I just saw the (fairly lame) movie Stigmata on cable and at the end there was some note about the “secret gospel of Jesus” referred to in the movie being a real document, and that the Catholic Church has refused to recognize it and calls it a heretical document.
What is this “secret gospel” all about?
There are many so-called secret gospels, mainly Gnostic in nature and many of them discovered at Nag Hammadi. Here’s a link for a bunch of them:
I would only add to aldiboronti’s by saying that the movie referred to the Gospel of Thomas (probably Thomas the doubter.)
OH, God, don’t get me started on Stigmata.
The “secret gospel” in question is the Gospel of Thomas, one of the Gnostic Gospels, probably composed in, I think, the second century (don’t feel like looking it up at the moment), and is easily available at a bookstore near you.
That movie drove me nuts. Doctrinal errors aside (no, you can’t “catch” stigmata from an object owned by a stigmatic, for one thing), it irritated the crap out of me watching a movie about this woman going through all this pain and suffering and nearly bleeding to death over a book you can pick up at Barnes and Noble. It would be contained in one of the collections of Gnostic gospels- don’t know if it’s in the Nag Hammadi Library, but that might be a book worth looking into if you want to read some Gnostic stuff.
Thank you, Thea, now I’m definitely going to have to see it–sounds like “Great Bad”. 
Yeah, it’s from Thomas:
Here’s an interesting site about “other” gospels.
Happy
Here is an article with more info on the Gospel of Thomas and other estranged gospels.
Here is an article with more info on the Gospel of Thomas and other estranged gospels.
Here is an article with more info on the Gospel of Thomas and other estranged gospels.
There’s a lot of interesting religious books that didn’t quite make the final cut for the Bible. Basically, the Apocrypha and the Pseudopigrapha. In the Pseudopigrapha, you get books like “The Book of Adam and Eve” where Adam and Eve actually return back to the garden of Eden at some point. You can find it in most academic libraries. I’ve read through bits and pieces of it, and it’s quite fascinating. You also get a Gospel of Peter in the New Testament Apochrypha and various prophesizing Revalations-style works in the Old Testament Pseudopigrapha. The Pseudopigrapha is a HUGE tome, but fun if you’re into this sort of thing.
In addition to the Gospels cited above, Morton Smith has published a book on a “secret” gospel, which is actually an additional chapter to the Gospel of Mark, which he found in a monastery, copied onto the pages of anothe religious book. It’s interestig, because it looks like a Marcn parallel o the story of Lazarus. It was evidently a part believed by at least one group to be something to be read only by the initiated. Whether it is actually by Mark or as old as the Gospel of Mark (or a much mire recent invention) I do not know, but it’s fascinating reading. Just take Smith with more than a grain of salt. When he gets going his extrapolation mill runs way past the available evidence and gets fueled by his fantasies.
I didn’t care at all for the movie “Stigmata.” The whole thing was full of garbage. Later, I looked up this “Gospel of Thomas” and found that IT was also full of garbage.
I read that “Gospel of Mark” and was outraged.
There are REASONS why those alleged books were deliberately excluded from the canon of the New Testament.
I’m going to have to watch the movie again for errata. I distinctly remember seeing the stigmata on the young woman at the very beginning of the movie, when she was taking a bath, BEFORE she supposedly received any of the wounds.
Catholics certainly have enough problems with apologetics without crap like this being available to the public.
~VOW
I bought a copy of the GOSPEL OF THOMAS at the Booksmith in Harvard Square as a gift for my very Catholic Dad.
He found it fascinating and bought it along to his classes on bible history at Dunwoodie Seminary, where a cheerful and wise old Jesuit led him and the class in a study of it and other non-canonic Gospels, including that of Barnabas, who was after all the apostle who “replaced” Judas Iscariot.
Neither I, Booksmith, Dad, the Jesuit, or Dunwoodie have been struck by lighning or noticed any other signals of divine wrath. So far.
Dad tells me that there’s been several conferences at which the Catholic Bible, which has more books in it than any other Christian Bible, has been codified, and the Church regards the vote as it does the Pope’s election–it’s inspired by the Holy Spirit which makes up for the faulty judgement of humans.
Theoretically, then, a new gospel could be languishing in a cave deep in the desert somewhere that could be added to the canon after a Church council. It’s an exciting time to be a biblical scholar, with computers able to find patterns in texts that would have taken lifetimes before, and archaeology able to identify and date them with much more accuracy.
Not so- Barnabas was one of the two finalists to replace Judas, but he lost out to Matthias, who became the 12th Apostle.
So Barnabas was Miss Congeniality? Or am I getting my movies mixed up? 
The most interesting thing about ‘Stigmata’ in my book (it was a terrible movie in most respects) was how they presented the avowed religion of about half the people in North America as some kind of weird cult. What planet do these Hollywood producers come from? I actually started laughing at several points. It was as though you tried to depict alcohol as some sort of weird orgiastic ritual drug used by depraved devotees in bizarre exotic temples called bars.
Maybe we’ve become more insular in recent years. A friend recommended me as a source of information to a not-so-young Jewish woman of good education on the subject of medieval social hierarchy. At one point she said, now where do bishops fit in, the a lot of rest of these names are the same as chess-pieces,. I told her Bishops were Christian church officials and she said Oh, I always wondered about that.
Always wondered but apparently never bothered to find out even basic things about the majority religion of the country she lives in. I certainly don’t mean to imply Christians or unbelievers like myself are any better, my point is we are all becoming less interested in the core beliefs of our fellows to the point where they seen exotic if not downright weird