BBC Clip on “The Lost Gospels”
On Tuesday the 21st, September 2010, BBC FOUR aired "The Lost Gospels." Â I was one of the talking heads. Â The presenter was an interesting fellow, an Anglican priest Pete Owen Jones. The show included several on-location discourses. Â They flew me to Egypt for the taping. Â Some of it was done near the village of Nag Hammadi, at the spot where the so-called "Nag Hammadi Library" was discovered in 1945. Â The fourteen books found in a jar in this wilderness area contain 52 tractates, the famous "Gnostic Gospels." Â The most famous of these was and is the Gospel of Thomas. Â The clip here includes a shot in a busy market in Cairo, where we are sipping coffee and thinking deep thoughts together. In the clip I talk about the Gospel of Thomas, and I would like to make one point before you watch it. Â For over a decade now a lot of scholars of Gnosticism have argued that this Gospel is not actually a Gnostic Gospel. Â None of the complicated Gnostic mythology that [...]