Paul's Different Gospel 3
The truth of the matter is that many early "Christians" themselves did not believe in the "Trinity". The truth is that such a doctrine did not even exist in early "Christianity", which was essentially a Jewish Essenic-Nazarene movement.
The further truth is that, even after the "Christian" movement outgrew its Jewish Essenic-Nazarene (the so-called "Judaic-Christian") roots and spread amongst the non-Jews, there were many who still believed that Jesus was an ordinary human being.
On what basis did they believe so and how did the truth of the Unity of God become heresy and the heresy of the "Trinity" become the truth?
As Peter Novak put it in his book, "Original Christianity- A New Key to Understanding the Gospel of Thomas and other Lost Scriptures"
https://www.amazon.com/Original-Christianity-Understanding-Gospel-Scriptures/dp/1571744452
"Thousands of books were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of "heretics" with them. Less than 100 years after Constantine's conversion, the church burnt down the famous Library of Alexandria in Egypt. It continued to launch similar campaigns for the next 1,000 years. It massacred tens of thousands of Christian "heretics" in France in the Albigensian crusade of 1209-1255, and possibly hundreds of thousands more during the Inquisition. Like George Orwell's fictional "Big Brother", the official church sought complete control over public and private opinion. When the printing press was invented in the fifteenth century, the church demanded the right to approve all manuscripts before publication. The church even refused to let people read its own book. As unlikely as it seems today, it was actually illegal to possess the Bible, and simply reading it was considered proof that someone was a heretic. Men and women were actually burned at the stake for reading the Roman Catholic Bible."
and
"A great many of these lost scriptures have been dated to the first or second century, making them some of the earliest Christian literature. Despite that, these teachings were erased from the church's legacy; we never inherited them because the church didn't want us to. For 1,500 years, from Constantine's conversion in the fourth century until the end of the Spanish Inquisition in 1834, the church burned these books and killed their owners. It was the longest censorship campaign in human history.
There is no way to calculate how much we lost. Although a few listings of titles of missing early Christian scriptures still exist, we know these listings aren't inclusive. They are just the only listings that managed to survive the editing process of the church. Still, they are enough. They make it clear that many more early Christian scriptures once existed. In the first centuries of the church, the faithful once read the following, alongside the familiar titles in today's Bible:
listing omitted
Today's official New Testament only offers its readers the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, along with a handful of letters from Paul, Peter, James, and Jude. Early congregations also read dozens of gospels and holy scriptures that no longer exist. All we have left today are a few of the titles, which stand as witness to the power and thoroughness of the church's censorship campaign. Although only eight authors are represented in the official New Testament, in the earliest years of Christianity the faithful read the work of at least 38 additional authors that we know of. The earliest disciples spent their lives teaching a literate culture about Christ, and, as Luke himself testifies, a great many written works emerged from their passionate commitment to that mission:
Many have taken pen in hand to draw up an account of the things that have taken place among us, just as they were handed down to us from the first eyewitnesses and ministers of the word. Since I have perfectly followed all these things from the very beginning, it therefore seemed good for me to also write you an orderly account. (Luke 1:1-3)
Before Luke got around to writing his version of events, many others had already done so. The official church, however, condemned all of those early reports, all except the 27 books that made it into the New Testament. In making those decisions, the church demonstrated favoritism toward one author in particular: Paul, who wrote 14 of the 27 books in the New Testament and never even met Jesus in the flesh. Today the official church embraces Paul's letters as the standard by which all other Christian scripture is to be judged, primarily because his work, before the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, seemed to be the oldest surviving Christian literature. Paul's writings were given preference over a great many other scriptures, including many allegedly written by some of the actual Twelve Apostles, such as Peter, James, Andrew, Thomas, and Philip. The church's only possible defense of this would be if all those writings were falsely attributed and were not actually written by the true Twelve; for if they were authentic, then the testimony of those who spent a year or more being instructed by Christ during His ministry would surely be preferred over someone who had only had visions of Him after His Resurrection.
The church does deny that these scriptures were written by members of the original Twelve. There are two things wrong with this position, however. First, if these scriptures were not originally written by the apostles, then where are the scriptures they wrote? Luke says that a sizable percentage of the apostles wrote their recollections or teachings. If these recently discovered scriptures are not the ones they wrote, then where are the ones they did write? Second, a very good case can be made that both the Gospel of Thomas (found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945) and the Gospel of Peter (found in Akhmim, Egypt, in 1886) actually date from the mid-first century, which is exactly when the Twelve would have been most likely to produce written works.
We know our lists of lost works are incomplete, because the Nag Hammadi find contained no fewer than 41 early Christian scriptures that we'd never heard of. Their titles had previously appeared in no list, no correspondence, no surviving document of any kind. These scriptures were considered so dangerous to the church that not one mention of them was allowed to survive. In the last century, for example, we discovered that there had once been a Gospel of Mary. We never knew that because the church didn't want us to. If the church had wanted that text to survive, no power on earth could have erased it from our heritage.
These texts and all trace of them were to be rooted out, the church decided. History was wiped clean of any memory or mention of the ideas in these works, until their texts were unearthed in Egypt.
How many more were there? Were there another 41 scriptures written in the earliest years of the church that we still don't know anything about? Were there a hundred? Two hundred? There doesn't seem to be any way to know. If the church could successfully erase all memory of these 41 scriptures, it could do anything; 1,500 years is a long time to get a story straight.
Truth through Censorship
The official church openly admits this censorship. It claims that all these lost texts were erroneous representations of Christianity and so deserved to be destroyed; and in support of that position, it points to some extant writings of early church figures that say as much. This argument is disingenuous, however, for the church is arguing its case with evidence it has admitted tampering with. For all we know, the vast majority of Christians in the first two centuries preferred these forbidden scriptures over those the official church canonized. But now that all evidence that might have reflected this has been erased, we will never know. As soon as the official church began tampering with the evidence, it lost all credibility."
Partial List:
o The Prayer of the Apostle Paul
o The Apocryphon of James (also known as the Secret Book of James)
o The Gospel of Truth
o The Apocryphon of John
o The Gospel of Thomas a sayings gospel
o The Gospel of Philip a sayings gospel
o The Book of Thomas the Contender
o The Apocryphon of John
o The Gospel of the Egyptians
o The Sophia of Jesus Christ
o The Dialogue of the Saviour
o The Gospel of the Egyptians
o The Apocalypse of Paul
o The First Apocalypse of James
o The Second Apocalypse of James
o The Apocalypse of Adam
o The Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles
o Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter
o The Letter of Peter to Philip
o Melchizedek
o The Testimony of Truth
o The Interpretation of Knowledge
o A Valentinian Exposition, On the Anointing, On Baptism and On the Eucharist
The Gospel of the Apostles
The Gospel of Basilides
The Gospel of Matthias
The Gospel according to the Hebrews
The Gospel of Peter
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene
The Gospel of the Nazareans
The Gospel of the Ebionites
etc.
Definitely and quite obviously, Paul wasn't the only one with a "different" Gospel and there were many more Gospels - other than the 4 Gospels - in existence at the time.
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