The Search for Lost Gospels Bible Hunters

Egypt.

The setting for a unique and historic quest.

CAMELS BRAY

The quest to find ancient scriptures in support of the largest

religion in the world...

BELLS RING

..Christianity.

RELIGIOUS CHANTING

At stake - the faith of millions with the Bible at its heart.

But there are deep divisions between those who consider the Bible

to be the absolute word of God

and those who take a less literal view of its teachings.

200 years ago, for the first time, the historical story of Jesus

and the reliability of New Testament Gospels came under attack.

To defend the authority of the Bible,

Bible hunters scoured the monasteries of Egypt

in search of the world's oldest biblical manuscripts.

What they found were challenging variations between ancient

and current biblical texts.

The threat that the Gospels

may not be the pure Word of God was received like a bombshell.

But what if it wasn't just variations between the biblical texts

we have today and those they'd rediscovered?

What if they found whole new texts and gospels?

In effect, a lost alternative Christianity?

I'm Jeff Rose, an archaeologist and historian.

I want to explore what the Bible hunters discovered

and ask just how this affects the very foundations of the Christian faith.

This is the abandoned city of Oxyrhynchus,

in the desert of Egypt, south of Cairo.

A centre of early Christianity,

the site was a magnet for 19th-century Bible hunters.

In 1897, two British archaeologists, Bernard Grenfell

and Arthur Hunt, came here to dig.

They were looking for the world's oldest Bibles.

In their own words, "Some day or another,

"a New Testament of the 2nd century must turn up in Egypt."

In an ancient rubbish pile, they found over a half million

fragments of Greek papyri.

One of them, a sensational text from the 2nd century AD...

..with sayings attributed to Jesus.

"Jesus said - 'My soul grieveth over the sons of men,

"'because they are blind in their heart.'"

Some of the Jesus sayings found at Oxyrhynchus were known

and quoted in the Gospels of the New Testament.

But other sayings were completely new to Bible readers.

"If you do not fast from the world, you will not find

"the Kingdom of God.

"And if you do not keep the Sabbath a Sabbath,

"you will not see the Father."

If these new Sayings Of Jesus were genuine,

they threatened the authority and reliability of the Bible text.

Devout Christians believed that the Bible contains

the absolute Word of God.

Yet here was startling evidence of sayings attributed

to Jesus which never even appear in the Bible as we know it.

To understand the full importance of this discovery,

we have to travel back in time.

To the earliest centuries of Christianity - the time

of Jesus' crucifixion in Jerusalem around 33 AD.

It was shortly before the Jewish Passover that Jesus,

a radical and controversial Jewish preacher, came to the city.

Jesus arrives in Jerusalem

and it's clear that his arrival has caused great excitement

and the message is very clear that there is going

to be some form of transformation, a new kingdom is at hand.

But within a week, this movement is completely, apparently, snuffed out.

There is no more humiliating way of destroying someone than to

crucify them.

But something happened in the 36 hours after the crucifixion

that made the followers of Jesus believe that he was

God's Messiah, God's divine saviour.

And the bringer of a new world order.

At some point, there is the idea that there is an

empty tomb and that there is a possibility that, in some way, Jesus

has survived, has become alive even, possibly even in a physical sense,

that although he appears to be dead, he has triumphed in some way.

The story of the resurrection of Jesus comes down to us

through the four Gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, written several

decades after the crucifixion, when Jesus' disciples were getting old.

Those Gospels essentially arose

at a time when Jesus' followers, the apostles,

they were dying out, and therefore, it was felt

that there needed to be something of Jesus' words, his teaching,

his deeds that needed to be recorded for posterity, as it were.

The four Gospels are a key part of the official

text of the New Testament, the Canon.

For almost 2,000 years, they had the monopoly on the story of Jesus.

Until the discovery of the New Sayings Of Jesus in 1897.

In Europe, the introduction of a new biblical text caused a storm.

Scholars and believers were in the midst of an acrimonious

debate about the Bible and the Christian faith.

In the 19th century,

there was the most febrile debate about religion.

It was really the thing that fired everybody up.

It was about your very self, your soul, it was the most

violent disagreement about religion since the Reformation.

Under scrutiny was the historical reliability of both

the New Testament,

and of the Old Testament,

written by ancient Israelites long before the appearance of Jesus.

Critical history really challenged

the foundations of Christianity, by looking at the fundamental texts

of Christianity, and wondering if they were original, true, authentic.

But why was this debate about the truth of the Bible

happening in Europe?

And why were Bible hunters heading for Egypt?

It had all started 100 years earlier because France had

imperial ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean.

In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte arrived here with

an army of 40,000 soldiers.

Although he failed to establish a permanent foothold in Egypt,

he opened this ancient and mysterious country

to an army of Bible hunters.

He's definitely here for political reasons,

he's definitely here for military reasons, but any voyage into

Egypt in the 19th century is going to be shrouded with romanticism.

Egypt is seen very much as the birthplace of the

arts and sciences, it's a land that hasn't been accessed freely

since classical antiquity.

Among Napoleon's army was the surveyor Vivant Denon.

A trailblazer for the Bible hunters.

His drawings alerted the world to the wonders of Egypt

and challenged long-held views of history.

The French, the British, and the Germans were obsessed with the idea

that they were natural heirs to the great civilisations

of Rome and Greece.

But Denon's drawings revealed an older,

more spectacular civilisation -

Ancient Egypt.

360 miles south of Cairo, Denon happened upon

the ancient temple of Denderah.

THEY SPEAK IN EGYPTIAN ARABIC

He was awestruck.

"This monument seemed to me

"to have the primitive character of a temple in the most perfect state.

"In the ruins of Denderah, the Egyptians appeared to me

"like giants."

Denderah was full of mysterious images and hieroglyphs,

which Denon couldn't decipher.

He had no idea that he was about to make one of

the most controversial discoveries of the age,

a direct challenge to the authority of the Bible.

Deep within the main temple,

something truly spectacular awaited him.

A narrow stairwell leads upward. On top is a small room.

On its ceiling - a sensation.

A zodiac.

A circle of animals representing the constellation of the stars

at a specific date in history.

Denon made a sketch of the zodiac so he could show it to French scholars.

They were so impressed that a treasure hunter was

dispatched to retrieve the zodiac for the French nation.

What you see here isn't the original zodiac.

That one was removed "oh, so carefully!" using explosives

and then brought back to France.

The zodiac ended up in the Louvre,

where Denon became director after his return to France.

Soon, he was embroiled in a heated controversy about the age of

the zodiac, with huge implications for the authority of the Bible.

In the 19th century,

Christians believed the world was created in 4004 BC.

This PRECISE date was proposed by the Irish Bishop Ussher

after he meticulously calculated a timeline using

all of the genealogies in the Bible.

But if the Denderah zodiac was older than 4004 BC,

this implied that the Bible was wrong.

THUNDER PEALS

French scholars read the zodiac as a clear

representation of the night sky as seen at the time that it was carved.

Through astronomy, they concluded that it was far older

than 4004 years BC.

The date that they give to this monument is about 15,000 BC,

so long before the biblical creation.

So this is really dangerous material for

Bible-believing Christians and it causes a

huge battle in France between the conservative Catholic Church, who

want to argue that this is a much, much later monument,

and the atheists and radicals in France,

who are committed to this date of 15,000 BC.

The controversy surrounding the zodiac raged for more than 20 years.

Until the brilliant French scientist Jean-Francois Champollion got involved.

So Champollion looks at these images of the Denderah ceiling

and he finds there a word - autocrater.

This is a Greek or Roman title,

so Champollion argues that this has to be a Roman-age temple.

He, Champollion, the great radical, ends up defending the Church

and demonstrating this to be a much later monument.

The Pope was so pleased, he offered to make him a cardinal.

Which is a nice gesture, but Champollion was both married

and an atheist.

HYMN SINGING

But the damage to the Bible's reputation had been done.

Scholars had started to question if the stories of the Bible were true.

Denderah challenges the Old Testament.

The idea of taking this challenge to the Old Testament

and moving it to the New Testament Gospels, that only comes with

the German scholar David Friedrich Strauss in the 1830s.

Strauss' book, The Life Of Jesus, shocked the faithful

when it was published in 1835.

Strauss' claim is that the Gospels are

unreliable sources in two ways.

Firstly, they're full of inconsistencies.

Different Gospels say different things about the life of Jesus.

Secondly, they're full of miracles

and in making that argument, it helped Strauss to be able to

claim that the Gospels were very late texts.

The end product of a long period of myth making.

He thinks that the events of the Gospels,

especially those events that don't seem historically viable,

like miracles,

are myths and he's quite willing to use those words about them.

Defenders of the Christian faith were stung by Strauss' criticism.

Some set out to search for the oldest biblical manuscripts

in the world, to prove the truth and historical accuracy of the Bible.

The first of these was the young lord Robert Curzon.

Robert Curzon had studied classics at Oxford,

but failed to complete his degree.

In many ways, he was very typical of his age.

Young aristocrat, bored, er, couldn't find a role for himself.

His family had no sense of what he should do,

and so, he was clearly seeking some sort of purpose in his life.

Disenchanted by the perpetual gloom of England, Curzon wrote,

"The solitariness of my existence is unendurable.

"It is like living in a madhouse."

So he packed his bags

and set off for an exotic land to resurrect his broken spirit.

In 1833, Curzon went for a Grand Tour that took him

through Europe, then across the Mediterranean all the way to

Egypt and the majestic pyramids.

CAMELS BRAY

You can't not be amazed standing in the presence of these

giant stone monsters.

But Curzon wanted to do more than just

marvel at the wonders of Ancient Egypt.

Curzon had a special interest in ancient biblical texts and believed

that the best way to preserve them was to bring them home to England.

He hoped to find them at the country's Christian monasteries,

some of the oldest in the world.

Egypt was a key player in the formation of early Christianity

and it's here that the monastic movement began.

Monks who had gone out to the desert to live in solitude banded together

in self-sufficient communities and those became the first monasteries.

Curzon travelled west of Cairo, to the Syrian monastery,

part of Egypt's 2,000-year-old Coptic Church.

He'd heard that its library was in poor condition and wanted

to preserve whatever texts he might find there for posterity.

BELL RINGS

When Curzon visited the library, he found the place in

complete disarray with manuscripts just littering the floor.

In his own words, he saw himself as a kind of biblical

knight-errant, there to save the texts -

"from the thraldom of ignorant monks,

"kept in their dark monastic dungeons."

The librarian of the monastery, Father Bigoul,

knows of the chaos that Curzon encountered.

During Curzon's visit, a blind monk showed him some of the library's

collection, a scene illustrated in one of Curzon's books.

According to Curzon,

the young English lord plied the blind monk with sweet liqueur

so he would lead him into the deepest recesses of the vaults.

"Taking the candle from the hand of one of the brethren,

"I discovered a narrow low door, and entered into a small closet

"with the loose leaves of ancient manuscripts."

Curzon bought dozens of rare Christian manuscripts

from the monks, including a precious 9th-century Gospel fragment.

The texts are now in the British Library,

more than 2,000 miles from where they were found.

How do you feel about that?

Curzon's cache of manuscripts included a surprise.

A Christian text no-one had seen before.

The Acts of Peter and Paul.

Although they are important characters in the New Testament,

the Acts of Peter and Paul were never included in the Bible.

The Acts of Peter and Paul have Peter

and Paul in Rome as brothers, which is extraordinary

because Peter, of course, is the original Jewish apostle who

is given the order by Jesus to go and lead the Church after his death,

Paul is representing something very different, he's representing

the Gentile Christianity, they actually have a row together.

Bringing these two together is absolutely

essential for the unity of the Church.

The question was why this important Christian text was not

included in the Bible? And how many more texts not

included in the Canon were out there, waiting to be discovered?

Bible hunting now focused on the White Monastery near Sohag.

It had its heyday between the 4th and 7th centuries AD,

when Christianity was the dominant religion of Egypt.

It's here that I meet Father Shenouda, a local monk,

who provides a window back in time.

Monastic life started

here in Egypt, and then spread all over the world.

Ah, yeah, you can see the old and then the new top of the church.

'In the hills above the monastery, Father Shenouda takes me

'to an old cave, cut into the rock thousands of years ago.'

This is St Mark who tells us about Christianity when he came...

This is unbelievable.

'This cave became a centre for Christian worship when Christianity

'became the state religion of Rome in the 4th century AD.'

But this whole cave is carved

-out by hand, by people.

-Yes.

This cave is very important for Christians here in Egypt.

Egypt was full of monks, full of monasteries, you know, you can

hear the bell of the churches from Alexandria to Aswan.

Means 1,000 kilometres.

It means that Christianity was very spread all over.

Isn't it interesting that this cave here was

-started by the Pharaohs?

-Yes, still working, that's the thing,

because when the era of the Pharaohs is being finished, the Christians,

they complete this wonderful work and clever work.

That means that we are the sons of the Pharaohs,

we are the original of this land.

In the valley below the cave, Lord Curzon visited the White Monastery

in the 19th century, but failed to find any significant Christian manuscripts.

But the French Egyptologist Emile Amelineau and his team

refused to give up the search for biblical treasures.

Look... Check out these hieroglyphs.

It's like everything in Coptic Christianity.

Built on the ruins of the ancient Pharaohs.

Visiting the site,

these Egyptologists came across the monastery's old church.

COPTIC CHANTING

It's still a place of worship for Coptic Christians.

It once boasted a large library,

until the collection was consumed by fire in 1798.

But, following a trail of parchment leaves,

the Egyptologists knew that some Christian texts had survived there.

In 1885, Amelineau discovered a secret room.

Inside, a large cache of manuscripts.

It included an extraordinary text written in Coptic -

the language of Egypt's Christians.

The text was attributed to the disciple Bartholomew,

but it was not included in the Bible.

The Questions of Bartholomew, which have survived, are rather interesting documents

because these are questions which Bartholomew is supposed to have made

to Jesus after the Resurrection, very searching questions

about the meaning of Jesus himself and what the Resurrection meant,

but also has a lot of material about the descent into hell.

The Bartholomew text includes the following passage -

"Blessed are you, Bartholomew, my beloved,

"for when I vanished from the cross then I went down into Hades

"that I might bring up Adam and all those who are with him."

The Bartholomew text was further evidence of early Christian manuscripts

that had not been included in the Bible.

It raised questions over the way that the Bible text,

the Canon, was fixed.

In Britain, in particular, religion was a hotly-debated topic.

It's the one side of the 19th century that costume drama,

popular images of the country, have tended to forget.

Religion went right to the heart of who you were.

It was the sort of subject that every student talked about,

that there were articles in the paper about, people burnt books.

There were riots in the streets after sermons.

It was THE topic that defined who you were

in 19th-century England.

HYMN SINGING

In the face of this acrimonious debate,

the discovery of Christian texts that were

not included in the Bible

added further uncertainty to the Christian faith.

This was a ticking time bomb that could further undermine

the version of the Bible that was in most people's houses in those days.

The discoveries of the White Monastery inspired

French archaeologists in Egypt to find out more.

In 1886,

the French scholar Urbain Bouriant travelled south along the Nile.

He could read Coptic and was an expert in the new

science of palaeography - the study of ancient writing.

His quest for ancient Christian texts brought him to Akhmim,

a former centre of Christianity, 300 miles south of Cairo.

I am curious to see the cemetery here, in Akhmim.

Because even though they are Christians, the way they bury

their dead is the same as they've been doing for 5,000 years.

Bouriant's dig report recounts how he excavated

a Christian tomb in the city.

There's a good chance he was looking around here,

the city's main cemetery.

DISTANT CHANTING

I check out one of the tombs.

Apparently, this one contains the coffins of foreigners

who died in the city.

Searching through the tombs of Akhmim,

Bouriant eventually made a major discovery.

Beside the mummy of a Christian monk,

he found an 8th-century papyrus with a 2nd-century text.

He'd discovered the Gospel of Peter,

another important text not included in the New Testament.

The Gospel of Peter takes us back to a pivotal moment of Christianity.

The crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ.

Technically,

none of the Gospels gives us an account of the Resurrection,

the women go to the tomb and it's already happened.

There is an angel who tells them it's happened,

the tomb is empty, he's gone.

In the Gospel of Peter, it purports to give you

a kind of visual of the event, so Jesus is pictured as actually

coming forth out of the tomb with angels accompanying him.

And he does so in a very spectacular way.

He comes out as a giant with two others beside him,

and his head reaches above the sky, and then behind them

comes a cross which proclaims Jesus, which actually speaks.

"And they heard a voice out of the heaven saying,

"'Have you preached unto them that sleep?'

"The answer that was heard from the cross - 'Yes'."

This story is so much more fantastical than

any of the Resurrection stories you'd find in the modern Bible.

The Gospel of Peter was published in 1891, not long after its discovery.

It was the first Gospel to appear in print

that was not in the New Testament.

Now people were beginning to talk about new Christian texts

that had never been seen before.

Wealthy Christian donors, challenged by these new revelations,

threw their energies and money into Britain's Egypt Exploration Fund,

established in 1882.

The Egypt Exploration Fund

was set up precisely to prove the truth of the Bible, by finding

material evidence that would justify the belief in the Bible.

So, biblical archaeology, was established as an attempt to

say, "No, look, there's a real world that will justify this belief."

And they tried very hard to find such things.

All the EEF needed was a leader in the field.

So the search was on for a dynamic archaeologist who could spearhead

their research, but also one who was sympathetic to a Christian agenda.

They hired a rising star of archaeology,

William Flinders Petrie.

The British-born son of an electrical engineer,

he'd been surveying ancient sites since he was a teenager.

Flinders Petrie is often treated as the great originator of Egyptian

archaeology, and is still revered as the first serious archaeologist.

And he deserves that reputation,

but it misreads a fundamental aspect of his work.

For...for Flinders Petrie, was also a serious Christian

intent on discovering the real roots of Christian

and Jewish religion in the region.

Petrie's search eventually led to Amarna,

the capital of Egypt in the 14th century BC.

Amarna was ruled by the Pharaoh Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti.

It's a lot more impressive up close than it is from down below.

This is a boundary stela marking the edge of the city,

on the left there is Nefertiti and on the right is Akhenaten himself.

Once, this great city stretched for miles.

Some of its foundations are still visible today.

In 1891, Petrie got permission to excavate the royal palaces.

It was here that he made a remarkable discovery.

While he was excavating the library here, in the royal palace,

Petrie found an archive of clay tablets called the Amarna Letters,

they were diplomatic correspondences with foreign rulers.

In the Amarna Letters was a reference to a group

called the Habiru.

Habiru sounded very much like Hebrew,

the name sometimes given to the biblical Israelites.

Petrie believed this was the proof he had been looking for -

evidence supporting the Bible's story of the Exodus.

How was Petrie's work received back in the UK?

Well, with extraordinary enthusiasm.

The demonstration of biblical accuracy that

seems to come from the Tell el-Amarna Letters just

works perfectly for, kind of,

reinforcing the world view of those

who believe in the literal truth of the Old Testament.

In Britain, finds like the Amarna Letters

were hailed as -

"The most serious effort yet to stem the advancing

"tide of Old Testament criticism."

Encouraged by their success at Amarna,

the Egypt Exploration Fund decided to search for biblical texts

that would support the New Testament as well.

In their own words, "Some day or another,

"a New Testament of the 2nd century must turn up in Egypt."

Flinders Petrie directed the EEF to a site

he had briefly excavated south of the Faiyum Oasis.

The abandoned city of Oxyrhynchus,

a centre of early Christianity in Egypt.

GOATS BLEAT

Oxyrhynchus was a known Greco-Roman town,

it was a regional capital, pretty big place.

Oxyrhynchus had the largest number of churches in Egypt.

More churches than any other city.

The Fund dispatched two young archaeologists to Oxyrhynchus,

Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt to search for Christian manuscripts.

Dr Dirk Obbink is an expert on the expedition.

They were the, er, perfect collaborators.

Hunt was silent and studious.

Grenfell was, er, fiery and gregarious.

But they always worked in concert and they discovered

the principle that two pair of eyes are better than one.

Grenfell and Hunt hired 100 men and started to dig.

More than a century later, archaeologists are still

excavating the site, using the same methods as in the 19th century.

We've got all kinds of new toys and gadgets in archaeology

and there is even people

who can find sites from space using satellites,

but ultimately, you are going to have to move the dirt

and it comes down to shovels and buckets.

I am told that this is the back-dirt pile, the rubble

that was left behind by Petrie's excavations in the 1890s.

It covers a recently-detected Greek building and has to be removed.

It's a pretty neat feeling to be digging through

Petrie's old back-dirt pile.

For an archaeologist, it's pretty cool.

At first, Grenfell and Hunt failed to find anything of interest,

until they tried their luck

in an oddly uneven stretch of desert nearby.

So they went out to where the rubbish mounds were,

some of them 30 feet tall.

Like these over here, not sand dunes, they are actually

layers of ancient rubbish, you can see the horizontal layering in them

of what is called 'sabbac', which is the Arabic name for ancient garbage.

Grenfell and Hunt ordered their workers to start digging.

Within minutes, piles of papyri appeared out of the ground.

The papyri came in torrents, that's how they describe it,

torrents of papyri streaming from the mounds.

They employed teams of up to 50 local workers,

used them as diggers, to clear the mounds, move them 50 feet to

one side and, in the process, sift out all of the papyrus fragments.

The Oxyrhynchus dig would unearth treasures for years to come.

One of the most revealing rubbish dumps in the history of archaeology.

All the other materials that were thrown away were in with them.

People's clothes, wood implements, shoes, tools.

They found a Ptolemaic plough, a shield, weapons

and, of course, 800 years of pottery fragment

charting the chronology of the whole site.

Hunt stayed up all night working on them in his tent

and he wrote that during the first season, they found so many during

the day that he couldn't sort them all out and catalogue them at night.

They just had to start packing them up in boxes with sand

and debris still clinging to them.

The dig at Oxyrhynchus revealed well over 50,000 Greek manuscripts,

many torn into fragments.

They included tax records,

ancient plays and religious texts.

They sifted through this and moved it aside

and picked out only the papyrus fragments, filled them up

in tin boxes and shipped them by the hundreds back to Oxford to work on.

The most important papyrus was found at the start of the dig -

a sensational biblical manuscript.

It contained sayings attributed to Jesus.

"Jesus said, 'I stood in the midst of the world,

"'and I found all men drunken, and my soul grieveth over

"'the sons of men, because they are blind in their heart.'"

It was a dream for any archaeologist -

Greek papyri fragments with the Sayings Of Jesus.

Some of the sayings were familiar to readers of the Bible

at the time, but four other sayings weren't included in the Bible,

and had never been seen before until that day.

The text was dated to the late 2nd century.

The new Sayings Of Jesus proved to be a sensation in Britain.

As one writer commented,

"The possibility of recovering forgotten sayings of Christ

"strike the imaginations of even the man in the street."

Of all the vast material found at Oxyrhynchus,

this fragment would be designated as Papyrus Number One.

The British press was ecstatic.

"Here we have in the brief space of a few lines

"a record of Jesus Christ which takes us

"closer to his life than any manuscript at present in existence."

BELLS RING

But the discovery also worried many defenders of the Bible text.

How would these new Sayings Of Jesus,

not included in the Bible, affect the faithful?

These texts weren't in the Canonical Gospels,

so what was their status?

Did this even mean that the Gospels themselves didn't transmit

the whole of Jesus' teaching?

So, once again,

this was risky territory for Bible-believing Christians.

"The whole religious world has been agitated by the publication

"of the reputed 'Sayings' of our Lord."

HORN TOOTS

After the discoveries at Oxyrhynchus, the search

for early Christian manuscripts continued with great fervour.

Such was the demand that similar papyri were now

sold on the open market by the dealers of Cairo's souks.

But nothing as controversial as the Sayings Of Jesus

would emerge for almost 60 years.

Two world wars and a global depression put a significant

dampener on the business of Bible hunting.

Until a spectacular discovery surfaced in 1946.

That year, an Egyptian dealer visited the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

He had several ancient manuscripts for sale, many of them

dating back to the 4th century.

They were part of a larger collection of codices that had been discovered

somewhere in the region of Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt.

These manuscripts would be the focus of scholarly attention

and controversy for decades to come.

The Nag Hammadi discoveries have

revolutionised our understanding of early Christianity.

A fascinating collection of texts,

most of which have never been known before.

They were written in Coptic,

which is Egyptian written in Greek letters,

they are translations of the original Greek

and so, we can go back and get a great deal out of them.

One of the documents was titled the Gospel of Thomas,

named after one of Jesus' disciples.

A mystery was about to be solved.

In the Gospel of Thomas, scholars discovered 114 Sayings Of Jesus,

including the eight sayings that had been found 60 years earlier,

at Oxyrhynchus.

At last the author of the famous

Sayings Of Jesus had a name - Thomas.

The Gospel of Thomas begins with the following line -

"These are the hidden words that the living Jesus spoke,

"and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them down."

It suggests the possibility of an alternative version of Christianity.

But where did the text come from?

It would take another 30 years for the full story to emerge.

Ever since the late 1940s, scholars searched for the place

where the manuscripts had lain hidden for almost two millennia.

But it wasn't until the 1970s, that the American Professor

of Religion, James Robinson, made headway.

He scoured the region surrounding the town of Nag Hammadi,

in Upper Egypt.

It's known for sectarian strife and feuds between rival clans.

After years of hunting for the source of the manuscripts,

Robinson's search brought him to the village of Fal Kibley.

It's here that he met a priest,

who tipped him off about a local farmer named Mohammed Ali.

Mohammed Ali's account led the investigation to the

edge of the Nile valley, to the cliffs that separate

the fertile land from the desert,

and it's here that the story began.

Mohammed and his brothers were out looking for fertilizer.

They made an amazing discovery. Underneath a boulder,

they found a sealed clay pot.

Now, the other guys, they didn't want to touch it

because they were afraid there might be a genie inside.

But Mohammed was more interested in money,

so he picks up a rock, smashes the thing.

You can imagine his surprise when he saw what was really inside.

He found the manuscripts

that would become the famous 13 Nag Hammadi codices.

Mohammed took the documents home.

But he and his family had had trouble with the local police

and he was concerned that they might confiscate his valuable find.

So, they decided to deposit

the manuscripts into one of the local monks in the village,

because he is the only person not going to be searched in the village.

And that's how the codices were known from this family house

to the other house, to another house.

And so many hands got involved in that.

And the codices travelled to Cairo.

Mohammed Ali's testimony explained how the codices had

found their way to the Coptic Museum.

But a deeper mystery remained unsolved.

The question was, why somebody decided to hide

the codices in a clay pot at the edge of the desert?

Could it be that these manuscripts were prized possessions

that somebody wanted to protect?

And if so, who did they want to protect the manuscripts from?

To find clues, we have to revisit the early centuries of Christianity.

In the late 4th century, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria was

one of the most powerful men in the Church.

He saw that Christians would need a fixed canon

as their guide to the faith and set about deciding which

texts should be included and which should be excluded.

CHANTING

This was the time

when Christianity was being moulded into the state religion

of the Roman Empire, and when the first Bibles started to appear.

In 367 AD, Athanasius sent a letter to all the churches and monasteries

in Egypt that laid out the 27 books of the New Testament

that are still in the Bible today.

As a result of letters like the Festal Letter of 367,

the other Christian texts, many of which were still being used,

were condemned to oblivion.

The classic case of this is the Nag Hammadi texts, because they

are buried very much at the same time as Athanasius' Festal Letters.

Quite clearly, the monasteries were pretty frightened

of what he was trying to do

and whether they would be rounded up and excommunicated

if they went on using these texts, which is why they were hidden

in a jar and buried not far from the monastery.

But what was in the Nag Hammadi texts that might have upset the bishop?

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says -

"I have cast fire upon the world, and see,

"I am guarding it until it blazes."

Essentially, what we have are a number of writings

very often distinguishing themselves

from more familiar versions of Christianity.

Tends to have a kind of elitist outlook, in other words.

"Jesus said, 'It is to those worthy of my secrets

"'that I am telling my secrets.

"'Do not let your left hand understand

"'what your right hand is doing.'"

Another reason why some of the texts may have caused offence

was their pessimistic view of the world.

In one of the sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas,

he speaks of the world as being a corpse, as being a dead thing

because it kind of reflects a view of materiality as in itself bad

and is something to be escaped from.

"Jesus said,

"'Whoever has become acquainted with the world has found a corpse,

"'and the world is not worthy of the one who has found the corpse.'"

The Gospel of Phillip, also part of the Nag Hammadi find,

might have seemed scandalous.

It suggested that Jesus might have been close to Mary Magdalene

and that he...

"Loved Mary Magdalene more than the rest of the disciples

"and used to kiss her, often on the mouth."

The Nag Hammadi codices even contain a text attributed to

Mary Magdalene - the Gospel of Mary.

The Gospel of Mary is very unusual and very significant in the extent

to which it gives prominence to a woman disciple of Jesus.

Mary Magdalene is one of the most important women

of the New Testament.

She is still widely revered by many Christians.

According to the New Testament, Mary Magdalene travelled with Jesus,

she was present at the crucifixion,

and she was the first to see him after the Resurrection.

The Gospel of Mary describes a conversation between her

and the disciples.

And what's interesting

is that she occupies the major role in this exchange.

She's the one who has the revelation,

she's the one who's speaking, she is the one who is

being interrogated and that gives her a prominence that

we don't find in any of the other Gospels.

It's a fascinating document

in a way because it shows that Jesus was having special knowledge

that he was imparting to Mary, and therefore, not only can you talk

about the relationship he had, but it also shows that women may have

been seen in the early church as repositories of spiritual knowledge.

So you do get the beginnings of the idea that there is

possibly a suppression of women's voices

because these documents suggest that women were, were perceived to

have special roles within the church, which have now disappeared.

The people associated with the Nag Hammadi texts were the Gnostics,

an elite group of Christians who believed in salvation by knowledge.

We often use the word Gnostic, gnosis is knowledge.

In this context, it means secret knowledge, knowledge imparted

to a few, and this is the Gnostic texts, one of their main

themes runs all the way through, we are privileged to special ideas, but

we live in an evil world and we are the ones who have the possibility

of escape from that, because we have the special knowledge.

"Jesus said, 'Know what is in front of your face,

"'and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.

"'For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.'"

Gnosticism is all to do with secret knowledge.

It was part of a philosophical,

intellectual movement around the ancient Near East and many, many,

many fathers in Egypt were Christians in their heart

but also Gnostic in their mind and this is the conflict

between orthodox Christianity versus the intellectual free thinkers.

But as the Church consolidated its power in the Roman Empire,

the Gnostics were increasingly under pressure.

Their intellectual take on Christianity

didn't tally with the official Church doctrine.

By the 5th century, there was a fixed version of the Bible,

Gnosticism had lost out to a dominant orthodoxy,

and it was the orthodox who would shape

the future of Christianity.

So one of the reasons for the success

of what became orthodox Christianity was its ability to, you might say,

mass market a message that could be understood, that was meaningful.

They weren't mystical, they weren't so esoteric, they were digestible.

In a survival of the fittest sort of thing,

the emerging orthodox Christianity won because they were simply

more effective at the game than any other version of Christianity.

In general, the Orthodox Church as it defined itself, won -

and as such, it defined the Gnostics to the dustbin of history.

And it did so often with intense violence.

One thing one forgets about turning the other cheek,

it doesn't necessarily stop you burning people to death.

Under pressure from the Church,

Gnostic texts were destroyed or hidden away.

Gnostic ideas and the lost Christianities

they represent were completely suppressed.

But thanks to the discoveries of the Bible hunters,

their voices can be heard again.

We now know that, from the very beginning,

there was never just one kind of Christianity.

Before the 5th century,

there wasn't even an authorised version of the Bible!

Today, some 200 years after Napoleon first set foot in Egypt,

modern-day Bible hunters still seek answers to

fundamental questions about Christianity.

At St Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai,

monks and scientists are scrutinizing the monastery's palimpsests,

ancient texts that lay hidden under more recent writing.

We're using multispectral imaging

to try to recover writing that was erased,

sometimes 1,000 years ago, sometimes 1,500 years ago.

And multispectral imaging involves illuminating

an object, like this manuscript, a palimpsest with erased layers of

writing, we illuminate with different wavelengths of light so as to see

things that the human eye normally can't see on this manuscript.

There is a language in these palimpsests called

Christian Palestinian Aramaic, it was the language of the

Christian churches in Palestine

from about the 3rd to about the 8th century.

So you are able to resurrect dead languages?

Resurrect dead languages and not only that,

but the people who spoke and used them, they had a literature,

they had philosophy, they had art, they had ideas

and they affected the communities that are still surviving today.

More than 100 years after Grenfell and Hunt,

the search for biblical manuscripts also continues in Oxford,

where the Oxyrhynchus papyri are kept.

We systematically sift through

the unpublished part of the collection and, so far, out of

a little more than a million fragments that we have,

we've published 5,000,

so it's really a drop in the bucket.

We've now loaded them on to the internet in a interface

where interested members of the public do a bit of transcription

with an on-board keyboard. We've speeded up our process

of identification by something like ten times and have already

begun to identify new un-canonical versions of the Gospels.

It's one of the largest unfinished archaeological projects

in the world and there is still decades, if not centuries,

to go on it.

And Bible hunting with a trowel in the dirt

is still uncovering new treasures.

In 2005, a group of Polish archaeologists excavated

the site of El Gurna, in Upper Egypt.

It's an ancient burial site,

home to Christian monks between the 6th and 8th centuries AD.

The Polish archaeologists found some of the monks' scriptures,

preserved just beneath the sand.

They discovered a 4th-century codex with a text called

The Acts of Peter,

another Christian text not included in the Bible.

The text was very similar to the Acts of Peter and Paul

discovered in 1838 by the pioneer Bible hunter Lord Curzon.

The Biblical texts and lost Gospels rediscovered by Curzon,

and all the Bible hunters

who set out to prove the validity of the Bible,

may have actually done the opposite.

From variations between ancient

and modern Bibles to radical lost Gospels, their finds

failed to prove that the Bible was the undisputed Word of God.

After everything we've learned

in the last 150 years or so of Bible hunting,

is it even possible to defend the historical accuracy of the Bible?

Yes and no.

If you are content to say - "Can we know the basics?",

That Jesus of Nazareth lived.

That the apostles probably taught early Christian

beliefs and developments. If you are content with that then, yeah.

If however, your notion of historical accuracy is that

every single incident as reported must have happened that way,

you know, as if it is some sort of CCTV footage of an actual event,

then you are going to be in big trouble.

These textual variations and rediscovered Gospels paint

a more fluid picture of the Bible in its early days

than the Bible we have today.

But could these discoveries have also played

a part in some people's shift away from the Christian faith?

In Christianity in Western Europe,

we would see secularisation as one answer.

In fact, across the world, that's not necessarily true.

But for the people who experienced the shock of Sinaiticus and the

other discoveries, secularisation has been one consequence.

For over 2,000 years, the Bible has been a source of comfort,

inspiration and guidance.

It helped shape civilisation.

It's been the cause of profound conflict and division.

The discoveries of the Bible hunters began a controversial reassessment

of Christianity's sacred scripture - hailed by some, dismissed by others.

Certainly, the search for biblical truth continues to raise

more questions than answers.

There's a lot at stake as the controversy over

the Bible as the Word of God rages on.