The Secret Gospel

I'm doing an extra bookstore shift today, from 12-2.30, as we're all helping my friend Sharon move house. Tim usually does Sunday afternoon, and Tim is the guy with the truck.. I'm happy just to sit here and blog. ;-) I got a good deal.

I have bookstore/library karma.. Since I was 23, when I met Keith, I've volunteered in Glastonbury's Library of Avalon, and then when I came to the US worked in B&N for a time, until the slave-labour broke me down, then I volunteered in here. 10 years total, hardly a week missed, being around books. I've wondered several times whether I had anything to do with the fire in Alexandria, and if this is penance?? I do have a particular love for the Roman history of that era... ;-)

Talking of which I started a new book, "The Secret Gospel", about a letter from Clementine, to 'Theodore' (nobody knows who Theodore was) about the esoteric teachings of Jesus that got left out of the New Testament, and a sect of heretics that taught that discovering and demystifying sin was the only way to salvation. The document was dicovered by Harvard professor Morton Smith, in 1958 in Mar Saba, a very remote desert Monastery in Judea. How these old (1800 years!) documents survive is incredible! No, not the Nag Hammadi/Dead Sea Scrolls stuff, this is different. It's very interesting reading. And it's published through our Dawn Horse Press.

History is only ever partial, we can never really know, and I love those wild-card things that you never get taught in school. This world is not what we think. Not what we were taught it is.

In 1958, Morton Smith traveled to Jerusalem to do research in the monastery library of Mar Saba, in the Judean Desert. What he found was no routine corroboration of New Testament history, but a precious fragment of a second-century document that would change our understanding of the work and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.
As exciting as the most suspenseful adventure story, Professor Smith’s book is a lively and readable account of the discovery and unraveling of some of Christianity’s most intriguing mysteries.
While his scholarly credentials are impeccable, Professor Smith’s theory—as he himself anticipated—has proven to be explosively controversial. . . . Meanwhile, The Secret Gospel invites a wide community of readers to share in the challenge of his discovery, and to evaluate for themselves the provocative—and fundamental—questions it raises.
—from the Foreword by Elaine Pagels

author, The Gnostic Gospels