What You Will Find When You Really Look

Some truths don’t disappear; they get buried where power hopes no one will dig.

Before I talk about rewrites, power, or how Christianity changed, I want to slow down and name what I’m actually referring to because this isn’t metaphor or suspicion. It’s history that didn’t make it into Sunday school.

In 1945, near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, a group of farmers uncovered a sealed clay jar containing ancient Christian texts. What they found had been hidden for more than 1,600 years. Not lost, hidden.

Scholars like Elaine Pagels and Karen King have spent decades studying these writings as legitimate early Christian voices that existed alongside what later became the New Testament.

These writings, now known as the Nag Hammadi Library, include early Christian gospels and teachings that circulated in the first centuries after Jesus’ death. Some may be just as old. Some may be older.

What These Texts Actually Say

The Nag Hammadi writings include:

·       The Gospel of Mary

·       The Gospel of Thomas

·       The Gospel of Philip

·       The Apocryphon of John

As historian Bart Ehrman notes, early Christianity was not a single unified belief system, but a collection of competing interpretations about who Jesus was and what his message meant.

In these texts, the tone is different. There’s little emphasis on sin, guilt, or punishment. The focus is on gnosis, direct knowing, awakening and seeing clearly. The divine isn’t distant or conditional; it’s present and accessible. You don’t earn salvation. You remember who you are. That difference explains why these writings became a problem.

Mary Magdalene, Before the Rewrite

In the Gospel of Mary, Mary Magdalene is not a side character. She is central. She understands the teachings when others do not. She steadies the disciples when fear takes over. She shares revelations Jesus gave her privately. Karen King points out that Mary’s authority in these texts comes from insight, not position, something the early church increasingly resisted in a woman. Peter challenges her openly. He questions why Jesus would teach a woman directly. Levi responds by reminding him that Jesus trusted Mary and knew her worth. Mary Magdalene was known as “the apostle to the apostles,” or simply: the disciple of the disciples. This title was used by early Christians and affirmed by later scholars not as poetry but as recognition.

Why These Texts Didn’t Survive the Cut

After Jesus’ death, Christianity wasn’t one movement. It was many.  Some were mystical. Some were communal. Some rejected hierarchy altogether. As Elaine Pagels explains, once Christianity aligned with Roman imperial power in the 4th century, diversity became a liability. Uniform belief was easier to manage. Church councils began deciding which texts were “orthodox” and which were “heretical.” The deciding factor wasn’t spiritual depth, it was institutional stability.

Texts that supported:

·       Direct access to God

·       Inner authority

·       Mystical experience

·       Women in leadership

Were excluded.

Texts that supported:

·       Obedience

·       Hierarchy

·       Male authority

·       Centralized power

Were preserved.

Mary Magdalene wasn’t erased. She was reframed from teacher to sinner, from leader to warning. That’s often more effective.

Editing Isn’t Always About Lies

This wasn’t a single dramatic act of censorship; it was a long narrowing. The translation choices, omissions, emphasis shifts, and silence became tools. Mystical teachings became dangerous. Inner knowing became suspect. Experience was replaced with belief.

By the time the Bible reached its finalized form, Christianity had shifted from a lived path of awakening to a managed system of doctrine. The edits were safer for the empire, safer for power, less dangerous for those at the top.

The Nag Hammadi texts, The Gospel of Mary, these writings weren’t lost because they were wrong. They were hidden because they returned authority to the individual.

The quiet truth that Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute but Jesus’ closest companion had to be withheld because the truth would return power back to the people. Especially women, especially the awakened, and especially those who didn’t need permission.

When I talk about Christianity drifting away from something closer to Buddhism, when I question how fear became sacred, when I suggest that the Bible has always been shaped by wealth and political authority, this is the ground I’m standing on.

Once you know these pages existed, it becomes easier to understand why the story we inherited feels thinner. And why so many of us sensed, long before we had language for it, that something essential was missing. In all of this it was one word, freedom. The freedom to be exactly who you are, exactly beautiful at birth and exactly self-determining without the need for powers above you to stamp approved. You never needed anyone or thing to school you. You are the school. You never needed anyone or thing to judge you, you are the judge. You never needed anyone or thing to god over you, you are your own god.

When we know all of this, it is easy to see why so many people would vote for the current president and also praise his every move. The very thing that played out in the time of Jesus and his death, is happening again right now. People are being moved to assassinate any idea that counters being a whole person, a whole soul and the divinity of each individual. As long as we look outside ourselves, there will always be someone or something controlling us and when you give up your divinity and that of others, the world will always suffer. You will always suffer.

When you know the truth you can also see how the genders suffer from being assigned rolls based on gender. Everyone is walking around in a fog of trying to be something expected and not being who you are. The identity crisis goes so deep. You know deep down it’s not right but you do not know what it is. You have lost communication to your own soul and divinity. If everyone knew that, they would no longer be susceptible to the people in power. They would not see power as a god. They would know it is the opposite of that. I am not telling you anything you do not know. It’s in you but you stopped listening. You stopped believing in your own inner voice and started following the thing you have been indoctrinated your whole life to follow. If you do not wake now then when will you?