klubbhead024 said:
I finally got around to seeing this movie, and was actually quite pleased. I did have 1 question though. I know the book and the movie were fiction, but I thought I heard somewhere that some parts were true. The one main thing I was wondering is if there really was Gospels left out of the Bible.
The compiling of Gospel traditions (all the stories about Jesus) that eventually were written and canonized (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) took about four hundred years.
The first four hundred years of the church were years of division - scores of groups claimed to be the true church, and many of them had their own Gospels, most of which were lost when the orthodox church "won" with Constantine.
The Gospels that we have left that were not canonized are very fragmented, principally because they were not used in orthodox worship services from 70ad to 350ad or so...
We should note that the groups were largely seperated by their teachings about Jesus, Paul, or the OT. The worship services were meals, and after a meal a book would be read aloud (not everyone could read) and discussed. The orthodox church only had (and therefore only preserved) the NT.
Both the orthodox churches and the other churches mutually rejected eachother's writings because both were very traditional. That is, they were told by their founder to only accept teachings of a certain kind, and only accepted writings that fit this... unless a later teacher convinced them otherwise. As new writings came out, they were not accepted by either group.... the orthodox church simply "won."
footnote:
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~humm/Resources/Bauer/
