The True Story of the Origins of Christianity

By the 4th century of Christianity there was beginning to emerge a "victor's circle" which could claim for itself the status of "orthodox". This circle began to form itself around the emperor Constantine, who in 313, by a single edict, converted Christianity from a forbidden cult to a state religion and thereafter made it his pet project. The energy toward clarification, unification and yes, imperial pomposity, emerged primarily from that quarter of the Christian world. By 325 the church had it's official creed, hammered out at the Council of Nicea in what is now southwestern Turkey and still in regular use by Christians today.

It would still be another century and a half before an "official" Bible appeared, but a consensus as to what belonged in it was already beginning to take shape. As the church consolidated in those years, and this part of the world, it had a story to tell. We all know that story. It's not only in the Bible, it's in our blood, reinforced by the liturgy, the catechism, and the rich traditions of sacred art and iconography.

The basic plot is laid out in the book of Acts. It begins with the hushed silence of Jesus being taken up to heaven, followed by the fiery descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, which many Christians still celebrate as the birth of the church. The apostle Paul enters on the scene. at first a foe and then an indefatigable champion following his mystical encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. And now we watch as the disciples...now apostles... work out their differences and steadily spread the gospel...and the young church...to all corners of the Holy Roman Empire.

What we should be aware of, however, is that running through this story are several powerful assumptions that reinforce a singular point of view about how the faith and practice of the early Christian church took shape. And what became "the master story" was only this one point of view. It was nowhere near the whole story.

"The master story" claims that an unbroken chain stretching from Jesus to the apostles and on to their successors in the church....elders, ministers, priests, and bishops...guaranteed the unity and uniformity of Christian belief and practice. This supposedly unbroken chain is the basis of what the church still sees as "apostolic succession". And when anyone has strayed from the uniformity it claims to represent, by abandoning the pure doctrine that Jesus is said to have revealed to his apostles, the story says it is because the devil has sown weeds in the divine field.

By the time this "master story" had emerged, the apostles had come to be seen as male only, despite the evidence of the scriptures to the contrary. And, of course, some of today's churches still insist on the all male version of the story.

In the simplified version of this story that most Christians absorb, Jesus came to earth to found a new religion called Christianity, called his male only disciples to be his apostles and priests, and gave them the sacrament of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. And in this simplified version, obvious anomalies are overlooked...why Mary Magdalene, who was specifically given the first apostolic charge by Jesus himself to announce the news of his resurrection, was not included among the apostles, and why Paul, who was not at the Last Supper and never met Jesus in his earthly life,was.

But such is the power of blinders and most of today's churchgoers still seem determined to keep those blinders firmly in place.

The master story so seamlessly became the filter through which Christians saw the world that for sixteen hundred years seeing it any other way was nearly impossible. In 1945 in the deserts of Egypt, near Nag Hammadi, a large urn was discovered in a cave containing scrolls dating from the early days of Christianity. They seemed to have been put there in the late fourth century, probably in response to a bishop's having sent out a list of writings that is seen now as the earliest effort to declare a New Testament canon. The scrolls were a collection of sacred writings that had once been in use in early Christian communities but failed to make the cut amid tightening standards of orthodoxy.

From the translation and analysis that scholars have done in the years since the Nag Hammadi and other similar finds, some contents of newly found scrolls have proved to be among the earliest writings of the church. And the scholars who have examined them and studied the circumstances in which they were written and later hidden have now realized that winners and losers in the canonical sweepstakes were determined not by God's edict, but by worldly politics. What we now call orthodoxy came into being through the tug of war of opposing viewpoints around developing issues of Christian order and doctrine.

Losing views, including the one now called Gnosticism, came to be portrayed as the result of the devil's efforts. The real culprit all along has been not the losing viewpoints but the master story itself. When one moves this sacred cow gently off the tracks the picture that emerges of the real origins of Christianity is far more fascinating and believable. Rather than an unadulterated "pure doctrine" handed on serenely from apostle to apostle, early Christianity was a riot of pluralism. In the Christian communities, all different in ethnicity and temperament, there were many local options, and the texts that were circulated among these early outposts of Christians comprised an ongoing conversation rather than an unbroken monologue.

The treasure trove of writings emerging out of Nag Hammadi and other recent finds yields us up three very important new source materials for the study of Mary Magdalene: the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Her story is included in these three documents and also the story of true Christianity and its origins.

What emerges differs from the master story in some very important ways. Whereas in Acts the heroes are Peter and Paul, here it is Mary Magdalene who clearly emerges as winner of the apostolic triple crown: deepest understanding of the Master's teachings, best ability to live out what she understands, and an ongoing relationship with the Master in the visionary realms that makes her privy to teachings the other disciples know nothing about.

Another important point reinforced by the more recently discovered gospels is that Jesus'inner circle of disciples included both men and women on an equal footing. Jesus set his disciples upon the only known path to integral transformation: the slow and persistent overcoming of the ego through a lifelong practice of surrender and non-attachment. The self emptying that comes from that practice is not renunciation that implies pushing away. It is simply the willingness to let things come and go without grabbing on. It is non clinging. The path that Jesus taught led from selfishness fear, and narcissism to justice, compassion and humility.