I decided not to stay up and watch the documentary about Jesus’ secret family tonight. I recorded it instead, went to bed and read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and then I watched the documentary after breakfast today.
It was interesting, both historically and religiously. It was about Jesus’ kinship with John the Baptist, Jesus’ half-brother Jacob (according to this documentary he was a son of Joseph the carpenter from an earlier relationship), and about how the Christian Church has tried to conceal for ages that it was actually Jacob and the rest of Jesus’ family who were the leaders of the new Christians. And above all, that what the family of Jesus preached was different from the Christian teachings that are foundation of today’s Christianity.
It turned out there is a really old handbook, written while the family of Jesus lead the Jewish Christians, and Jesus is hardly mentioned in it, there’s no resurrection or anything like that. There’s just guidelines for how the Jewish Christians would live, how the service would be held, and so on. It’s said that this is the original teachings of Jesus, that are not longer preached.
Obviously you should take documentaries like this with a grain of salt. But it does sound interesting, doesn’t it? A lot of intrigues within the Church, as usual, I’m not that surprised. Personally I can very well imagine that most of what was mentioned in this documentary could have some truth in it.