The term apoc­ryphal may sound anti­quat­ed, but any rea­son­ably seri­ous read­er encoun­ters it fair­ly often, even in recent­ly pub­lished texts. In the mod­ern usage, it usu­al­ly describes words or events that, despite prob­a­bly nev­er hav­ing been spo­ken or tak­en place, tend to be cit­ed as if they had. Hochela­ga cre­ator Tom­mie Trelawny says that the word comes from a Greek term mean­ing “hid­den,” and was used to refer to dis­put­ed texts not includ­ed in the main­stream Bible. Some church­es acknowl­edge these apoc­rypha, and oth­ers reject them. As for what the unpre­dictable and often bizarre mate­r­i­al, even by bib­li­cal stan­dards, in these “hid­den books,” that’s what Trelawny explains in his new video above.

In the book of Tobit, a high­ly unfor­tu­nate man and woman receive sal­va­tion from the angel Raphael, who uses fish guts to cure their phys­i­cal and demon­ic afflic­tions. In the book of Judith, the tit­u­lar Israelite wid­ow deceives and slays the Assyr­i­an gen­er­al Holofernes, a scene immor­tal­ized by Car­avag­gio (and ren­dered even more vis­cer­al­ly, as pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, by Artemisia Gen­tileschi).

In one chap­ter of the book of Daniel, the tit­u­lar prophet plays the lawyer in a kind of court­room dra­ma that has a cou­ple of men get­ting their come­up­pance for false­ly accus­ing a woman of adul­tery; in anoth­er, he turns detec­tive, inves­ti­gat­ing the mat­ters of a stat­ue said to come alive at night and a drag­on being wor­shipped as a god.

There’s quite a bit more, all of it event­ful, none of it uni­ver­sal­ly accept­ed among the holy texts of Chris­tian­i­ty. The pecu­liar sta­tus of the apoc­rypha dates back to the fourth cen­tu­ry, when the schol­ar Jerome embarked upon a trans­la­tion of the Bible into Latin. This first required gath­er­ing up all extant ver­sions of the book, which did­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly agree with each oth­er: one, writ­ten in Greek, includ­ed quite a few more books than the Bible in Hebrew. It was Jerome who, unable to con­firm these extra books’ authen­tic­i­ty, labeled them “apoc­rypha,” plac­ing them in a sec­tion that even­tu­al­ly got them regard­ed as a kind of sec­ond canon: “delet­ed scenes,” as Trelawny puts it, accom­pa­ny­ing the fea­ture that is the Bible. As for the extent to which they reflect the auteur’s true vision, that can only be — and remain — a mat­ter of debate.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Chris­tian­i­ty Through Its Scrip­tures: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty

Every Book of the Bible Explained in One Video

The Gnos­tic Gospels: An Intro­duc­tion to the For­bid­den Teach­ings of Jesus

The Dead Sea Scrolls: Dis­cov­er the Secrets of the Bible’s Old­est and Strangest Texts

How Many Lives Does God Take in the Bible: An Inves­ti­ga­tion into a Sur­pris­ing­ly High Body Count

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Ref­er­ences to Islam in major media can make it sound mono­lith­ic and eter­nal. But it’s actu­al­ly a much younger and less uni­fied phe­nom­e­non than many of us imag­ine, espe­cial­ly if we hap­pen to live out­side the Mid­dle East. As a reli­gion, it dates back “only” to the sev­enth cen­tu­ry, when it was found­ed by the Prophet Muham­mad. As an engine of large-scale civ­i­liza­tion, Islam took a bit longer to come into its own, and it has­n’t stopped under­go­ing divi­sions, trans­for­ma­tions, declines, and rebirths since. Here on Open Cul­ture, we recent­ly fea­tured a video from YouTube chan­nel How So cov­er­ing 1,000 years of medieval Euro­pean his­to­ry in 20 min­utes. The one above does the same thing for the Islam­ic world’s first mil­len­ni­um, end­ing with the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

After he unit­ed the for­mer­ly poly­the­is­tic Arab tribes under his new faith, Muham­mad lived for a decade longer. His death in the year 632 marked the last time that every believ­er in Islam would have been on the same page. It was at that point that the title caliph, or suc­ces­sor, was defined, and the first four caliphs after Muham­mad held pow­er for thir­ty years, the peri­od in which the first Mus­lim state emerged.

The caliphate, as their ter­ri­to­ry was called, expand­ed wide­ly across and out of the Ara­bi­an Penin­su­la, into the ter­ri­to­ries of the Byzan­tine and Sas­san­ian empires. Sup­port­ers of the ear­ly caliph Ali ibn Abi Tal­ib argued that he was the true heir to Islam, and detrac­tors that he was­n’t. Even­tu­al­ly, the for­mer group became known as the Shias, and the lat­ter as the Sun­nis, the two sides of a schism of which prac­ti­cal­ly every­one today has heard.

Less­er known to the gen­er­al pub­lic are the Umayyads, Abbasids, Buyids, and Fatimids, all of them major play­ers in the con­tin­u­ing expan­sion of Islam well into the Mid­dle Ages. But the still-famil­iar place names of Dam­as­cus, Jerusalem, Bagh­dad, and Con­stan­tino­ple (or, as we know it, Istan­bul) are just as impor­tant in these chap­ters of the sto­ry of Islam, and with­out under­stand­ing that reli­gion, it’s impos­si­ble to under­stand the diverse forms that civ­i­liza­tion has tak­en in those places and oth­ers in the wider region of the world around them. The cri­sis of author­i­ty that began set­ting in after Muham­mad’s death has, in some sense, per­sist­ed for near­ly four­teen cen­turies now, more than long enough to have become a defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of the Islam­ic world. What shape its soci­eties will take over the next mil­len­ni­um, it would sure­ly take a prophet to know.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Birth and Rapid Rise of Islam, Ani­mat­ed (622‑1453)

500+ Beau­ti­ful Man­u­scripts from the Islam­ic World Now Dig­i­tized & Free to Down­load

How Medieval Islam­ic Engi­neer­ing Brought Water to the Alham­braThe Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

The World Map That Intro­duced Sci­en­tif­ic Map­mak­ing to the Medieval Islam­ic World (1154 AD)

Learn Islam­ic & Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy with 107 Episodes of the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast

1,000 Years of Medieval Euro­pean His­to­ry in 20 Min­utes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Chris­tian­i­ty has long been close­ly iden­ti­fied with West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. The asso­ci­a­tion is espe­cial­ly strong, in mod­ern times, with the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, that source of deri­sive­ly quot­ed, quite pos­si­bly apoc­ryphal argu­ments that “if Eng­lish was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for our chil­dren.” But of course, Jesus nev­er heard a word of Eng­lish, and though the spread of the reli­gion named after him did shift into high gear not long after his death — to say noth­ing of after Con­stan­ti­ne’s — it took its sweet time get­ting to the Amer­i­can con­ti­nent. In fact, it does­n’t show up there until more than five and a half min­utes into the new eight-minute video from Ollie Bye above, which ani­mates Chris­tian­i­ty’s his­tor­i­cal prop­a­ga­tion on a world map.

It’s a world map by the end, in any case: the view zooms out as the reach of Chris­tian­i­ty increas­es, start­ing with the region we now call the Mid­dle East and end­ing up with every con­ti­nent on dis­play, none of them untouched save Antarc­ti­ca (which actu­al­ly does have eight church­es of its own). Remark­able though it is that this first-cen­tu­ry “desert reli­gion” has tak­en root in such a vari­ety of envi­ron­ments, cul­tures, and soci­eties, it has­n’t come through that process com­plete­ly unchanged.

Indeed, Bye’s map includes a run­ning leg­end of its major vari­ants, from Nicene, Celtic, and Chal­cedon­ian Chris­tian­i­ty ear­ly on to Angli­can, Luther­an, Bap­tist, and many more in our time. It makes less sense to speak of the spread of Chris­tian­i­ty, per­haps, than the spread of Chris­tian­i­ties.

In the sin­gu­lar or the plur­al, what has made all this so adapt­able to such a wide vari­ety of human set­tings? Chris­tian­i­ty’s non-eth­nic uni­ver­sal­ism sure­ly has some­thing to do with it, as does the broad emo­tion­al res­o­nance of its core nar­ra­tives of sin, sal­va­tion, and rebirth. The assid­u­ous trans­la­tion of its texts and out­ward march of mis­sion­ar­ies and oth­er car­ri­ers of the gospel has been going on almost since the very begin­ning. Through­out its his­to­ry, Chris­tian­i­ty has also shown the ver­sa­til­i­ty to thrive as a clan­des­tine under­ground move­ment, a state reli­gion, and every­thing in between. All the while, it has assim­i­lat­ed qual­i­ties of the civ­i­liza­tions it enters, from Gre­co-Roman phi­los­o­phy to Celtic fes­ti­vals to Kore­an shaman­is­tic tra­di­tions. In fact, I’m writ­ing this very post from one of the many church cafés in Seoul, as con­vinc­ing an expe­ri­ence as to under­score Chris­tian­i­ty’s improb­a­ble — and con­tin­u­ing — endurance.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ani­mat­ed Map Shows How the Five Major Reli­gions Spread Across the World (3000 BC — 2000 AD)

180,000 Years of Reli­gion Chart­ed on a “His­tom­ap” in 1943

The Birth and Rapid Rise of Islam, Ani­mat­ed (622‑1453)

A Visu­al Map of the World’s Major Reli­gions (and Non-Reli­gions)

World Reli­gions Explained with Use­ful Charts: Hin­duism, Bud­dhism, Judaism, Islam, Chris­tian­i­ty & More

The His­to­ry of the World in One Video: Every Year from 200,000 BCE to Today

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The sto­ries in the Bible have been told in many ways, not least through film. Among the many cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tions of Chris­tian­i­ty’s holy book, none comes to mind that ends with freeze-frame title cards explain­ing the lat­er fate of each char­ac­ter, in the man­ner of Ani­mal House, Amer­i­can Graf­fi­ti, or Good­fel­las. This is sur­pris­ing, since that device could do much to sat­is­fy our curios­i­ty about so many sec­ondary Bib­li­cal fig­ures. Take the twelve dis­ci­ples of Jesus Christ, whose lives Hochela­ga cre­ator Tom­mie Trelawny takes as his sub­ject in the new video above. Be warned: things did­n’t end par­tic­u­lar­ly well for most of them.

Peter, who “has to be one of the most stud­ied fig­ures in his­to­ry,” seems to have end­ed his days in Rome. Chris­tian­i­ty’s rapid spread there in the first cen­tu­ry AD, even­tu­al­ly brought about a crack­down by the rul­ing class. The emper­or Nero blamed the fire of 64 on Chris­tians, and Peter, now known as Saint Peter, was among the vic­tims of the result­ing per­se­cu­tion. Judas, the betray­er of Jesus, “remains the most con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure in all of Chris­tian­i­ty,” though ques­tions about his moti­va­tions have gone with­out defin­i­tive answers. We do know, how­ev­er, that remorse even­tu­al­ly over­took him, lead­ing him to take his own life in Akel­dama, or the “field of blood” — and if you believe Dante, he now resides in the ninth cir­cle of Hell.

Trelawny gives the title of most under­rat­ed to the one whose skep­ti­cism about Jesus’ return from death has guar­an­teed him his own eter­nal life through the expres­sion “doubt­ing Thomas.” (As with Peter and Judas, his iden­ti­ty was solid­i­fied by a Car­avag­gio paint­ing.) Accord­ing to cer­tain sto­ries, he also trav­eled the far­thest of any of the dis­ci­ples: far enough to fol­low exist­ing Roman spice routes and found the church of the Saint Thomas Chris­tians in Ker­ala, India. The not-quite-as-wide­ly known but nev­er­the­less high­ly impor­tant Andrew made trav­els of his own, going to Scythia, and from there to Greece. After his even­tu­al cap­ture and cru­ci­fix­ion, his holy relics were scat­tered far and wide: even to Scot­land, so the leg­end has it, home of the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Andrews. The St. Andrews’ Cross appears as the main design ele­ment of Scot­land’s nation­al flag, as well as a part of the Union Jack.

In these and oth­er ways, the lega­cies of the dis­ci­ples con­tin­ue to man­i­fest in famil­iar ways through­out the West­ern (and, occa­sion­al­ly, non-west­ern) world. After telling the sto­ries of the remain­ing eight, from John to Bartholomew to Simon the Zealot, Trelawny con­sid­ers the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a mnemon­ic rhyme for their fates. Alas, he admits, “I’m still try­ing to think of what goes with ‘flayed alive by Arme­ni­ans.’ ” Being a dis­ci­ple of Jesus turns out, for the most part, to have been a call­ing with a very low sur­vival rate indeed. But then, in ear­ly Chris­tian­i­ty, mar­tyr­dom was a holy act, a demon­stra­tion of devo­tion in imi­ta­tion of the Mes­si­ah him­self — and an ele­ment sure to make most any dis­ci­ple biopic a grue­some view­ing expe­ri­ence.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Real Sto­ry of East­er: How We Got from the First East­er in the Bible to Bun­nies, Eggs & Choco­late

The Gnos­tic Gospels: An Intro­duc­tion to the For­bid­den Teach­ings of Jesus

Why Real Bib­li­cal Angels Are Creepy, Beast­ly, and Hard­ly Angel­ic

How Our Depic­tion of Jesus Changed Over 2,000 Years and What He May Have Actu­al­ly Looked Like

How Many Lives Does God Take in the Bible: An Inves­ti­ga­tion into a Sur­pris­ing­ly High Body Count

What Makes Caravaggio’s The Tak­ing of Christ a Time­less, Great Paint­ing?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The say­ing “You can’t take it with you” may be a cliché to all of us here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, but it would hard­ly have made sense to an ancient Egypt­ian. One of the most wide­ly known qual­i­ties of that civ­i­liza­tion’s upper crust, after all, is that its mem­bers spared no expense try­ing to do just that. The most com­pelling evi­dence includes the tombs of the pharaohs, lav­ish­ly stocked as they were with every­thing from dai­ly neces­si­ties to reli­gious arti­facts to ser­vants (in effi­gy or oth­er­wise). And nobody who was any­body in ancient Egypt would be seen shuf­fling off this mor­tal coil — or what­ev­er the shape in which their poets cast it — with­out a Book of the Dead.

“A stan­dard com­po­nent in Egypt­ian elite buri­als, the Book of the Dead was not a book in the mod­ern sense of the term but a com­pendi­um of some 200 rit­u­al spells and prayers, with instruc­tions on how the deceased’s spir­it should recite them in the here­after,” writes the New York Times’ Franz Lidz.

“Com­piled and refined over mil­len­ni­ums since about 1550 B.C.,” the text “pro­vid­ed a sort of visu­al map that allowed the new­ly dis­em­bod­ied soul to nav­i­gate the duat, a maze-like nether­world of cav­erns, hills and burn­ing lakes.” Each of its “spells” addressed a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion the deceased might encounter on that jour­ney: a snake attack, decap­i­ta­tion, a turn­ing upside down that “would reverse your diges­tive func­tions and cause you to con­sume your own waste.”

We can cer­tain­ly under­stand why these high-sta­tus ancient Egyp­tians did­n’t want to take their chances. In the ani­mat­ed Ted-ED video above, you can fol­low the jour­ney of one such indi­vid­ual, a scribe from thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry-BC Thebes called Anees. After his body under­goes two months of mum­mi­fi­ca­tion, his spir­it makes its har­row­ing jour­ney through the under­world, call­ing upon the spells he’d thought to include in his Book of the Dead when alive. Then comes moral judg­ment by a bat­tery of 42 “asses­sor gods” and a weigh­ing of his heart, the final step before his admit­tance to a lush wheat field that is the Egypt­ian after­life. Whether Anees got that far remains an open ques­tion, but mod­ern phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal enshrine­ment of Books of the Dead (more of which you can see up-close at Google Arts & Cul­ture), has grant­ed him and his com­pa­tri­ots a kind of immor­tal­i­ty after all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Did the Egyp­tians Make Mum­mies? An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Ancient Art of Mum­mi­fi­ca­tion

Hear Lau­rie Ander­son Read from the Tibetan Book of the Dead on New Album Songs from the Bar­do

Sci­en­tists Dis­cov­er that Ancient Egyp­tians Drank Hal­lu­cino­genic Cock­tails from 2,300 Year-Old Mug

When the Grate­ful Dead Played at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

Were the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Not Built Up, But Carved Down?: A Bold New The­o­ry Explains Their Con­struc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The appear­ance of the Dead Sea Scrolls was the most impor­tant doc­u­ment dis­cov­ery of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Yet, in some sense, they did­n’t deliv­er what many assumed to be promised with­in: that is, the basis for a com­plete revi­sion of every­thing we thought we knew about Chris­tian­i­ty. The real­i­ty of the Dead Sea Scrolls’ con­tent is less sim­ple, but also stranger — which makes it an ide­al sub­ject for the YouTube chan­nel Hochela­ga, giv­en its pen­chant for explor­ing the obscure byways of reli­gious his­to­ry. And indeed, as host Tom­mie Trelawny says in his new video above, they are the “old­est Bib­li­cal writ­ings ever found,” a sta­tus that, what­ev­er their specifics, cer­tain­ly jus­ti­fies the great scruti­ny paid to them over the past eight decades.

For it was only in 1946 that the Scrolls were found, by a Bedouin shep­herd look­ing for his lost goat in a series of caves in the vicin­i­ty of ancient ruins by the Dead Sea. Or so the sto­ry goes, any­way, and Trelawny explains some of the com­pli­ca­tions that emerge when it’s exam­ined more close­ly.

But the fact remains that those caves did con­tain, tight­ly rolled up and for the most part well-pre­served, a set of scrolls adding up to “around 900 indi­vid­ual man­u­scripts: 40 per­cent of them “resem­bled books found in the Bible”; 30 per­cent, apoc­ryphal writ­ings “banned” from the Bible; and anoth­er 30 per­cent, “writ­ings pre­vi­ous­ly unknown to schol­ar­ship.” Those last include “texts that described a secre­tive reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty and apoc­a­lyp­tic visions of a great heav­en­ly war.”

Most intrigu­ing­ly, there was also “a scroll made entire­ly of cop­per that lists the loca­tions of lost trea­sure.” None of it has ever been found, much as the con­tent of the oth­er texts has­n’t forced a great rethink­ing of the reli­gion at the cen­ter of so much of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. In fact, as Bib­li­cal schol­ar Robert Alter writes in the Lon­don Review of Books, “the notion that these sec­tar­i­an writ­ings are actu­al­ly Chris­t­ian has no schol­ar­ly cred­i­bil­i­ty,” though some researchers argue that “the blue­print for the Gospel nar­ra­tives,” mes­si­ah fig­ure and all, “was laid out in the Scrolls and fol­lowed by the first Chris­t­ian writ­ers.” They do, how­ev­er, reveal a great deal about the world­view of the par­tic­u­lar fringe faith­ful who took to the desert to keep their unortho­dox beliefs safe from the harsh judg­ment of main­stream soci­ety — and, for about twen­ty cen­turies, safe they remained.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Google Puts The Dead Sea Scrolls Online (in Super High Res­o­lu­tion)

Google Dig­i­tizes Ancient Copies of the Ten Com­mand­ments and Gen­e­sis

2,000-Year-Old Man­u­script of the Ten Com­mand­ments Gets Dig­i­tized: See/Download “Nash Papyrus” in High Res­o­lu­tion

How Ancient Scrolls, Charred by the Erup­tion of Mount Vesu­vius in 79 AD, Are Now Being Read by Par­ti­cle Accel­er­a­tors, 3D Mod­el­ing & Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

The Gnos­tic Gospels: An Intro­duc­tion to the For­bid­den Teach­ings of Jesus

Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment: A Free Yale Course

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.