I have been working on the discovery of alternative scriptures and ancient heretical movements during the Enlightenment, between about 1690 and 1740. Central to this phenomenon were a group of philosophers and thinkers generally called the Deists, who were a loose network rather than any kind of organized movement. For modern audiences, what is shocking about them is just how very daring and skeptical they were on their speculations about religion, and how very early historically. For present purposes, what matters is not that the Deists necessarily talked a lot about such “lost gospels,” but rather that they created the environment in which such ideas could flourish.I think we can count this post as another turbo footnote to Prof. Jenkins's Lost and Found Scriptures series, for which see here and links.[...]
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