:13

These four Sundays, if you can make all of them, good for you. If not, anyone is fine. These four Sundays, we will explore writings from an unusual time. A time when all of the people who were alive and knew Jesus and could tell his stories are gone. A time when maybe children of those who knew Jesus may still be alive, but the average lifespan in Jesus' time was 45 years. So if you were born in the year that Jesus died, let's say the year 30, by the year 75, you're probably approaching your death. And most of these things we're going to look at were written somewhere between 150 and 300. So there's nobody around with any eyewitness accounts. There are people around who may remember old stories being told and they may retell them and change them in a way that makes them feel like it helps their belief. But we're in a time when it's kind of who knows what you get. And who knows how authentic they are. The eyewitnesses are gone. So what we'll be examining then in these four weeks and four different writings is how people of the first century, second century, and third century sought to explain the life of Jesus Christ. And keep in mind they were doing this for their own beliefs, for their own ability to sort out and come to understand what had come to pass then many generations before them. And of course, there's no record keeping, and there's no libraries, and there's no way to authenticate what came before. And so you just get things that are passed down, whisper down the alley style. Okay? So some of these writings have been called Gospels. Don't treat that word as if it's terribly special. It was a word that grew out of the Roman Empire of stories of heroes. So not all of these people will be heroes. Not all of them are really anything like gospels. But it's a picture of the varieties of Christian faith in this era, in the kind of beginning of the church, the varieties of churches. And let's take a moment and look at the map. This is roughly in the year 150 to 200, where the church was. And the darker the shading, the heavier the prominence of congregations. So while we may all think of the church as centered in Rome, Rome was almost non-existent in this era. Paul and Peter had gone to Rome and been crucified, and that was kind of the end of Rome as playing a part in the Christian church for three or four hundred years. So instead, you see the church has grown down into Africa. The church has grown greatly over into Asia. And so a number of these things we'll look at this month come from Syria, come from the Asian, the eastern part of the church. And just as a little aside, one of the interesting things you'll see when you read some of these, in the eastern part of the church, Jesus was not born in a stable. In the eastern church, he was born in a cave. It's just an interesting little way to differentiate where your text is coming from. And you'll see some things in there as you read them this month that you say, wait a minute, that's not what it says in the Gospel. No, that's not what it says in the Western Gospel. But in the Eastern Gospel, that's what it says. Okay? So that gives us some sort of setting. Now, who wrote these things? We really don't know. Just like the Gospels, these things got names given to them once they had become well established enough that people could remember them and wanted to give them a name. So we're going to start today with the infancy gospel of Thomas the Israelite. This is a very anti-Jewish writing. So how Thomas the Israelite would have written it is kind of curious. Just a way of showing you the names are kind of arbitrary. They just show up as a way for people to remember this kind of thing. There are theological differences in these texts. Some come from teachings that contradict mainstream Christianity, at least the mainstream Christianity you and I have been raised on or come into. They will say things that for them are important because there was at this time the beginning of the struggle of where was the final, where was orthodoxy getting established? Who would finally win out and say, this is true, that's not. And so here we have the wrestling match going on for two or three hundred years. These writings were not widely read. And in those parts where they arose, they were well read. But there was a kind of division between the East and the West. All this heavy population that you see in Syria and Asia Minor, that was kind of one Christian world and one variation of Christian belief. And then the African and the Roman Western sort of world was another kind of orthodoxy. So there were then some questions that people were struggling with, questions not unknown to you and I, because we've all got these questions. The first big question, and we'll see that today, is is this kingdom of God, is this second coming, is this heavenly place, is it something to come? As the book of Revelation, which has influenced all of us, it is something down the road. It is something that will arrive and sort of fall on us, and we will all be changed. That was the winning theory. It's the one you and I were raised on. But there's another theory. You see it a little bit in the Gospel of Luke, just for a couple of verses, and that is the kingdom is where? It's here. It's here. It's inside us. And it is up to us to shepherd it, to take care of it, to expand it. But it's all about one spiritual life. It's all about the spiritual life of the community. It isn't something in the future. It's something that is in us, and if we don't tend to it, it doesn't come. You see the difference? We are of the orthodoxy that we wait. There is a different orthodoxy that did not win the day, then it's already here. So it's the struggle between sin and once sin is eradicated, the kingdom comes. That's our kind of orthodox notion. Or the theory that your own spiritual life and spiritual development will bring the kingdom. Maybe not seem like a big difference, but it turns out to be a pretty big difference. Although, let's say I would bet in this congregation there are people of both persuasions. And maybe you are of both persuasions yourself. Maybe it's a little of this and a little that. Another question that people are raising is, what is this resurrection all about? And how do we know that Jesus really lived life after death? How do we know about that? And so some of these will struggle with that. Another question is, how does Christian forgiveness work in a life where evil and terrible things happen? How do you make forgiveness work? We've in 21 or 22 centuries kind of worked out some of that, but that was a big question for them. Can you be forgiven? Because forgiveness wasn't a coin of the realm. It wasn't things that people had ever conceived of before Christianity. And finally, what rules or principles should govern congregations? We're not going to see much of this, but it's there in little places. Let's see if there's those four things. We'll do it. Now keep in mind this is an era of heresy. We haven't decided what is orthodox yet. But the way we get to orthodoxy is declare that's heresy. That's not heresy. That's orthodox, that's heresy. And so we're going to look at heresies for a month. We're going to look at things. When the final vote came, their ideas didn't make it. They were the losers. These are the heresies. When they were going on, they weren't heresies. They were just people's sense of, well, okay, this must be the way it is, or could be the way it is. And finally, before we get to the infancy gospel, for the most part, these writings came in an era when a certain philosophy had grown up in the world. It was a philosophy called Gnosticism. It's a very complex thing. I'm not going to make any effort to really explain it. But what Gnosticism amounts to is a belief that the whole universe is divided into two forces. There is goodness, which essentially is God and heaven, and there is evil, which essentially is the earth and all of creation. And the basic struggle in life, then, is you're born into evil. You are evil. Inside you is this little spark, this little bit of possibility. And what happens is that somehow that spark grows until you're worthy of heaven and you ascend through seven stages, the last stage of which being heaven. That's a very simplistic way, but you'll see a little hints of that kind of thing. Not today, but next week. So let's take a look at this infancy gospel. Some of you may have read parts of it. We're going to look at three sections of it, just three or four verses in each section, but let me talk a little bit about it. This infancy gospel was written to fill in the gaps in the story of Jesus' life. From when the Magi left until he shows up in the temple at twelve. There's twelve years of stories that we didn't get in Matthew and Luke. And so people are saying, there's got to be stories. I mean, Jesus lived, he had to have done something. And so the stories start to emerge, and that's what we have here today. These stories you and I would call made up. But if you had never read the Gospel of Luke or Matthew yet, and you read these, you'd say, well, okay, we'll take these. Although they're pretty crazy. But we'll take these. Alright? So that's the first thing. We estimate it was written around the year 150. About 40 years after the Gospel of John. It shows in part that it's familiar with the Gospel of John. It doesn't necessarily show it's familiar with Matthew and Luke, but it would have had it been. But it's been circulated. It was written, we now have it in five different languages, two versions of Greek, Coptic, Aramaic, and even late in the 13th century in Latin, but the Latin was a little late, late arriving. It's believed that Thomas was a member of a local congregation, somewhere probably in Syria, and was not the same as the disciple Thomas. It was just a popular name that was applied to it. Keep in mind we have no idea what the name of the person was or persons who wrote this. It's thought to be part of the impetus that came about by this era of the Jews and Christians had essentially fallen out. We get in the Gospels that we're familiar with an earlier time when some members of the early Christian church were Jews that had become Christians. By 150, that was over. The Jews were seen as kind of the losers, the ones whose faith didn't make it. This is the inheritor of Judaism, and it's trying to get away from those notions of Judaism in order for it to have its own identity. Rather than it is an outgrowth of Judaism, it is moving toward a sense we've never seen this before. This is a new faith, and this is, you know, our favorite faith. It appears to be missionary propaganda, an effort to get people who didn't know about Christ interested in him with the stories of his childhood. It exalts Jesus over and over against other divine men. We're in an era where the Romans were making all of their emperors out as gods, and so there was a need to have some balance, some competition with the Romans. And so we get this Jesus who does a lot of miraculous things. It becomes obvious that the writer knows little about Judaism, other than may know about Passover, may know about Moses, but the knowledge of Judaism is just not there. So we've come to an era in which Christians stand without that Jewish heritage. The text purports to reveal events in the life of Jesus when he was between roughly five and twelve. There are versions of this, longer versions, that tell the story of how Jesus talked to his mother in the cave or in the stable and told his mother who he was. There's some pretty fascinating stuff. I did include all that for you. Let's see if there's anything else. It portrays Jesus' earthly mother, Mary and Joseph, very clearly. And it portrays them learning how to deal with a precocious child. Many of us know that story. And perhaps in 150, that's part of why that was the form of the stories because people had, in their own right, been dealing with precocious children. If there ever was a precocious child, it was Jesus, right? And so it picks up on that sort of theme. It also picks up on the theme of magic. Jesus does all kinds of magical things. I mean, he makes people just drop dead, if you've read through this early before this morning. I mean, if he gets upset with you, he just kills you off. And then if somebody complains, he brings you back to life. I mean, it's an effort to figure out, you know, who Jesus was. What kind of powers did he have? Now, for all of us, that seems silly, but in the year 150, these things hadn't been sorted out yet. And so there was a sense that Jesus could do everything. He could bring you back to life, he could end your life, he could create your life. It was a pretty impressive, you know, sort of biography of somebody. Then by the year 400, a couple hundred years after this was out, the church leadership finally declared that this gospel was a heresy. And the reason it was a heresy is because it claims that Jesus did miracles before he was baptized. So you see the churches struggle to sort of decide what holds water. I mean, they're searching around for a way to declare this to be outside of orthodoxy. Well, there he did all these miracles, and there we know he didn't do any miracles before he was baptized by John and the Jordan, so therefore it's just a kind of peek into the way the church has struggled with things over its heritage. Okay. Let's take a look. I want to look at, first of all, if you have it before you, at what is marked as chapter 1, verses 1 to 5. The story of the sparrows. This is a story that has survived this gospel. You may have actually heard of it, but we're going to start in 1, 1 through 1.5. And I'll, for the sake of time, just give it a little read. When the boy Jesus was five years old, he was playing at the ford of a rushing stream, and he gathered the disturbed water into pools and made them pure and excellent, commanding them by the character of his word alone, and not by means of a deed. Get a little echo of the Gospel of John here. His word created it. It was in his hands. Then, taking soft clay from the mud, he formed twelve sparrows. It was the Sabbath when he did these things, and many children were with him. There were boys out playing in the mud. Pretty standard scene. And then a certain Seeing the boy Jesus and the other children doing these things went to his father Joseph and falsely accused the boy Jesus, saying that on the Sabbath he made clay, which is not lawful. You see the sense of what Judaism may have been. That probably wasn't true, but this was his notion of what Judaism would have been, that somebody would just ruin a child's play, you know, because of their faith. And so he says this to his father, and Joseph came and rebuked Jesus, saying, Why are you doing these things on the Sabbath? But Jesus, here's the great part, clapping his hands, commanded the birds with a shout in front of everyone and said, Go, take flight, and remember me, living ones. And the sparrows, taking flight, went away squawking. When the Pharisee saw this, he was amazed and reported to all his friends. What do you think? What's your what's just what comes to mind? Amazed too.

SPEAKER_08 21:13

Yeah, yeah, it would have been amazing.

SPEAKER_03 21:15

Pardon?

SPEAKER_08 21:16

I would have been amazed too.

SPEAKER_03 21:19

Sort of an eye-opening thing.

unknown 21:23

I think it must have been very difficult.

SPEAKER_07 21:35

They don't understand. So how can they really die? They're probably more fearful of what could happen to them all. You know, and they don't appreciate what this child could do.

SPEAKER_03 21:52

Yeah, you see, I I I guess what that makes me think about is you see Joseph as a father trying to do what he thinks is right. And at the same time, he's got this precocious kid who's, I mean, I'm over here in my carpentry shop and he's out there making sparrows fly. Like, what do I do with that? It's shades of the creation. Oh yeah. Out of nothing, well, not exactly out of nothing, but uh, yeah, Jesus the creator. Maybe that's one of the one of the points of that story. Although I think the bigger point is he can do anything, anytime, anywhere.

SPEAKER_05 22:44

Bob, you had a thinking, I mean, this is a fairly specific story, and it made me wonder, what were they thinking? Why why did they come up with this thing about Jesus making sparrows out of the mud? I mean, you know, what would make you think about something like that? Why would you make that up? What why would that be what you you made up unless they just had this point that they wanted to make and just made up a story to uh emphasize a point.

SPEAKER_03 23:25

Any any thoughts about Bob's query? Why would they make up this story?

SPEAKER_06 23:32

Yeah, but I do think it reflects back to the creation.

SPEAKER_03 23:36

Do you? Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 23:38

Because he, you know, I I I just really because God created everything from nothing. And so he took this mud and water and made sparrows. He was just playing around because he was the son of God.

SPEAKER_03 23:52

Dude? He was just playing around. Instead of a big creation. He just made a couple of birds. Yeah, my point about it wasn't very theological. These are boys playing in the mud, and you you know, you can make things in the mud.

SPEAKER_06 24:06

And Joseph had to come back bus at him because of the the neighbor or the other person in order for him not to be reported, I would think.

SPEAKER_03 24:16

Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure that the Jewish faith of the era would have forced Joseph to criticize his child for making sparrows in the mud. Now, making them fly away, well were there twelve.

SPEAKER_07 24:34

The fact that they flew away. Why were there twelve?

SPEAKER_03 24:38

I don't know. You know, I I don't know what twelve may have meant in that era. Probably had some meaning. Yeah, that's what twelve disciples. That's a wishes thing on the city. Yeah. Especially if there's a pretty logical kind of root. Yeah. But if it keep in mind, this was not necessarily a culture that was well schooled as we are in the stories in the Bible. So it could have 12 could have meant something there in Syria that we okay. Let's go on to the second one, which is um chapter 5, verses 1 through 6. So you're gonna have to go back to the what amounts to the second side. So it reads, and those standing there were astonished. Cried out loud and said to him, Oh, what a new and incredible wonder. Such words we have never known, not from the priests, nor the scribes, nor the Pharisees. Wait a minute. Am I on the right section here? No, I'm not a.

unknown 26:04

Oh.

Reactions And Meaning Of Twelve;

SPEAKER_03 26:09

There, at the top of the page. A teacher named Zacchaeus, isn't that an interesting name? A teacher named Zacchaeus was standing listening to Jesus saying these things to his father and said, Oh, wicked boy! He said to Joseph, Come, bring him, brother, so that he may learn to love those his own age, honor old age, and revere elders, so that he may acquire desire to be among children, also teaching them in return. But Joseph said to the teacher, Who is able to restrain this child and teach him? Do not consider him to be a small cross, brother. And the boy, Jesus, answered and said to the teacher, these words which you have spoken, I am strange to them, for I am from outside you, but I am within you, on account of existing in this material excellence. But you, a man of the law, do not know the law. And he said to Joseph, When you were born, I existed, and was standing beside you, so that, Father, you may be taught a teaching by me, which no other knows nor is able to teach. I mean, this is quite the child operating as Father. And as for the cross of which you have spoken, he shall bear it whose it is. For when I am greatly exalted, I shall lay aside whatever mixture I have of your race. For you do not know where you are from. I alone know truly when you were born and how much time you have to remain here. And those standing there were astonished and cried out loud and said to him, Oh, what a new and incredible wonder! Such words we have never known, not from the priests nor the scribes, nor the Pharisees. Where is this boy from, who's five years old and says such things? Never have we seen such a thing. And the boy answered them and said, Why are you so amazed? Moreover, why do you not believe that these things I said to you are not true? When you were born and your father's and your father's fathers, I, who was created before this world, know accordingly, accurately, and all the people listening were speechless, no longer able to speak to him. Approaching them, he skipped out and said, I was playing with you because I know you were amazed by trifles and to the wives you were small. The original narcissist. It's just uh you hear echoes of the Gospel of John here, but the Gospel of John hasn't quite been fully ingested yet, like they're still trying to sort out what John's like, and so you have what would you call this? This is just, you know, this is a kid who should be spanked, kind of kind of thing. So, what's your response to it?

SPEAKER_01 29:25

I think of a comic strip writer today who's creating something, and you know, he just say, What if? You know, um, this is a what if situation back there. This might have happened, but if you take the gospel and says uh Jesus says, it's not my time yet to do anything, you know, he's 30 years old, you wonder, well, did he do all these things? I don't think that's the reason it's called heresy, I guess. I guess. I guess.

SPEAKER_04 29:56

Other thoughts? It's also a little bit of the uh Jesus was created, and that that stuck out to me. Jesus was not a creation according to the church orthodoxy of the time, still is not, but that was interesting that I was created before you.

SPEAKER_02 30:13

Oh, yeah.

Story Two: Boy Jesus Schools A Teacher;

SPEAKER_03 30:14

That's also incorrect. And you also get a little flavor of this Gnosticism where Jesus says, I am of a substance that you are not. I'm of that holy, that perfect substance, and you are just evil. You are just bad stuff. But he's also saying, you know, follow me. You can make your way up through the seven levels, we'll get to them next week, up to the seven levels to heaven. So you have here the parts of the church sort of aligning themselves with this philosophy that eventually the church rejected. But at this point, it hasn't rejected that yet. You even have Gnostic Judaism at this point. So it's a kind of philosophy that covers the entire sort of known world growing out of Greek and Roman kind of heritage.

SPEAKER_07 31:12

It kind of makes me think of children today that are special and don't fit the normal people. And the majority of society is not that way. And so they come down hard on them or they want to ostracize them. It makes me think that way. That we still don't understand people that are different. You know. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_03 31:48

And given even in the year 150 that we knew Jesus somehow was different, now we're trying to wrestle with, well, exactly how was he different? Was he different like kings and rulers we've known who are capable of good but also do bad? Do you know what I mean? We haven't seen, in the year 150, we haven't seen a perfect king, emperor, sultan, whatever. They have good and bad in them. And I'm wondering if this wasn't written more about Jesus' precociousness rather than his narcissism. You know what I mean? We're trying to get a handle on what it means to be Jesus or who it was that was Jesus.

unknown 32:46

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 32:47

This one died because he said that, and that one, you know, booted and that. Yeah. That was the most important. That's that's all a sense of the tremendous power he has. But it's not harnessed, it's it's not informed.

SPEAKER_00 33:03

Well, that makes me think of we say Jesus is fully human, fully divine, right?

SPEAKER_02 33:07

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

So here he is immature. He himself, the fully human part of him, is perhaps still wrestling with how do I use this that I have within me?

SPEAKER_03 33:21

Yeah. That has a certain amount of logic. All of us kind of follow that. Because we've all been down that road. We've all had a childhood where we misbehaved. Or did some of you not have that childhood? So, and and one other thing that you mentioned. We believe that Jesus was fully human, fully divine. You see how that is a direct attack on Gnosticism?

SPEAKER_02 33:47

Right.

SPEAKER_03 33:48

Direct attack. That's one of the reasons the church arrived at that kind of phrase. Okay, the last one we're going to take up is near the end, chapter 11, the first two verses. And he was about eight years old. And when his father, a carpenter, was making ploughs and yokes, he received a bed from a certain rich man that he might make it exceedingly great and suitable. And since one of the required pieces was shorter and he did not have a measure, Joseph was distressed, not knowing what to do. The boy came to his father and said, Put down the two pieces of wood and align them from your end. Joseph did just as Jesus said. And the boy stood at the other end and took hold of the short piece of wood and stretched it. And he made it equal to the other piece of wood. And he said to his father, I love this, don't be distressed, but do what you wish. And Joseph embraced and kissed him, saying, Blessed am I, for God gave me this boy. What's your reaction?

unknown 35:20

It's magic.

Power, Precociousness, And Gnostic Hints;

SPEAKER_03 35:23

It's magic. We know Jesus did miracles, and now we're trying to get a handle on. You know. And one of the ways that the church decided that things were authentic, worthy of the New Testament, worthy of being included, and were outside, was whether or not the stories happened in public, whether they happened where there were people around. There were disciples to retell the story. There were people that could verify the story. And here we're in an era where probably these stories were made up. They weren't told because somebody had known the story. I mean, there's a big difference. And so here we have, looking back, we could say these are invented stories. When you may have gotten them in your local congregation in the year 150, you didn't know they were invented. You didn't have that looking back capacity to know what the church was going to declare to be authentic and inauthentic, orthodox or heretical. So at this point, all these stories arrived, one as true or false as the next. I'm grateful I didn't live then. I'm grateful we've sorted out some of what I can count on and other things that are just fanciful. This is some of the fanciful stuff. But we see here also an effort to define the boundaries of what this wholly human, wholly divine person, what parameters did he live in? And after all, we had this morning these three, four, twenty-seven, as Stephen said, people who followed the stars for their kind of sense of what was true and not. I mean, that's pretty far from the kind of uh authenticity we would look for in a story. Other thoughts?

SPEAKER_01 37:48

In our gospels, the first miracle is the miracle of changing uh water into wine. His mother had to witness some ability that he had of powers to do something for those people. You know, she's she told him it's up to you to do this. You know, so she she insisted that he do something and he performed the miracles just like that. So that would that would provide some critics to some of the early stories and so forth.

SPEAKER_03 38:19

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you have two boys out there with fish and bread, and you could eat 3,000 or 5,000. I mean, that's pretty that's pretty startling stuff. Getting sparrows to fly, I don't know, they may fall into that category, right? So we're trying to sort out. If if this is God amongst us, then what does that really look like? Especially if none of us ever knew Jesus, and the only way we have to know Jesus is to read these stories and find out about them. It's a task. It's a task all of us go through from childhood on because we get some stories we learn in Sunday school and we we get them and we get them wrong. We don't understand them until maybe we're 18 or 22, or so. Oh, I always thought that meant this. You mean it only means that? You know, it's kind of the way our maturity works in the faith. So all of the other stories are public, but this one is. Yes, yes. That's that's probably a shortened way of saying what I said with a lot longer. If it's public, therefore it's verifiable. Of course, still, if you're a hundred years after Jesus' death, you're just taking it on somebody telling you that it was public and it did happen. And who's gonna put up with with Joseph's word because he stood by his son all these times anyway in public? Joseph comes out of this.

SPEAKER_08 40:01

Well, and when he's in public, because someone came and complained to him about Jesus' precociousness, he rebukes him. But in private, he's proud of it.

SPEAKER_03 40:13

He loves that word lengthening. He really likes it.

SPEAKER_06 40:21

It's certainly.

SPEAKER_03 40:22

It just makes me think of this material was written by a man. And he's got a certain amount of sympathy for Joseph. You notice most of the most of the history of the church, it's Mary that's center stage. Here it's Joseph that's center stage. I don't know why, but it's kind of interesting. Because we know almost no stories about Joseph, other than his faithfulness and standing by and you know, etc. So it's kind of interesting to get a couple of Joseph stories here. Any other thoughts, questions? I want to take a moment to talk about next week before we run out of time.

SPEAKER_04 41:04

Can you imagine how worrying it was for Joseph? Like, you know what? You've been banned to think I'm not giving you your allowance. I'm just watching.

SPEAKER_06 41:21

And what might happen when he did it.

SPEAKER_03 41:24

That's right. So next week we're going to look at the Gospel of Mary, Mary Magdalene. Its writing is very different and a little more complicated. The part I've given you comes sort of in two portions. One portion is some of the disciples gathered somewhere, probably after Jesus' resurrection, so this is a post-resurrection appearance, it's being recorded there. There are three or four disciples, and there's Mary. And Jesus is trying to explain to them about sin. You won't understand what he's talking about unless you understand this Gnosticism stuff. Because Jesus says sin doesn't exist, so forth. But we get this kind of inner look at the disciples struggling because Jesus has this conversation with them, and then he's gone, and they can never contact him again, and they're left of all these questions. And then as they're sort of struggling, Mary speaks up and starts to explain everything that was going on. And the disciples realize that Mary makes a lot of sense. But then the misogyny comes in. And the disciples all get together and they say things like, Did Jesus really love Mary more than us? And of course, Mary claims he did. And they get into this argument, and they want to get rid of Mary, and finally, one of the disciples steps in and says, This is nonsense. So I leave you with that for next week. Read through it, struggle with it. The parts you don't understand, don't worry, they're not understandable. And we'll try to decipher some of that next time. Thanks for being here. It's been a great day. Thank you.