Camp Gagnon - Jesus’s SECRET Teachings In The Gospel of Mary

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

Who was Mary Magdalene, and why is she important to theology? Today, we take a closer look at the life of one of the most famous religious figures. We’ll talk about who Mary Magdalene is, the seven spiritual powers, Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels, the Pope declaring Mary a prostitute, Mary’s spiritual teachings, and other interesting topics...Welcome to Religion CAMP! 🏕️Shoutout to our sponsor: RelayUse Code 'GAGNON' For a 7 Day Free Trial Here: http://www.joinrelay.app/camp✝️☪️✡️🕉️☦️ Religion Camp Merch: https://religion-camp.com🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets Here: https://markgagnonlive.com🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History Here: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.comTimestamps:0:00 What Is The Gospel of Mary Magdalene4:26 Who Is Mary Magdalene?5:57 The Pope Declares Mary a Prostitute12:20 The Lost Pages of Mary’s Gospel14:02 The 7 Spiritual Powers16:19 Jesus’ Teaching In The Gospel20:34 Mary’s Explains The Soul’s Journey 23:14 Was Mary Jesus’s Wife?27:52 Mary’s Spiritual Teachings33:52 Do You Believe Gnostic Texts?

We have all heard the story of Mary Maglan, the first to witness the resurrection, a close follower of Christ, and potentially maybe even a prostitute in ancient Judea. But what if that is a cover story? You see, this theory is controversial, and it comes from what we call the Gnostic Gospels. It's buried in the Egyptian desert and nearly lost a time, torn pages, teachings that never got out, and a version of Christianity that the church probably doesn't love. Because in this specific telling of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Mary isn't just a follower. She's actually Jesus' closest disciple and maybe the true heir to his movement.

I know this sounds crazy. As a Catholic, I mean, what are we even doing? But this is a piece of literature that existed, who knows how long ago and was talked about at the time of the early church. Now, Mary Magdalene, according to this theory, wasn't erased because she was sinful. She was erased because maybe she was too powerful. I love examining these alternative theories about biblical history and the Gnostic gospel of Mary Magdalene is no difference. So without further ado, let's jump in to this fascinating theory. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Religion Camp.

What's up, people, and welcome back to Religion Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon. And thank you for joining me at my tent for every single Sunday we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from every religion from around the world from all time, always. as I always say on the show, life is better with belief and myself growing up as a Catholic. I'm always curious about other people's faiths and backgrounds,

and I want to learn more about my own as well as other people. So this is a show where I have a good faith attempt to understand actually what people really believe. I truly believe this. I don't think it's possible

to understand a human being without understanding the God that they worship, whether that's, you know, Brahma, if that's Allah, if that is Jesus Christ, if that is something else completely. I am curious about really what it all is about.

And as always, I'm joined by the Greek freak himself. Christos Papadapodapodos, he is raised in the Orthodox Greek tradition. Isn't that right? That's correct. All right. Anyway, so today we're talking about the gospel of Mary Magdalene. Now, you probably heard of Mary Magdalene. You know, she's the first person to witness Jesus after he resurrected.

And at some point, a pope called her a prostitute, which we will explain. and as we know, a lot of that is, you know, what is found in church teaching, church history, and in the Bible itself. But what if I told you that Mary Magdalene's story potentially goes deeper? And it was actually hidden in the Egyptian desert for centuries. And it was covered up by men who wanted to potentially erase women's role in the church. This is something known as the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. It is a part of what we would call the Gnostic Gospels. These are teachings that are non-canonical.

They're scriptures that are allegedly dated to the time of the early church that have been found recently. I think this one specifically is in the Berlin Codex. Regardless, this is a gospel about Mary Magdalene that is filled with teaching so radical that someone literally tore out some of the most dangerous pages before bearing it completely. And what survived reveals a completely different version. version of Christianity, one where Mary Magdalene wasn't just Jesus' closest disciple or a, you know, someone that learned from him, but possibly something much deeper. And the real reason that Mary Magdalene was potentially erased from history wasn't because of her status or, you know, because,

you know, she was sinful or the sinful woman, as we'll explain. It was because she was actually powerful and possibly, according to this gospel, potentially the true heir. to Jesus's church. Now, again, this is, we're in conspiracy world here, okay? I don't want to conflate this. I don't want you guys to be thinking that I'm over here saying that this is Catholic or, you know, Christian dogma in any which way. No, this is a specific gospel that was found many, many years later that sort of recounts a different version of Mary Magdalene and who she was to Jesus Christ and what women and their role was like in the early church. So, again, just indulge me here as we go through.

this Gnostic tradition. So there is a German scholar named Dr. Carl Reinhart, around late 1800s, 1896, to be exact, and he's browsing through old manuscripts when a dealer approaches him. And he's in the middle of Cairo in Egypt. And this dealer comes up to him, and he says that he has this ancient beat-up book. And Dr. Reinhart buys it for, you know, maybe a couple hundred bucks, who knows. And he has absolutely no idea of what he just purchased, and he doesn't realize that it is going to be one of the most controversial religious texts in history.

This damaged book contained what is known as the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. It is, to date, the only gospel or ancient text that has been discovered that was supposedly written by or about a woman. And what it revealed would eventually expose how the Christian church in some ways spent centuries trying to rewrite Mary Mag's line in history. Now, we don't know for sure who wrote it or when exactly, but it is thought to clearly be written by a woman. By the way, it empowers Mary.

So whether it was Mary Magdalene or a different woman, we don't know. Now, before we get into what this Gnostic text actually says, let's talk about who Mary Magdalene, you know, the one that most people know, the one that is in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And across all four, she shows up as one of Jesus' most loyal followers. She helped fund his ministry, which means she probably had money in some capacity. She stayed at the crucifixion when most of the male disciples had left.

And most importantly, she was the first person to see Jesus after he resurrected from the dead. Let that sink in for a second, right? In a culture where women's testimony may not have even been valid in court, Jesus chose her to be the first witness to the biggest moment in Christian history. I mean, truly, if you don't know much about Christianity, the resurrection is the moment that people became Christian. That is the moment that Christ goes, defeats death. I mean, that's what Easter is all about. The resurrection cannot be underscored as the single most important event in Christianity. And Mary Magdalene, a woman was the first one to witness it. Early Christian communities clearly got the message.

I mean, the Eastern Orthodox Church even gave her the title of, quote, equal to the apostles. She wasn't just following, but she was a leader. So how did that Mary Magdalene, as, you know, church history goes on, become a sinful, potentially sexually deviant woman that we hear about in the West? Well, 591 AD, things take a turn. So in September of that year, Pope Gregory the Grand. is giving his Sunday sermon in Rome. Gregory was basically the most powerful religious figure in the Western world at this point, right? He is the Pope. He is the CEO of Christianity. There's only one unified church. There's no schism. And on this particular day, he makes an announcement

that will stick for the next 14th centuries. Gregory stands up and tells his congregation that he has figured something out. He says that Mary Magdalene is actually the same person as that, quote, unnamed sinful woman who washed Jesus's feet with perfume in Luke's gospel. Not only that, but she is also Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. Now again, if you don't know much about the Bible, there's a guy named Lazarus. He has, you know, a sister named Mary of Bethany. There's also a woman that washed Jesus' feet. These are all stories that exist in the Bible that are, you know, pretty uncontroversial.

They exist. But he is now saying that they are all the same person and that they are. are all Mary Magdalene. Now, if you actually read those gospel stories, the theory doesn't exactly hold up perfectly. You see, in Luke, there's an unnamed woman at the end of chapter 7, who anoints Jesus before his crucifixion. And then literally, one verse later in chapter 8, he introduces Mary Magdalene by name. If they were the same person, why wouldn't Luke just say so? It'd be like me being like, yeah, like, you know, someone just shows. up to this party. Anyway, meet Sarah. Right? Like, that's not how you would tell the story. You'd be

like, oh, like, Sarah just showed up to the party and here she is, you guys should meet her, right? Like, you wouldn't talk about someone as if you had no idea who they were and then immediately be like, oh, this is who they were. John's gospel makes it even clear. He tells the same perfume story, but he names the woman as Mary of Bethany, Martha's sister. Different Mary, different family, different backgrounds. It's kind of obvious when you look at the text and remember that all four Gospels tell in some ways the same story just through kind of different lenses. But for whatever reason, Gregory wasn't interested in these explanations. He had a point to make.

And in his sermon, he basically called Mary a, like a sex worker, basically, right, without using the word directly and saying that she had used perfume, quote unquote, to sent her flesh in forbidden acts. So basically to clean herself after doing sexually deviant activities for money. Now, this is what an actual Pope said. And again, not everything that the Pope says is necessarily church dogma. It's not like once he said it, it just was like, this is what every Catholic believes. But when you have the Pope at church saying something, you know, it's going to make a wave.

So by 591 AD, the church was this massive institutional hierarchy. You've got bishops and priests and deacons and men just in general. And then here's Mary Magdalene in the Gospels holding a position of authority in some ways. And the theory is that this potentially made people uncomfortable. And again, you have to remember the time frame, right? Gregory was saying that this is just as, you know, the Roman Empire in a lot of ways is collapsing around him. The church was positioning itself to fill that power vacuum and having a woman as one of the most important early Christian leaders was going to potentially cause a rift in the church. taking over that power vacuum.

Now, here's where things get interesting. The Eastern Orthodox Church heard Gregory's sermon later on and basically said, yeah, we're not really buying this. They kept honoring Mary Magdalene as a saint and continued to call her equal to the apostles. And in some way, this was just, you know, continued sort of theological division that would later lead to the schism. But in Western Europe, Gregory's version became kind of what was just generally believed. And for over a thousand years, if you were a Christian in the West, Mary Magdalene wasn't remembered as a, you know, a disciple or equal to the disciples or a leader.

She was kind of like the prostitute that turned it around. And artists, like, painted her that way. And priests, in some cases, would preach about her in that way. And she became this symbol of like guilt and of sin and then redemption rather than just a spiritual authority like many of the other disciples. And the craziest part is that this story, that Pope Gregory put out there was so successful that it actually survived the Protestant Reformation. So when Martin Luther broke from the Catholic Church,

and then later John Calvin started his own denomination, and then King Henry the 8th created the Church of England, they all kept Gregory's version of Mary Magdalene, and no one really questioned it at all. And this went on for 1,300 years. And by the time anyone officially corrected the accusation, I mean, we'd been through like Dark Ages, Renaissance, discovery of America, industrial, like world wars, the moon landing. It literally happened

1969 during this big Catholic church overhaul known as Vatican II, which my mom has plenty of thoughts about. Regardless, they kind of quietly made the correction. They removed Mary Magdalene from the official list of penitent women saints. And there was no press release or no sermon or anything like that, just a quiet admission that, you know, this teaching from the church was not exactly the way they wanted it to be known. So Pope Paul, the 6th, Basley said, yeah, she was never a prostitute and just kind of moved on. Compare that to Joan of Arc, who was burned for heresy, but eventually got like an official apology in sainthood. Well, Mary Magdalene, who was, you know, actually in the Bible, walked with Jesus, witnessed the resurrection,

probably could have gotten a little more, is all I'm saying. And most people never even heard about this 1969 correction. It wasn't like news or anything like that and Gregory's version was so baked into the pop culture that even with this correction, a lot of people still don't even know what to believe. So even today in movies and TV shows, people still portray Mary Magdalene as this reformed sinner

or, you know, rather than like a powerful disciple. So even in the TV show The Chosen, they claim Mary is from this place called the Red Quarter, which is literally a euphemism for the Red Light District. Now, is it possible that she's married from, who knows, right? It's just, doesn't seem as clear according to the Gospels.

So now that we have a pretty broad idea of who Mary Magdalene is and how most people see her, let's go back to that marketplace in Cairo, right? Dr. Reinhart takes his purchase back to Berlin, and then scholars start to translate it. And they realize that they found something really, really incredible. The manuscript ends up containing four different early Christian texts, the Apocrypha of John, the Sophia of Christ, the Acts of Peter and our topic of the day, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. And together, these make up what is now known as the Berlin Codex.

But here is the frustrating part. The Gospel of Mary was seriously damaged. The first six pages are completely gone, and four pages in the middle are completely missing. That's roughly half the text. But some scholars think that this damage may not have been done on accident, because those missing sections probably contain the most radical teachings of this Gnostic gospel. And you might just be sitting there at home being like, oh, this, you know, was some medieval fake. Well, archaeologists kept on finding more pieces. And in the early

1900s, they discovered Greek fragments of the same gospel dating to around like 200 AD. Now, that's nearly 400 years before Gregory had made this declaration or claim about Mary. So it's possible that this gospel was already circulating when the early church was still figuring out what Christianity even was. So people who read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John may have even had the opportunity to read the Gospel of Mary and internalize her own teachings. But what are these teachings? What is in this gospel? What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because you need to stop choking your chicken, slapping your salami, beating your meat, doing the little five-knuckle shuffle, shaking hands with the unemployed or squeezing the stress. You get what I'm saying.

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who will help you become the best version of you. Now, let's get back to the show. Her version of Christianity is a little different than what becomes mainstream. The four Gospels that we know, you know, focus on Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. That's kind of the whole point, right? Jesus died for your sins. Believe in that. You get saved.

You know, there's more of that, but that's generally the story. But the thing about Mary's gospel is that it doesn't mention the crucifixion of the resurrection of all. And that is weird because, according to the other gospel, she was the first person who witnessed the resurrection. Right? You'd think that would be worth writing down. Instead, Mary focused on something that Jesus taught her about the soul's spiritual journey. She describes seven powers that every person has to overcome to reach spiritual freedom. That is darkness, desire, ignorance, excitement of death, kingdom of the flesh, foolish wisdom of the flesh, and wrathful wisdom.

Now, if you know anything about Eastern spiritual traditions like Buddhism, Hinduism, this is probably not that strange to you. This is basically a roadmap for inner transformation, like a Christian version of like the chakras, or consciousness or things like that. Now, there is another big issue in Mary's text. Mary isn't talking about needing a priest to forgive your sins or requiring the church to interpret God's will. She's saying that you can personally overcome these spiritual obstacles through direct experience

and inner knowledge. I remember that word knowledge because it is important when it comes to understanding this text. Knowledge in Greek means nosis. And in Mary's gospel, we can see this on full display. The text is considered Gnostic because it is based on the Gnostic myths about how humans are trapped here in their material bodies and need to learn the secrets about themselves, about the world, and how to escape these physical prisons. And all this through the secret knowledge or this secret gnosis that Jesus can provide. Literally the first thing you see when you open the text is Jesus answering questions from his disciples about the nature of matter and sin.

So Peter asks, what is the sin of the world? Jesus responds, 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. That is why the good came into our midst to the essence of every nature in order to restore it to its root. So what does that mean? Essentially, Jesus is saying in this text, sin is manmade and something that can be overcome. It is not. a natural part of the world. It doesn't just exist ontologically. It is something that comes from within man himself. And then after delivering these teachings, Jesus leaves and the disciples are stuck asking themselves, what is, what did he just, what was that? And then this is where Mary steps in. So the text says, 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. But rather, let us praise his greatness, for he has prepared us and made us into men. Again, pretty weird. Notice how Mary lumps herself into the category of men here. Now, in the Gospel of Thomas, which we will absolutely do an episode on that I've talked about many times before, Jesus is quoted as saying, every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean changing gender. It means moving past the physical, social, and gender roles to attain this spirit. spiritual nirvana until we unite with the divine. So again, you can see how these two Gnostic texts are in some ways kind of potentially playing into each other. Right. This idea isn't stuck in one book. It's spread across different sort of Gnostic literature. Now the gospel continues with when Mary said this, she turned their hearts to the good and they began to discuss the words of the Savior. So we see Mary functions not just as a recipient of this knowledge, but as a leader in some ways who can guide and comfort other disciples, and not just annual disciples, men, which again, a woman was not allowed to do in the past. Peter acknowledges her special status, saying in the text,

Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than the rest of woman. Tell us the words of the Savior which you remember, which you know, but we do not, nor have we heard them. Mary then reveals the core teaching of her message, a vision of Jesus, an account of the soul's journey through these spiritual powers, the same seven that we mentioned before. So, Mary begins by telling of a personal vision. She says, 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, blessed are you that you did not waver at the sight of me? For where the mind is there is the treasure. When Mary asks how one sees such visions, whether through the soul or you know, the spirit. Jesus says, 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. Unfortunately, the manuscript is then broken off at this critical point and the next four pages are missing. But when the text resumes in chapter 8, Mary is describing the soul's ascent through various spiritual obstacles. This appears to be part of the vision that Jesus had shared. The soul in counters different powers that try to prevent its journey. So you have the power of desire that confronts the soul saying, I did not see you descending, but now I see you ascending. Why do you lie since you belong to me? The soul then responds, I saw you, you did not see me, nor recognize me. I served you as a garment, and you did not know me. And then the power of ignorance challenges the soul.

Where are you going in wickedness? Are you bound? But are you bound? Do not judge. The soul replies, why are you judging me? Although I have not judged. I was bound, though I have not bound. I was not recognized, but I have recognized that all is being dissolved, both the earthly things and the heavenly. And then finally, the fourth power appears in its seven forms. These powers ask, whence do you come, slayer of men, and where are you going? Conqueror of space. The soul's final response demonstrates its liberation. What binds me has been slain and what turns me has been overcome and my desire has been ended. The ignorance has died. In an eon, I was released from a world and in a type from a type from the fetter of oblivion, which is transient. From this time on,

will I attain to the rest of the time to the season of the eon in silence? All right, what does all this mean? I know this sounds kind of confusing, but I think it's important for us to actually read the text itself in order to get a sense for how it is written. Essentially, it details the story where the soul must overcome different obstacles, right? So you die, your soul then is released, and you have to overcome these obstacles, desire, ignorance, death, flesh, false wisdom to achieve the ultimate liberation and rest. But not everyone thought Mary was telling the truth. Andrew responds first and says, 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. Peter then takes it further, questioning both

the content and the fact that Mary received private revelations. He says, did he really speak privately with a woman and not openly to us? Are we to turn about? And I'll listen to her. Did he prefer her to us? Mary then responds and says, my brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I have thought this up for myself in my heart or that I am lying about the Savior? This conflict is then finally resolved by Levi, who we also know as Matthew, who defends Mary by saying, Peter, you have always been hot-tempered. 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. That is why he loved her more than us. Now, this quote brings us to possibly the, you know, one of the greatest conspiracies in Christian history, that Mary Magdalene wasn't just, you know, a trusted disciple of Jesus, but that she was also his wife.

Now, again, this is crazy, but it exists in church heresy. The Gospel of Philip, another text that was buried for centuries and rediscovered in 1945, again, sort of lumped into these sort of Gnostic texts, contained some pretty wild statements about. Mary Magdalene's relationship with Jesus. And I'm going to quote this directly because it's important you hear the actual words. The Gospel of Philip says, there were three who always walked with the Lord, Mary, his mother, and her sister, Anne Magdalene, the one who was called his companion. His sister and his mother and his companion were each a Mary. So, sister, mother, companion were each a Mary. And then it gets more specific, it says, Jesus loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him,

why do you love her more than all of us? Now, before we go down any rabbit holes here, let's just be clear what we're dealing with. These are second and third century texts that are not included in the official biblical canon. Scholars debate what these passages actually mean. some debate if they're even written by the people that were around the time of Christ and Judea. Some think companion might just mean spiritual partnership. Others think that it means something more. But here is what is not necessarily debatable. Multiple early Christian sources describe Mary Magdalene as having an intimate relationship with Jesus

that made the other disciples jealous. That's not necessarily speculation. That's what the text basically say, right, that Christ loved her very much. The gospel of Philip goes even further. It describes Mary as Jesus's cononos, which in Greek can mean companion or even spouse. The text says the other disciples ask Jesus, why do you love her more than all of us? And Jesus responds, why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light and he who is blind will remain in darkness. He's essentially

saying that, you know, they don't understand the nature of love and that they're blind to the truth. Some scholars argue that this points to an actual, like, marital relationship that early church leaders tried to cover up. And again, this marriage theory goes like this. If Mary Madeline was Jesus' wife and if she had children with him, then his bloodline would have continued through her family line and that would create a completely different source of religious authority, not based off Peter, who as Catholics, we understand, was the first pope, but through direct descendants from Jesus himself. Now, what would that mean for the church, right?

It would basically invalidate the Pope as having this authority as Peter's successor, and you might have had, you know, Mary's descendants claiming authority as Jesus's, you know, like actual family and, you know, this is not just theological competition. It's literally like Pope versus Jesus' kid. Now, I want to be clear, there is no definitive proof that Mary and Jesus were married. This is not something that I believe the canonical gospels don't explicitly state this. and the evidence is obviously circumstantial and pretty tacit at best. But what's interesting is how, you know, this has been even floated

and that these theories even exist in the first place. So in the fourth century, church father Epiphanius wrote extensively against groups that honored Mary Magdalene as Jesus' companion. As you can imagine in this early church period, you have a lot of different factions that are kind of gathering, you know, with admiration and worship of Christ, but all kind of believing and operating under some different rituals. And this kind of goes on until the church officially sort of canonizes what the teaching is. He was particularly upset about sex that, you know, included women in leadership roles and said

that they were deluded by feminine madness, actual quote. What we know for certain is that Mary clearly had teachings and spiritual authority that in some ways made people jealous. in this male-dominated structure. And whether that came from, you know, being Jesus' closest student or, you know, potentially these Gnostic Gospels being, having semblances of truth, which I don't believe. Regardless, the result was that the church leaders, specifically in the early days, didn't necessarily love her teaching.

And this connects to something a lot bigger. Mary's Gospel in these other early texts show that there was a whole branch of early Christianity that, you know, in some ways, look different than what we have today. And these are communities that, you know, potentially had female leadership and things like that. And, again, scholars call this Gnostic Christianity. And what we're talking about here is this experimental version of Christianity that puts, you know, spiritual development and almost like Eastern sort of Buddhist philosophy instead of, you know, dogmatic, you know, structured church teaching. And Mary Magdalene seems to have been central to this alternative Christianity. some people, you know, believe, and again, this is an early church heresy, but some people believe

that the church deliberately tried to cover this up. So the Gospel of Philip puts it this way. Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error. If they do not first receive the resurrection while they live, when they die, they will receive nothing. So again, in this same gospel, they're talking about the spiritual transformation in this lifetime, not waiting for salvation after death and that nirvana and enlightenment can be achieved on earth. This kind of teaching made every person their own spiritual authority and that you know you're on your journey while you're on earth and that you're not waiting for this afterlife. It sort of affected the role of priests and it suggested that you know women and men could have equal spiritual knowledge and had a ton of

implications that you know were in many ways antithetical to early church doctrine. And by the time the Roman Empire made Christianity the official religion in the fourth century, this alternative version had been spread in some ways and was now no longer going to be included in the canon. And so, as a result, Mary Magdalene, in some ways through, you know, Pope Gregory, got transformed from, you know, a close companion of Jesus to this, you know, sort of repentance sinner. And her teachings got potentially buried in the desert, again, if you believe, that this gospel of Mary is connected to Mary Magdalene in any significant way, which I don't. So it's possible that had that stuck around, Christianity would look very different today, as you can imagine.

The question now becomes, what else may have been lost? What was in those teachings and why was it created and why was it getting passed around the early church? Most Gnostic texts were completely lost to history until rediscovered in the 19th and 20th centuries. Scholars in the 1600s might have known that heretical gospels once existed, but it was only because early church fathers like Arranius and Epiphanius had mentioned them in order to denounce them and show that they are indeed heretical. There are virtually no copies in libraries or translations that circulated in Europe and no real understanding of what these texts might actually have taught. And it's really interesting to me. I don't know. I'm curious. Of course, there is the official

church canon that I have a ton of reverence and respect for, but these sort of Gnostic alternatives, Gospels I find fascinating to think about what were some of the theories that were swirling around about Christianity in those early days that never got canonized or were potentially even looked at by the early church fathers and not included. Now, this Berlin Codex wasn't discovered until 1896. That is, three years after King James formed the biblical canon in England. Nag Hammadi wasn't discovered until 1945. And to really understand the amount of lost time, listen to this, the gospel.

of Judas was discovered in the 1970s and wasn't publicly announced until the early 2000s. Now, Jesus' gospel was found in a tomb carved into a limestone rock and then sold and traded around on the black market and then sat in a New York City PO box for 15 years and was almost completely destroyed before being made publicly available in 2006. Now, again, this gospel of Judas, I don't believe, is an actual gospel written by the sort of infamous Apostle Judas, but it is an ancient text that existed around this time of, you know, early church discussion, which is fascinating to me that this text from thousands of years ago wasn't available to you and I until, you know, the Borat and Twitter and, like, the we.

Like, it's just crazy that something so old we didn't know about until so recently. And for over 1,400 years, you know, the church in some ways kind of upheld a teaching that was not entirely true around Mary Magdalene. And in some specific cases, her reputation amongst Christians and Catholics was tarnished. And so it is an interesting question that these gospels bring up. And for me, to me, you know, the ultimate thing is I don't reject Catholicism or Christianity. in any sort of significant way. But I do like to look at these Gospels and it's just fascinating to think,

like, oh, wow, this was also circulating at the time. And even when you consider, you know, women's role in religion, especially in that time, the fact that someone would even write a text like this, like, you know, let's say it's not Mary Magdalene herself. Let's say someone else writes this text. The fact that someone else would write it and then circulate it claiming that,

oh, Christ actually said this and gave it to early Christians and Jews of that time and that they read this and they were like, you know, this is crazy. And that someone thought it was crazy enough that they had to bury it. I don't know. It just raises a lot more questions than answers. But that, ladies and gentlemen, is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. I mean, a fascinating story. Christos. I mean, were you familiar with any of this stuff from the Gospel of Mary Magdalene?

Just all the Greek words you said? Nice. I guess that's all that matters, right? How is your Greek? It's pretty good. I'm pretty fluent. I get mistaken for a person from Greece, for a native. No way. That's sick as hell. Well, I mean, you should read the New Testament in the, you know, in the original Greek. All that to say, I don't know. I find it fascinating. I just love these Gnostic texts. I'm, I don't, I'm trying to figure out my exact relationship with them. I don't look at them and go like, oh, this is true.

But I do look at them and be like, oh, some people for sure believe this. And why do they put it out there? You know what I mean? Like, I don't know. Like, it just strikes me as so interesting. Why do these things exist? I don't know. What do you guys think?

think. Where do these Gnostic Gospels come from? What is the purpose of them? And I'm curious what other things were, you know, passed around in the early church that people kind of believed that weren't entirely true. That, you know, seems to be a misinterpretation of a few little texts in the in the Bible. Curious what you guys think. Please drop a comment. If there's anything that I missed about this gospel of Mary Magdalene, I would love to know. I read all the comments, you know, on YouTube and Spotify, go through all of them. So please drop it in there. I would just be nice about it. You know, I'm trying my best. Again, I'm not a biblical scholar. I'm not a religious expert.

I'm just a comedian that is curious. Speaking of which, if you want to see me on the road, come check me out doing stand-up comedy. Go to Mark Yagdon Live.com. You can see all the tour dates. Check out Camp R&D. Go to ReligionCamp.com or whatever. It's in the description.

You'll find all the merch, anything you need to find. Anyway, this has been another episode of Religion Camp. I will see you guys next Sunday. Thank you all so much and peace with you. What's up, people? Quick announcement. If you are a fan of Camp Gagnon or Religion Camp, I have great news because we are dropping history camp.

That's right. This is the channel where we're going to be exploring the most interesting, fascinating, controversial topics from all time throughout all history, right? You probably know about Benjamin Franklin, I don't know, Thomas Jefferson, Nikola Tesla. Interesting figures from history, and you probably learned about in school and they were pretty boring, but not here. No. As you know, I was raised by a conspiracy theory, so I'm going to be diving deep into all of the

interesting, strange, occult, and secretive society. social relationships that all of these famous influential men from our shared past have. So if you're interested, please go ahead and subscribe to the YouTube channel. It will be pinned in the description as well as the comments. And if you're on Spotify, this doesn't really apply to you, but these episodes will be dropping as well. Just go ahead and give us a high rating because it really helps the show.