Jesus-Lost 40 Days

Overall, there is much good in this documentary.

The reason it has been given four stars instead of five is due to the following misleading statements. The Protestant accounting of church history in relation to Constantine and the Roman Empire in this video can be somewhat misleading. Elaine Pagels, Ph.D., makes the statement that the hierarchy of the church composed of Bishop, presbyter, and deacon was based on the Roman army. Her accounting ignores the statements of early Church Fathers who relate these structures not to the Roman army, but to the hierarchy in the Jewish Temple composed of High Priest, priests, and levites. Pagels says that Constantine chose the believers in Christ who were called "Catholic" (that is, Orthodox Catholic) to represent "official' Christianity. She rightly describes this Catholic Church as an orderly "network," as indeed, it is. Truly, in comparison with all of the various syncretistic, paganized corruptions of Christianity which abounded in the early years of Christianity, the Orthodox Catholic Church, rightly identified as the true Church of Jesus Christ, was much more organized as a network of sister churches transcending cultural and linguistic boundaries. While it is true that there was diversity in the perspectives of these Orthodox Catholic Churches, (for example, the Antiochian manner of interpretation versus the Alexandrian one,) one particular contributor's statement tends to mislead people into thinking that this diversity was irreconcilable and it took Constantine strong-arming the Church to come up with one synthesis of doctrine.

The video ignores the fact that the Orthodox Catholic Churches--the one Church spanning the earth from Britain to India within the first three centuries--all shared the Four Gospels in common. Even the Diatessaron of Tatian, used in some of the early Syrian Churches was a synthesis of the Four Gospels. So it is not surprising, that the Orthodox Council of Nicaea settled on the six resurrection appearances described in the Gospels and the Book of Acts. Likewise, even though the Gospel of Thomas was used at one time by early Syrian Christians, it was used in conjunction with the Four Gospels. In other words, although the video fails to mention it, the Gospel of Thomas may be interpreted from an Orthodox Christian perspective rather than a pagan, Gnostic one so that such an interpretation accords with the Four Gospels.

The nature of the Church and of Holy Tradition has always been one of the blind spots of Protestantism and of the academic schools of textual criticism which arose out of Protestantism. For this reason, these professors of the Academy make these misleading statements. Apart from these aforementioned misstatements, the rest of the video appears to be largely consistent with Holy Orthodoxy and is well worth watching and discussing.… (mehr)