VOLUME CCXIII — What Christianity Removed

Amanda scovis something about his grandmother. She was from Eastern Europe, Poland, originally a small village. She came to their country as a young woman, raised her family, never spoke much about the old country, but digging through family papers after her death. He finds references to things she knew.

Herbs that healed specific ailments, prayers that weren't in any church book, rituals timed to the moon, to the seasons, to moments of transition. He never knew that she was a folk healer. The village had relied on her mother and her mother before that, but she never spoke of it. Her daughter, his mother, was raised to be ashamed of that peasant superstition.

The old practices were primitive, embarrassing something to hide from the modern world. Three generations later, this man knows nothing of what his grandmother knew. The remedies, the prayers, the understanding of plants and bodies and the timing of things. The knowledge didn't die naturally.

It was made shameful until it stopped being passed on, because someone decided it was mere superstition. Someone decided it had to go, and now it's gone. The Bible you were given is not complete. It's an edit, a selection, a curation by people with interests.

You inherited what they decided you should have, and you never saw what they removed. In the early centuries of Christianity, there was no Bible as you know it. There were texts, hundreds of them, gospels, letters, acts, teachings. They circulated among communities.

Different communities had different collections, and there was no clear agreement on what was authoritative. Then came the Council's groups of men, politically positioned, theologically motivated, representing factions with competing interests. These men gathered to decide what would be scripture and what would be burned, and what emerged was the canon. What was excluded was declared heresy, and the excluded material was systematically destroyed.

The Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings, attributed to Jesus, discovered in 1945 in Egypt after being hidden for nearly 2,000 years. Why was it hidden? Because it was ordered, destroyed. Why was it ordered, destroyed?

Because it presented a Jesus who taught direct experience of the divine, rather than reliance on institutional mediation. The kingdom of God is inside you and all around you, not in mansions of wood and stone, split a piece of wood, and I am there, lift a stone, and you will find me. This is not the Jesus who requires a church to reach him. This is not the message that serves institutional power, so it was removed.

The Gospel of Mary, a text in which Mary Magdalene is portrayed as a primary disciple, one to whom Jesus revealed teachings he didn't share with the male disciples, a text in which Peter challenges Mary's authority and is rebuked, a text that suggests women held spiritual authority in early Christianity. This didn't serve the emerging patriarchal structure of the church, so it was removed. The Gospel of Judas, a text presenting Judas not as a betrayer, but as a disciple who understood Jesus best, the one who helped Jesus fulfill his mission by enabling the crucifixion, a text that inverts the entire narrative of villainy and victimhood, a text that makes the story more complex, more ambiguous, more difficult to use for simple moral instruction. This didn't serve the church's need for clear villains and clear victims, so it was removed.

The Gnostic texts, an entire tradition of Christianity, older in some cases than what became Orthodoxy, the taught. The material world was created by a flawed or malevolent being, not the true God. Salvation comes through gnosis, which is direct knowledge of the divine, not through faith or works as defined by an institution. It said that each person carries a divine spark that can be awakened without the mediation of a priest.

This was Christianity as direct experience, this was spirituality without the need for an institutional intermediary. This threatened everything the emerging church was building, so it wasn't just removed. It was hunted, its practitioners were killed, its libraries were burned, its very existence was nearly erased from history. We only know it existed because some texts were buried in the desert and survived for millennia.

That's how thorough the removal was. You were told the Bible is the Word of God. You were not told that what counts as the Word of God was decided by councils with political agendas enforced by emperors with military power and maintained by centuries of systematic destruction of alternatives. The Bible is not a revelation, it's a curation.

When the curators were not neutral, they were building an institution of power and control. They needed texts that supported institutional authority. They removed anything that undermined that. What you call scripture is simply what survived the edit and the destruction.

What you call heresy is what they didn't want you to see. Consider what was removed. The exact experience of the divine without mediation, feminine spiritual authority, complexity and ambiguity in the sacred narrative. The possibility that the God of this world is not the ultimate God, the belief that salvation is through knowledge not institutional compliance.

And consider what was kept. The necessity of church mediation between human and the divine, male authority. Clear villains, clear victims, clear moral instruction. A God who demands worship and punishes deviation, salvation through faith as defined and managed by the institution.

The removal was not random, it was architectural. What was kept built the institution. What was removed, threatened it. I'm not telling you.

The removed texts are true and the canonical ones are false. I'm telling you that the process of selection was not neutral. I'm telling you that when you read the Bible believing you're reading the complete revelation of Christianity, you're not. You're reading an edited document and edit made by men with power and edit enforced through violence and edit that served institutional interests.

Knowing this doesn't destroy faith, it matures faith. It moves faith from naive acceptance of handed down authority to conscious engagement with a tradition that has always been more complex, more contested and more human than you were ever taught. The sacred may be real, the institutions claim to exclusive access to the sacred is a construction. And constructions are built by someone for some purpose.

The purpose he was power. The power to define what God said. The power to exclude what threatened that definition. The power to shape what billions of people would believe for thousands of years.

That power was exercised. And the Bible you hold is the result. What was removed didn't disappear. It was buried, burned, hidden and suppressed.

But some of it survived and now you know it exists. What you do with that knowledge is yours. But you can no longer say you weren't told or didn't know. If this transmission shifted something in you, there's a short book that I wrote that shows you why.

It's called Before Approaching the Threshold. There's a link in the show notes to access it and it's free. Welcome to the Architect Speaks.