Lost and forgotten for more than a thousand years, the only ancient Gospel named after a woman apostle emerged from the sands of Egypt just over a century ago. Originally written in Greek early in the second century and later translated into Coptic, Mary Magdalene’s Gospel comes to vivid life in this fresh translation with contemporary reflections on the ancient wisdom of this recovered treasure. Note on the cover artwork: The title format on the front cover is patterned after the inscription at the conclusion of the fifth-century Coptic text of the Gospel According to Mary.

"These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down." With this opening statement, the Gospel of Thomas, legendary Apostle to the East, introduces a startlingly profound list of Jesus' ancient Wisdom sayings. Similar to the collections of quotations copied by the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Thomas' Gospel contains a hundred and fourteen sayings, half of which don't appear in the New Testament. Once known from only a handful of ancient sources, third-century Greek fragments of this Gospel first turned up at the end of the nineteenth century – but ...

In this new translation of the Gospel of Thomas, Leloup shows that the Jesus recorded by the "infinitely skeptical and infinitely believing" Thomas has much in common with gnostics of non-dualistic schools. Like them, Jesus preaches the coming of a new man, the genesis of the man of knowledge. In this gospel, Jesus describes a journey from limited to unlimited consciousness. The Jesus of Thomas invites us to drink deeply from the well of knowledge within, not so that we may become good Christians but so we may attain the self-knowledge that will make each of us, too, a Christ.

Written in Greek in the second century, two Gospels describing the birth and childhood of Jesus were preserved and copied into many languages for centuries. Often dismissed as second-rate stories, these Gospels nevertheless profoundly shaped the development and traditions of the Church — for better and for worse. The Infancy Gospel of James narrates the birth and life of Jesus’ mother Mary in a way that limits women’s freedom but venerates Jewish tradition. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas narrates Jesus’ childhood in a way that disparages Judaism while exploring how Jesus could have ...

Forged in the flames of controversy and rejected by the very church authorities it criticized, the Gospel of Judas was once believed to be irretrievably lost to history. Its rediscovery in Egypt in the 1970s and initial publication in 2006 ignited an intense debate about Christian origins and meaning. How could a Gospel about Jesus have been written in the name of his greatest nemesis? What does it really say about Judas, about Jesus, about the church – and what does it mean for us today? Inside the pages of this enigmatic Gospel we can explore unfamiliar terrain, the outer limits of ...