Josh del Sol at AUREA: What Rome Cut From Christianity

Josh del Sol opened his AUREA I talk by asking the room to put their phones in airplane mode, then spent forty minutes on what a fourth-century empire decided the public should not read.

He is the filmmaker behind Take Back Your Power, an investigation into smart meters and suppressed patents. This talk was a deliberate turn from that work. His framing: the same instinct that censors a technology also censors a theology, and for the same reason.

What the Nag Hammadi library is

In December 1945, two brothers digging for fertilizer near Nag Hammadi, Egypt found a sealed earthenware jar holding thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices. They contained early Christian and Gnostic writings that the Roman Empire had banned, hidden by someone who wanted them to survive.

Del Sol's point was about what happened next. The Dead Sea Scrolls, found in the same period, moved into scholarship quickly. The Nag Hammadi texts were not fully published until 1972 to 1977. He quoted the scholar Hans Jonas, who described the find as "beset from the beginning to this day by a persistent curse of political roadblocks, litigations and most of all scholarly jealousies and firstmanship." When they finally appeared, he argued, the churches largely ignored them rather than treating them as an enrichment of the faith.

What he says Rome censored, and why

His thesis is that Rome did not defeat early Christianity; it absorbed it and then edited it. "Rome's evil genius and centerpiece for their control system was to systematically subvert something mostly true and appealing to souls and twist it enough so that it disempowered the masses."

The specific edit he names is the removal of the esoteric strand: the teaching that authority is interior. What Rome kept and standardized, in his reading, was the transactional strand, where salvation is something administered to you from outside. He traces the mechanism to the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the campaign against heresy that followed, when possessing the wrong book became a criminal offense. His summary of why an empire bothers: a population that locates authority outside itself is easier to govern.

He was careful to separate the critique from the faith. He recommended the Gospel of John as a starting point and said the canonical texts are not the problem. His argument is that reading them alongside the suppressed ones changes what they mean.

What the recovered texts say about where power is located

The line he built the talk around comes from the Gospel of Thomas: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

He paired it with another from the same text, where Jesus tells Thomas "I am not your master," and says that whoever drinks from his mouth "will become as I am." Read together, del Sol argues, these describe a relationship of identity rather than hierarchy, and that is precisely the reading an institution built on mediation cannot afford to circulate.

He applied it to creative work in the room. When an inspiration arrives and you act on it, life follows. When you do not, he said, the same creativity turns into a kind of poison. Most of the audience recognized the pattern; when he asked who was navigating foundational shifts in their life, roughly ninety percent of the hands went up.

What the Nag Hammadi texts say about the feminine

The recovered texts give women a standing the canonical ones do not. From the Gospel of Philip: Mary Magdalene is called the companion of the savior, whom "Christ loved more than all the disciples," a description that offended the rest of them, Peter in particular.

He also read from Thunder, Perfect Mind, a poem in the divine feminine voice: "For I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the silence that is incomprehensible." For anyone wanting a portrait of a woman of standing in the early church, he pointed to the Acts of Paul and Thecla.

What the word heresy originally meant

Heresy means thinking, seeing, or choosing for oneself: holding a doctrine or opinion at variance with an established standard. It described an act of independent judgment before it described a crime.

That shift in meaning was the whole talk in miniature. A word for choosing became a word for being wrong, and once it was a word for being wrong it could be a word for being burned. "I'm a heretic," he told the room, using the original sense.

Why he frames this as a shift of the ages

Del Sol reads the current moment through the precession of the equinoxes, the roughly 25,000-year wobble that moves the spring equinox sun through all twelve signs. He used Stellarium, free open-source planetarium software, to show the room the sky at each turning point.

He walked backward through it: the sun entering Pisces around 27 AD, near the time of Yeshua; aligned with Aries around 1446 BC, the traditional date for Moses, whom ancient iconography depicts with ram's horns; in Taurus around 3700 BC, matching the Egyptian sun disk set between bull's horns. His claim is that the transition into Aquarius, the water-bearer, is encoded in the Gospels themselves. He read Luke 22, where the disciples are told to follow "a man carrying a jug of water" into a house and prepare the Passover in an upstairs room.

He was explicit that this is a frame of understanding rather than settled fact, and he said so more than once. He also stated his own guardrail publicly: "I give only God permission to intervene in ways that I cannot unknow if I ever get hijacked by untruth or darkness in ways I cannot see."

The two questions he left the room with

He closed with the questions he had opened with, asked individually and collectively: where is the creative, life-affirming wellspring located today, and where is ultimate authority located?

The story he used to sharpen them comes from Carl Jung, by way of Robert A. Johnson's Owning Your Own Shadow. The water of life bubbles up in a well and flows freely. People fence it, charge admission, write laws about who may drink, and put locks on the gates. The water, offended, stops flowing and comes up somewhere else. The owners are so absorbed in their power structures that they keep selling water that is no longer there. As del Sol pointed out, the encouraging half of the story is the last line: the water is always flowing somewhere.

He ended by leading the room through Neil Douglas-Klotz's translation of the Lord's Prayer from the original Aramaic, mapped to the body's energy centers, a correspondence he credits to Edgar Cayce. In Aramaic, he noted, "our Father which art in heaven" opens instead as "O birther, father-mother of the cosmos, you create all that moves in light."

Watch the full talk above and learn more about Josh del Sol's work.

Frequently asked questions

What are the Nag Hammadi scrolls?

Thirteen leather-bound papyrus books found in a sealed jar near Nag Hammadi, Egypt in December 1945 by two brothers digging for soil to fertilize their crops. They hold 52 early Christian and Gnostic texts banned by the Roman Empire, including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and Thunder, Perfect Mind. They were not fully published until the 1970s.

What does Josh del Sol say Rome removed from Christianity?

The esoteric strand, meaning the teaching that divine authority is located within the person rather than administered from outside. His argument is that Rome kept and standardized the transactional version, where you get right with God through an act performed at intervals, because a population that locates authority outside itself is easier to rule.

What is the Gospel of Thomas line he built the talk around?

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." He treats it as a practical statement about creative work, not only a spiritual one: an inspiration you act on becomes life, and one you refuse turns into something corrosive.

What does heresy actually mean?

Thinking, seeing, or choosing for oneself, holding a view at variance with an established standard. It originally named an act of independent judgment. Del Sol's point is that the shift from "choosing for yourself" to "criminal offense" is the whole censorship mechanism visible inside a single word.

What is the precession of the equinoxes?

A roughly 25,000-year wobble in Earth's axis that slowly moves the spring equinox sunrise through all twelve zodiac constellations. Del Sol used the free Stellarium software to show the sky at historical turning points and argued that ancient iconography, such as Moses with ram's horns during the age of Aries, encoded which age was underway.