The True Jesus - The Christianity You Never Knew Existed

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
A private room late on January fifth, second century CE,
several Jesus followers gather in secrecy. The room is illuminated
only by oil lamps, casting long shadows across worried faces.
Participants exchange quiet greetings, some making subtle Christian fish symbols

(00:22):
with their hands to identify themselves. The Christian teacher whispers,
with a serious look on his face, what I reveal
to you tonight must never leave this room. The God
you have been taught to worship is blind. The serpent
in the garden did not bring a fall from grace,
but the first dawn of enlightenment. What you call creation,

(00:47):
was actually a cosmic prison built by an inferior deity
who falsely proclaimed himself supreme. The students leaned forward, eyes
wide with astonished You will now learn the secret knowledge
that Jesus brought, not for the masses who cannot bear it,

(01:08):
but for those with years to hear. The Christianity you
think you know is just one version of the story.
Before Catholics are Protestants, before Creeds or Orthodoxy, there was
a wild, untamed spiritual landscape ord Dozens of competing visions
of Jesus fought for followers. These weren't minor differences of opinion.

(01:33):
Some groups saw Jesus as a fully human prophet chosen
by God. Others believed he was a phantom who never
truly had flesh. Still, others taught he was just one
divine being among countless heavenly powers. Why does this matter
because history is written by the winners, and in the

(01:55):
battle of Christian identity, the group that would become Orthodox
Christianity unleashed an explosive campaign to crush these alternatives. Books
were burned, teachings were forbidden. Entire communities were excommunicated, persecuted,

(02:15):
and erased from memory. In this video, we resurrect these
forgotten Christianities and reveal their shocking beliefs. Christians who taught
the creator of this world was a cosmic accident, groups
that practice sacred rituals to reunite male and female aspects
of the divine. Communities that taught secret passwords to escape reincarnation.

(02:42):
Believers who claimed Jesus switched places with another man at
the crucifixion and stood laughing as his double died. Christians
who worshiped a divine feminine power called Sophia, whose cosm
drama created our world. These weren't simply felled experiments, but vibrant,

(03:08):
innovative spiritual systems that offered their followers meanings salvation and
community systems that might have become dominant had history unfolded differently.
By our journeys in you'll understand that the Christianity that
dominated Western civilization for two millennia was just one possibility

(03:31):
among many, and not necessarily the one closest to what
Jesus himself may have taught. This is the story of
the greatest religious creativity the Western world has ever known,
and the forces that crushed it. In the decades after
Jesus's death, his followers spread across the Roman Empire, but

(03:53):
far from being a unified movement, these earliest Christians held
radically different ideas about who Jesus was, what his message meant,
and how salvation worked. In the second and third centuries,
there were scattered throughout the Mediterranean world, small Christian groups

(04:15):
teaching ideas that would appear bizarre to most Christians today.
This was not a world of orthodoxy and heresy. It
was a world in which numerous groups proclaimed their own
understandings of Christianity. We should stop viewing these groups as
felled dediations from a pure original. Instead, they represent creative

(04:39):
adaptations of Jesus traditions within different cultural contexts, what scholars
call the kaleidoscope vitality of early Christian groups. Let's make
this concreep. Imagine walking through Rome, Alexandria, or Antioch in
the second century. In one house, church believers worship Jesus

(05:01):
as a fully human Jewish prophet chosen by God on
his baptism, who kept every detail of Jewish law down
the street. Another group teaches that Jesus was a divine
being who only appeared to be human, a phantom who
couldn't actually suffer or die. Elsewhere, initiates learned that Jesus

(05:22):
was just one manifestation of a cosmic drama involving thirty
divine beings called AONs. And in yet another gathering, followers
are taught that Jesus revealed a previously unknown God of
pure love, entirely different from the wrathful creator God of
Jewish scripture. Modern Christians who think their denomination's differences are

(05:46):
significant would be stunned by the theological chasms that separated
these early groups. These weren't just different interpretations. There were
fundamentally different religions using the same figure of Jesus. Among
the most startling of these alternative Christianities were the Sethians,
whose scriptures discovered at Nakamadi in nineteen forty five reveal

(06:11):
a cosmic drama that turns the Book of Genesis completely
upside down. The Sethians taught that the God who created
the physical world, the God of the Old Testament, was
actually an ignorant, arrogant deity called Yaldeboth, sometimes called Saclus
the fool or Samael the blind God. Far from being

(06:35):
the true God, yalde Both was a cosmic mistake born
when a divine feminine power called Sophia acted without consent
of the true, unknowable God. According to the Sethian text
called the Apocryphon of John, this false creator boasted, I
am God, and there is no other God beside me.

(06:59):
Butian's taught that when yalde Both made this declaration, a
voice from above saying you are mistaken Semio, which means
God of the Blind. In the Sethian retelling of Eden,
the serpent becomes a hero, not a villain, when the
Creator forbids Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of knowledge.

(07:23):
He's trying to keep them ignorant of their true divine origins.
The serpent, sent by the true God encourages them to
eat and gain enlightenment. As one Sepian teacher explains, those
who know the true mysteries understand that the serpent brought illumination.
What Genesis calls the Fall was actually humanity's first awakening,

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our discovery that we contain divine sparks trapped in bodies
created by an inferior God. The Sethians identified themselves as
the spirit ritual descendants of Seth Adam and Eves's third son,
whom they saw as the carrier of true divine knowledge.
They practiced elaborate baptismal rituals and taught secret names and

(08:13):
formulas to help initiates ascend through hostile cosmic realms controlled
by the false creators, arkhans or rulers. We can only
imagine how shocking this was to some Christians. The Sethians
were essentially saying the God of Israel was a blind,

(08:35):
ignorant cosmic tyrant. This wasn't just a theological disagreement. It
was a complete inversion of what most Jews believed. Around
one forty four CE, Marcian arrived in Rome with a
radical proposal. Christianity must completely sever its connection to Judaism.

(08:58):
Marcian taught that the loving God revealed by Jesus was
an entirely different deity than the vengeful creator God of
the Old Testament. Marcian's challenge to the Roman Church was
perhaps the most serious crisis early Christianity faced. He pointed
to the stark differences between the God portrayed in the

(09:19):
Hebrew scriptures, who commanded genocide, sent plagues, and demanded strict laws,
versus Jesus's message of love and forgiveness. How could they
possibly be the same god? Marcian declared to his followers,
brothers and sisters. The Lord Jesus revealed a god unknown

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until his coming, a god of pure love and mercy.
This cannot be the same deity who drowned the world
in a flood and commanded the slaughter of nations. As
Jesus taught, no one puts new wine into old wineskins.
We must free ourselves from the Jewish God and his laws.

(10:06):
Marcian didn't just talk, He created what scholars consider the
first Christian canon. He accepted a you could say, heavily
edited version of Luke's Gospel, as some scholars think. Some
think his gospels earlier than the later canonical one by
removing all references to Jesus' birth and Jewish connections. He

(10:28):
also had ten Letters of Paul, which he also edited,
according to some sources. Others think he had an earlier
version of Paul's Letters that the Orthodox Church padded out
and corrected over time. Everything else, including the Old Testament,
he rejected as corrupted. Marcian's followers practiced strict rules, including

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no marriage or sex. Since the physical world was made
by the inferior creator God, creating more bodies simply trapped
more souls in matter. What's remarkable is how successful the
Marcianites were. They established churches throughout the Roman Empire that

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rivaled other popular congregations. In some regions. Marcianite and Christian
meant the same thing. Imagine an alternative history where Marcian's
vision had won out. Christianity would have developed as an
entirely new religion with no connection to Judaism. The Old

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Testament would have been discarded, and Jesus would be seen
as the emissary of a previously unknown God. The implications
are staggering. Perhaps the most sophisticated of these alternative Christianities
was founded by Valentinus, who nearly became Bishop of Rome
around one seventy CE before his more radical ideas became apparent.

(12:00):
Like other groups that separated themselves from the mainstream, Valentinians
operated within ordinary Christian communities while teaching an elaborate secret
doctrine to select initiates. The Valentinians practiced a kind of
Christianity within Christianity. They attended regular church services, accepted the

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same scriptures, but claimed to possess a deeper interpretation that
only the spiritual elite could grasp. At the heart of
Valentinian teaching was an astonishing, complex cosmic story. Before creation,
there existed the pleroma or fullness, a realm of thirty
divine beings called eons AONs emanating in parish from the ultimate,

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unknowable Father, a Valentinian teacher would explain to initiates. From
the primal Father came mind and truth, then word and life,
and from these emanated other pairs until thirty AONs formed
the divine Pleuroma. But the youngest AONs, Sophia or Wisdom,

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acted independently trying to comprehend the unknowable Father. Her passion
and distress shattered the harmony of heaven. According to the
Gospel of Truth found at Nakamari, Sophia's fall created a
rupture in the divine realm, and her emotions formed the

(13:31):
substance from which our physical world was made. The Demiurge,
or creator of this world, was her offspring, ignorant of
the higher realities above him. The Valentinians identified this demiurge
with the God of the Old Testament, not evil as
the Sethians claimed, but simply unaware of the superior reality.

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What's fascinating about the Valentinians is their view of humansanity.
They taught that people come in three types, the spiritual pneumatics,
who have the divine spark and will certainly be saved,
the soulish psychics who have faith but not knowledge, and
the material hillicks, who are incapable of salvation. This allowed

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Valentinians to view ordinary Christians as well meaning but spiritually immature.
As early Christian writer Tertullian complained, they speak like us
but think differently. Valentinians practiced a mysterious ritual called the
Bridal Chamber, which symbolized the reunification of the divine spark

(14:44):
in humans with its angelic counterpart. The Gospel of Philip declares,
if one becomes a son of the Bridal Chamber, he
will receive the light. Whoever receives that light will not
be seen, nor or can he be detained. What would
Christianity look like today if Valentinianism had become the dominant form,

(15:08):
it would perhaps be more mystical, more focused on inner
enlightenment than on institutional authority, and certainly more comfortable with
feminine aspects of the divine. In stark contrast to Marcian
and the Gnostic groups, the Ebionites, whose name means poor

(15:29):
ones in Hebrew, held that Jesus was a purely human
Jewish prophet who came to restore true Judaism, not abolishift.
The Ebianites likely descended from the original Jewish followers of
Jesus in Jerusalem, led by his brother James. They saw
themselves as the authentic continuation of Jesus's movement, maintaining Jewish

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practices while believing Jesus was the messiah for the Ebionites,
Jesus was born naturally to Joseph and Mary. They rejected
the virgin birth entirely. They believed he became the Messiah
at his baptism, when God adopted him as son. They
followed a version of Matthew's Gospel written in Hebrew or

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Aramaic that emphasized Jesus as saying, I have not come
to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. An Ebionite
teacher would insist those who claim Jesus abolished the Torah
distort his teaching. Did he not say that not one

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jot or tittle of the law would pass away? If
you wish to follow the Messiah Jesus, you must be circumcised,
observe Sabbath, and keep kosher as he did. Most shocking
the many Christians, the Ebionites completely rejected Paul as an apostle,
viewing him as an apostate from the law and false teacher.

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One Ebionite text reportedly called Paul the enemy and spread
stories that he was a frustrated gentile convert to Judaism
who invented a law free gospel out of bitterness. It's
remarkable to consider that while Marcian exalted Paul and rejected
Jewish scripture. The Ebionites did exactly the opposite. They treasured

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the Jewish Bible and rejected Paul. These two extremes show
how contested the very core of Christian identity was. The
Ebianites lived simply, many practicing vegetarianism and voluntary poverty. They
prayed facing Jerusalem and continued to observe Jewish festivals. As

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Christianity became increasingly gentile and anti Jewish, the Ebionites were
marginalized and eventually disappeared. In many ways, the Ebianites preserved
the actual lifestyle of Jesus and his original followers more
than any other group, yet they were ultimately branded heretics

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because they wouldn't accept the divine nature of Christ or
the end of Jewish law, both central to the emerging
Orthodox position. For some early Christians, the very idea that
the divine Christ could have a physical body was unthinkable.
These believers, called docetists from the Greek Dokian to seem

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or to appear, taught that Jesus only seemed to have flesh.
Doicetism arose from the philosophical assumption that the pure divine
cannot mix with corrupt matter. For Dosetists, Jesus was a
divine being who projected the illusion of a physical body.
He appeared human, but was actually a spirit. This view

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took various forms. Some doctis taught that Jesus had a
celestial body made of spirit, not flesh. Others, like the Basilideans,
went further, claiming that Jesus switched appearances with Simon of Sirene,
who carried his cross. According to this startling belief, it

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was Simon who was crucified, while Jesus stood by. Laughing
at the error. A Bacilidean teacher would explain the Christ
could not suffer pain or death, being divine, he who
knows the truth understands that another died in his place.
The Christ laughed at their folly before ascending to the

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father who sent him. Some Christians were horrified by such teachings.
The middle recension of Ignacious of Antioch's writings is seen
by a minority of scholars focused on Ignatius as a
late second century product, where this writer warn and be
death when anyone speaks to you. Apart from Jesus Christ,

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who was truly born truly persecuted, truly crucified, who truly
rose from the dead. For many Christians, Christ's physical reality
was essential. If he didn't truly have flesh, he couldn't
truly save human flesh. As one early Creed stated, what

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is not assumed is not redeemed. The Doctic view of
Jesus fundamentally undermined what would become core Christian doctrine, the incarnation,
the idea that the Word became flesh. If Jesus only
appeared to be human, his whole life becomes a kind
of divine illusion, rather than a true intreu of God

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into human experience. At the center of many of these
theological battles stood the enigmatic figure of Paul. No early
Christian writer was more contested, more variously interpreted, or more
crucial to the development of competing versions of Christianity. It's
remarkable how different groups claimed Paul for entirely opposite positions.

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Marcie Knightes saw him as the champion who freed Christianity
from Judaism, Ebionites rejected him entirely as an apostles proto
Orthodox Christians, and Valentinians both sided his letters but interpreted
them completely different. The historical Paul left behind letters that
contained ambiguities. Does he say salvation comes through faith alone

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or through faith and works? Is the physical body redeemed
or left behind? Is the Creator God good or limited?
Different Christian factions seized on different elements of Paul's thoughts.
This explains why we see so many forgeries in Paul's
name in the second century. The pastoral epistles First and

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two Timothy and Titus, which many scholars consider synonymous, present
a more institutionalized, hierarchical Paul than his authentic letters, according
to many. Meanwhile, apocryphal works like The Axe of Paul
and Thecla emphasized a radical, ascetic Paul. Even now, scholars

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like Nina Livesey are questioning whether any of the Pauline
epistles are authentic, which the Dutch radicals did before. She
has really good reasons to doubt them. Maybe all these
letters have been redacted and tweaked to model second century sympathies. Remember,
the first place we ever get Paul's letters is in

(22:44):
a collection from the School of Marcia. Perhaps most striking
is the effort to reconcile Paul with Peter, who represented
the Jewish Christian tradition very interesting. The Book of Acts
presents them in harmony, while Tewod Peter defensively claims Paul's
letters as scripture. Though hard to understand, these efforts to

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show Peter and Paul in agreement reveal the deep tensions
between Jewish and Gentile Christianity. By the second century, Proto
Orthodox leaders were trying to claim both traditions to assert
that true Christianity was both fulfillment of Judaism and its transcendence.
Perhaps the strangest of all these forgotten Christianity centered around

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a figure mentioned in the Book of Acts, Simon of Samaria,
also known as Simon Magus, who allegedly tried to buy
the power of the Holy Spirit from the Apostles. By
the second century, a sect had formed around Simon that
viewed him as the embodiment of the great power of

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God and his companion Helen as the incarnation of divine thought.
The Simonians taught an extraordinary myth that Simon was the
earthly manifestation of the Supreme Power, who had come to
rescue his divine counterpart, first Thought, who had become trapped
in matter through successive reincarnations. According to Justin Martyr, who

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was from Samaria himself, Simon found Helen working as a
prostitute entire, but the Simonians believed she was actually the
incarnation of divine thought, who had fallen through the celestial spheres,
creating angels and powers along the way before becoming imprisoned

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in human form. A Simonian follower would explain, Simon the
Great Power descended to find his lost sheep, Helen, just
as she was entrapped in matter, so are all souls
divine thoughts that have forgotten their origin. Simon came to
awaken us to our true nature and lead us back

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to the Father. Medians connected Helen to Helen of Troy,
seeing in the Greek Epic, a cosmic allegory the most
beautiful soul Helen captured by dark powers Troy until her
rightful divine partner, Simon Menelaus, rescued her. What's fascinating is

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how early this mythology appears, possibly predating even the writing
of some of the New Testament texts. The Church fathers
considered Simon the father of all heresies, suggesting these alternative
visions of Christianity were emerging almost simultaneously with what would
become Orthodoxy. This means these heretical groups were there from

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the very beginning. Faced with this bewildering diversity of competing Christianities,
proto Orthodox leaders in the late second and third centuries
developed three crucial boundaries. A Canon of Authorized sco, a
Creed of required beliefs, and a hierarchy of approved bishops.

(26:06):
This process of boundary drawing wasn't simply about suppressing heretics.
It was about creating a coherent Christian identity amid the
noise of competing claims. The proto Orthodox saw themselves not
as eliminating diversity, but as preserving what they considered the
authentic core of the tradition. The proto Orthodox strategy was brilliant.

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They positioned themselves as the middle way between extremes, not
Marcianite rejection of the Jewish God, nor Ebionite insistence on
Jewish law, not gnostic multiplicity of divine beings, nor adoptionist
reduction of Jesus to mere human. Ironaeus, bishop of Lyons
around one ADCE, wrote a massive work called Against Heresies,

(26:52):
systematically refuting these alternative Christianities while developing Orthodox theology He
insisted on several points. There is one God who created
the material world. This same God sent Jesus. Jesus was
both fully divine and fully human, and salvation comes through
Christ's actual death and bodily resurrection. The battle wasn't simply theological.

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It was about social power and community boundaries. The Proto
Orthodox were building an institution that could unite diverse believers
across the empire, which required clear markers of who was
in and who was out. Their movement toward a fixed canon,
creed and hierarchy provided stability in a chaotic religious landscape.

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The formation of the New Testament canon was largely a
response to these challenges. Marcian had created or inherited his
own limited canon. In response, Proto Orthodox leaders gradually defined
which gospels and letters were authoritative. By keeping four different
godsp rather than harmonizing them into one, they preserved some

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theological diversity, but within limits they could control. Mind you,
there is scholarly debate on whether Marcian's Gospel was first
and other Christians padded it with more material, making Marcian's
gospel one that reflects their theology. Some say Marcian took
a gospel we call Luke and redacted it by the

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fourth century with imperial support. After Constantine Orthodoxy had the
power to enforce these boundaries, alternative scriptures were banned, labeled
apocryphal or heretical. Alternative communities were marginalized, their leaders exiled,
their places of worship confiscated. It's important to understand that

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the triumph of Orthodoxy wasn't inevitable. Historical contingencies. Which bishops
had political influence, which theological positions appealed to emperors, which
groups had more active organization, all played it crucial roles
in determining which version of Christianity would dominate. For over

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sixteen hundred years, these alternative Christianities remain largely forgotten, their
scriptures destroyed, their communities dispersed. But in the modern era,
extraordinary archaeological discoveries had begun to resurrect their voices. The
nagh Hamadi Library, discovered in Egypt in nineteen forty five,

(29:31):
revealed dozens of previously lost Gnostic texts. Scholars continue to
reassess the complex richness of early Christian diversity. We should
move beyond the language of lost and found Christianities. These
terms perpetuate the notion that there was a pure original

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form that was either preserved orthodoxy or corrupted heresy. Instead,
we should see all early Christian movements as created adaptations
of Jesus traditions within their unique cultural contexts, each authentic
in its own way. What these discoveries reveal is that
early Christianity was far more diverse, more creative, and more

(30:13):
contentious than most modern Christians imagine. The boundaries between orthodoxy
and heresy weren't clear cut. They were drawn through struggle
and debate. Why does this matter today? Because understanding this
vibrant world of early Christian diversity challenges us to reconsider

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fundamental questions. What did Jesus really teach? How did a
Jewish Messianic movement transform into a gentile religion which theological
roads not taken might still offer spiritual insight. These found
Christianities demonstrate the creative ways humans have interpreted this Jesus

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story across cultures and contexts, adapting it to addressed the
deepest human questions about meaning, suffering, and solivation. The story
of these forgotten Christianities reminds us that religious traditions are
not fixed monuments, but living, evolving human creations. The Christianity

(31:19):
that shaped Western civilization for two millennia represents just one
path among many that early followers of Jesus explored in
the spiritual marketplace of the ancient world. Various Christianities competed,
borrowed from each other, and evolved. The one that emerged victorious.
What we now call Orthodoxy wasn't necessarily the original form

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or even the most authentic to Jesus's teachings. It was
simply the version that, through a complex combination of theological, social,
and political factors, managed to outmaneuver its rivals. As we've
seen in our journey through this forbidden history, the Jesus
Us you think you know depends entirely on which early

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Christians you would have encountered. What would our world look
like today if one of these alternative Christianities had become
dominant instead. I'm curious to know your thoughts in the
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