Princess diana and the lost Gospel of Judas

It looks like I’ve got another big job to do – A TV advert for a Maltese version of Argos – sounds like fun and quite a challenge…. Deadline at the end of the month – just when the book needs to be finished…

Today, I made a start on it. Basically I need to design a warehouse full of goods. I designed the shelving today and got a pretty good test of how it will look superimposed into a backdrop. It’s looking good – and it’s the first time I’ve used Photoshop’s vanishing point tool to turn a photo into a 3d environment for an animation. It seemed to work, but I’m still not confident with the tool.

I also made a start on another chapter of the book. I managed to do a little of it yesterday, but I was looking after George, so I could only work in the hour or so that he slept… still, I’m getting there and this month – though full – looks possible.


The inquest into the death of lady Diana looks as though it’s going to find no evidence of a conspiracy…The problem the royal family is facing over this, however isn’t evidence, it’s truth. It’s the same problem the Catholic church faced over the Da Vinci Code.

It’s not that there’s any evidence to suggest that the Royal family had Diana Killed. It’s just that we’ve had a monarchy for a thousand years, and there are certain things we’ve come to expect from them. The evidence says they’re completely innocent, but given what we’ve seen them do over the past thousand years, not having anything to do with Diana’s death would just be so out of character for them.

It takes a lot of believing.

In the same way, the Catholic church found themselves having to deny that they’d been trying to kill of the family of Christ with secret assassins – not because there was any specific truth in the book – but because people had tuned into the underlying truth that the church has covered up just this kind of thing time and time again down the years.

I saw a documentary a couple of weeks ago about the church’s rejection of several other gospels which had at least as much validity as those of Mark and John (apparently the Gospels of Mark and John never claimed to be written by or on behalf of those disciples – the church just needed names for them and invented them).

Anyway the one that puzzled me was the gospel of Peter – i.e. the first Pope. The founder of the church, the leader of the disciples. Apparently he wrote a gospel, but later when they came to assemble the bible, they decided it just didn’t fit in with the product they were trying to sell, so they junked it.

And that’s my problem – not that they left out parts – they were the church, so they’ve got a perfect right to edit the bible to tell their story.

My problem is twofold:

First that they left out really very central important accounts. As a journalist you’re constantly reminded that you have to edit the material you have to tell the story as you understand it in the best way you can. But it’s unethical to ignore the central core ideas because they don’t suit your view – you wouldn’t cover a murder trial and leave out the verdict.

And second that the other gospels weren’t just left out, they were deleted – almost entirely - from history by what must have been a sustained campaign of suppression – and even though we know about them now, they’re not even mentioned by the practitioners of the church. This is bad. Very bad.

If Shakespeare had written a whole load of other plays that didn’t make it into his collected works – either because they weren’t good enough or for some other reason – we might not consider them in the same way as Hamlet – but we’d still publish them. We’d still study them. We’d still recognise them and allow them to help us gain an understanding of Shakespeare’s work.


Not including material in the Bible is one thing. Failing to even recognise or discuss material which you know exists and which has as much validity as that which is included in the Bible (and some of it more validity) is something else entirely.

These gospels are (or claim with as much evidence as any of the gospels) the story of the life of Christ – so can someone who isn’t familiar with this material call themselves a priest? Or even a practicing Christian?

I don’t think so.

Even though I’m not a Christian, In the interests of fairness, I thought I'd publish it.

unfortunately the gospel (or at least its only translation) is copyrighted! it's owned by the National Geographic.

here's a link

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel/_pdf/GospelofJudas.pdf?fs=www7.nationalgeographic.com&fs=magma.nationalgeographic.com