The claim from the genial Dr Robert Beckford at the start of Channel 4's 'The Secrets of the 12 Disciples' to be a Christian looked increasingly hollow as the programme progressed.True the programme did seem to indicate that Simon Peter dying in Rome was exceedingly unlikely and backed this up by showing the tomb of one Simon Barjonah in Jerusalem and pointing out that there was no evidence that the apostle had ever travelled so far westwards. Fair enough.
The programme seemed happy to back the claim that the Apostle Thomas had taken the Gospel to S. India and made a reasonably good case. Fair enough.
But its attempts to reclassify Judas as 'hero' were downright silly - asking why he was not positively represented. [???] A linguistic expert was trotted out to claim that the word in the NT translated from Greek as 'betrayed' actually means 'handed over'. Big deal! Read all the rest!
We had the usual hobby horse of 'Who wrote John's Gospel, letters and Revelation?' without one single jot of evidence produced that it was not the Apostle himself.
References were made to texts hundreds of years after the events such as the 'Gospel of
Thomas'. For the sake of all pity WHY?
Vain attempts were made to see the early Church 'differently' and split between the
'anti-Jewish and pro-Jewish elements'. This deliberately chose to misrepresent the reason for the actual divisions based on whether or not gentile converts needed to be circumcised.
The influence of Paul was derided and an almost 'gnostic' revisionism used to hint that the early Church had been less than honest about what Jesus had taught. Weak, unconvincing and not based on evidence.
[Does it never occur to such 'Christians' that we might have had a teeny weeny bit of God's influence into which texts were chosen for the scriptural canon?]
The programme was a veritable mishmash which will have put so many doubts into the minds of the uninformed using the tactics of Berlitz or Von Daniken. Annoying and academically unworthy.
