“Nag Hammadi Codices, public domain via Wikimedia Commons” If you spend any time on YouTube looking into the origins of Christianity, you will quickly encounter a particular kind of story. It usually goes something like this: there was once a rich, diverse early Christianity, full of competing gospels and visionary teachers. Then Rome got involved, the Council of Nicaea happened, the "wrong" version won, and everything inconvenient was burned. The Gnostics, in this telling, a

The surprisingly complicated question of what counts as scripture , and who decided. A friend pulled me up recently on something I said in passing. I mentioned, almost offhandedly, that there is more than one Bible. He looked at me the way people look when they suspect they are being told something that ought not to be true. He is not alone. Most people who grew up in a broadly Christian culture absorb the assumption (never quite stated, never examined) that the Bible is a f

Most people read through the Gospel of Mark without pausing at the final page. They encounter the empty tomb, hear the announcement of the resurrection, and move on. The story, they assume, is complete. It is not. Hidden within the closing verses of Mark lies one of the most fascinating and least discussed puzzles in the entire New Testament. The Gospel does not end the way most readers think it does. The question of what Mark originally wrote, and what somebody else may have

The answer might change everything you thought you knew about how the story was built. Most people who grew up with Christianity were never told that the four Gospels were not written at the same time, by the same kinds of people, for the same reasons. They sit together in the New Testament as though they are four windows onto the same event — four independent witnesses giving their accounts of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That picture is wrong. And the way it