Gospel of Judas - The text...

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel/_pdf/GospelofJudas.pdf

Make of it what you will...

Just what one would expect of a cultic sidebar from the early centuries. It is impossible for even scholars to convey the gleanings of these scraps from a complex past. Imagine taking a bunch of Robertson pamphlets, snippets of fundie videos, a few orthodox mundane mainstream sheets of paper and try to deduce the Christian Church of our century, all the while trying to make it fit the slick and easy conceptions of the present!

One has sympathy for those trying to get unedited and correct fragments of the life and words of Jesus. Even the Four Gospels are heavily redacted for their own purposes, albeit not as wild as the Gnostics.

Having said that, the first glance of this apparently rushed translation(under attack already from James Robinson) shows that, aside form the Gnostic mumbo jumbo, the attitude toward the disciples is intriguing when compared to Mark. The inappropriate laughter of Jesus in the Gnostic Gospels(such as at the foot of the cross when some poor schmuck has been crucified in his place by a "miracle") always gets to me and the fourth degree mason mysticism of stars and clouds, etc. is as puerile as the bad script. One can almost picture the poor people this stuff appeals to or bullies.

What people instinctively will be looking to find here does not exist. Faux books had been written before Jesus(The Apocalypse of Enoch, etc.) with every legendary and impossible Biblical personage imaginable. The price of parchment being what it was, this stuff is mercifully brief and mostly a competitive prop for rival cults. Putting stock in any historical clues is as fruitless as any of the mystical mangled stuff. Obviously someone wanted a rival cult and Judas as an outsider, mysterious, critical to the story, would appeal. Much wilder things have been written. The Gospel of Thomas by sticking to teachings is more interesting and possibly supplies otherwise lost words of Jesus, unpleasantly redacted without benefit of comparison. The Dead Sea Scrolls are immensely more thought provoking.

The tendency to inject the child Jesus here is very interesting because this is not an Infancy Gospel with all their appealing small miracle stories. Outside the controversies of the Epistle of James and other late NT books, there is a lot of dismaying dross for those thinking the book burners had something to hide. What has been lost are tiny clues and fragments to help the small body of Gospel knowledge gain a bit more context. The price would always be wading through the glamor of secret cult temptations. We have plenty of contemporary rivals that perform the ultimate revenge of re-interpreting the Gnostics(and many many others) for their own ends, keeping up a long standing human tradition of betraying truth in a fun way for personal gain.

Robinson accuses National Geo of trying to ride the PR waves of The Da Vinci Code. It certainly is messing with the minds of the masses who can't be expected to understand the erudite context of scholarship faster than public opinion is formed. It is not as easy or as pertinent as global warming, but the actual evidence is incredibly meager to work with.

Six years???

". . . Translation may have begun as early as 2000. In July 2004, eminent Coptic-language expert Rodolphe Kasser announced he was editing the work. " http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,18646661-28737,00.html


". . . (Charles) Hedrick said the last six pages of the Judas document describe a heavenly scene in which Allogenes is being tested and tried by Satan, followed by an earthly scene in which Jesus is being watched closely by scribes. At one point Judas is told, "Although you are evil at this place, you are a disciple of Jesus." The last line of the text says, according to Hedrick: "And he took money and delivered him over."

So, Hedrick said, "it appears that Judas is working at the behest of God when he betrays Jesus as part of the divine plan." When translations of the Gospel of Judas are released with accompanying analyses, Hedrick expects that "there will be a lot of sensationalism, but it will dribble out, leaving only the scholars interested." http://www.atrium-media.com/rogueclassicism//Archives/2005_12.html


IMO - Robinson is just PO'd that he was "shut out" of the translation process!

and it lends a little humorous soap opera to that rarefied world. Yet in the process, he bitterly notes, competition over the brittle documents has endangered them as they passed from hand to hand. The actual content, beside the ignorant media pimping sensationalist nonsense, which is the heart of the matter is not extraordinary, very little value in "rewriting history" and all in the ludicrous shadow of a second rate pop cultic book that itself relies on ignorance to titillate. Wacko conspiracy theories safely rooted in a past rendered inaccessible to most of the public are very popular even if it "offends Christians" who themselves do not matter to the media as much as the fringe fanatics.

Neither the history of the provenance of the manuscript and the infighting over its ownership nor the shallow excitement promoted by the media can make this fringe Gospel anything else but what it is, one among many and with less to offer than most.

The Gospel of Thomas is rightly a favorite of alternative views of Christianity and has been strangely adopted at times by anti-establishment groups who also could care less for the reality, admittedly to a large degree lost, of what it meant when written. Feminists took some odd inspiration from the last addendum to Thomas where the women are graced by being changed somewhat into men. When the sensationalism fades things like these fade faster. Meanwhile the public is not led to an interest in what has been gleaned from these extra books, echos to compare to the Gospels, possible lost sayings and an insight to the faith diversity of those early times. Overall, nothing is as revolutionary as the Essenes' dead Sea Scrolls and there was no faith earthquake but contributions to truer understandings.

But that gets boring and uncomfortable as do most of the real teachings of Jesus as opposed to Apocalyptic sensationalism and the contemporary dramas of those who get between people and the facts.
Coincidentally I see naive (Catholic) experts pimping for the journalistic furor totally unaware how to get this spin out of the facts.

If some future caveman rooting in the ruins of America finds a copy of Pat Robertson's sermon and thinks that because he found it like a lost treasure it must have extraordinary positive value. "A Canticle for Leibowitz" comes to mind where a cult springs up around an untranslatable grocery list that helps civilization recover and fall again.

The hot passion of ignorance and secret Gnostic cults. Their spirit certainly lives on long after their faiths have imploded.

And MSNBC news unabashedly finishes with how much money is being made by one and all. How exciting, inspiring.