If you have not heard there is a new book about to be released entitled The Lost Gospel. The authors Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson found this “lost gospel” in a British library. This lost and found gospel claims Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and they had two children.
Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene is not a new revelation, Dan Brown’s novel The DaVinci Code made the same claim and quite a bit of money at the box office when it became a movie. The tag line for the movie was “seek the truth.” Dan Brown said the couple only had a daughter with no mention of a second child. I wonder which one is “true.”
This isn’t the first lost gospel to be found either. About the same time The DaVinci Code was unveiled National Geographic boasted The Gospel of Judas is “one of the most significant biblical finds of the last century, a lost gospel that could shake the foundations of Christianity.” As it turned out the foundations of Christianity did not even shrug, but it did manage to capture part of the commercial success of the sensationalism created by the promotion of The DaVinci Code.
Not everyone is jumping on The Lost Gospel bandwagon. A professor of religious studies at Duke University, Mark Goodacre, is skeptical. He has evidently seen the lost manuscript the book is based on. He said, “I don’t think that there is any credibility in these claims at all. There is simply no evidence in this text or anywhere else that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, much less that they had a couple of children.”
But Americans are like the Athenians of Paul’s day, “Now all the Athenians and the strangers visiting there used to spend their time in nothing other than telling or hearing something new,” Acts 17:21. Jacobovici and Wilson are banking on people not caring about the truth as much as they want to hear about “something new.”
They will learn what Dan Brown did, that a new controversy plus some old–fashioned curiosity, equals big profits, especially if someone buys the movie rights. It is likely that Jacobovici and Wilson stand to make a small fortune when their book is published.
The truth is that sensational claims generate more than controversy and curiosity; they also generate cash. Many are willing to pander a “lost truth” for profits with little if any genuine concern for truth. I do not know what Jacobovici and Wilson’s motives are, but their book appears headed down a predictable path.
From the very inception of Christianity to the present believers and missionaries around the world have suffered the loss of their worldly goods, privations, persecutions and death to offer the Gospel of Jesus Christ freely to those who are in spiritual darkness. Who do you think possesses the truth, those who sell it to make a profit, or those who risk their lives to give it away?
Leave a Reply