Dear Reader,

I would like to share with you what I have learned about the mystical Gnostics and the roles they played in the birth of Christianity.

After converting to Catholicism in my teens, I devoured books saints, especially the mystics. I marveled at their reverence for Jesus a spiritual realm that they could fathom only through their hearts, and imaginations. Though I felt a particular fondness for Mother also have been deeply interested in Mary Magdalene as a spiritual model. Recently, her name has been as sociated with references Gnostics, mystics belonging to diverse sects but sharing some common beliefs. The ancient Gnostic Christians exalted Mar y Magdalene and mentioned her with respect and admiration in their sacred manuscripts. discovered that a gospel was named after her.

The Gnostic texts had all but disappeared until a peasant at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, discovered an earthenware jar buried in the Inside the jar were fifty-two, mostly Gnostic, sacred writings, some gospels. Scholars have now translated and published these Web sites and an extensive bibliography for reading contributions to primitive Christianity. I hope you'll find their myths and stories as fascinating as I have.

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Visit the entire Everything® Series at www.everything.com

A complete guide to the secret gospels

Meera Lester

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Avon, Massachusetts

Copyright © 2007, F+W Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

Author's Note:

Great effort was made to verify the facts in this work; however, scholars sometimes disagree, and whenever such discrepancies arose in the information for the Gnostic Gospels, interpretation of a majority of the sources was the one used in this book.

The quotations in this book were taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

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