The National Geographic Society has been part of an international effort, in collaboration with the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art and the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery, to authenticate, conserve, and translate a 66-page codex, which contains a text called James (also known as First Apocalypse of James), the Letter of Peter to Philip, a fragment of a text that scholars are provisionally calling Book of Allogenes, and the only known surviving copy of the Gospel of Judas.
What he said.
There are several other “gospels” that already exist. These documents are very historically important and will certainly have an impact on how we view the Bible but I doubt any church or group will embrace them as scripture. IMHO they are just as valuable as any of the books of the Bible but hey, that’s just me.
From what i’ve heard, the “big story” is that it suggests Jesus asked, or indirectly influenced, Judas to betray him; so that events could, well, ensue. It’s a suggestion i’ve heard before, though, so even if it’s deemed reliable by scholars and theologians (or whatever the process might be) it’s not as groundbreaking as people would suggest.
It kinda makes The Last Temptation of Christ a less controversial movie. I don’t remember if the movie showed Judas working under the direction of Jesus, but it certainly showed him in a more influential role than the standard Gospels do.
But I wouldn’t look for any mainstream Christian religion to adopt it as canon any time soon!
I’m not sure how you would go about judging the reliability of one gospel over another. Even if the Judas gospel was really old (as seems to be the case) it could still be a true story handed down after attempts by the devotees of the other disciples to suppress it. We’ll never really know.
Heck, and it isn’t even like it brings up anything specially new, the speculation that maybe Judas was indeed in on the Plan all along and doing exactly what JC intended has been banging around for just as long as Christianity.
BTW, it was known for a long time than among the non-canonical scripture there was something called the “Gospel of Judas” (Irenaeus of Lyon makes a reference to that in the late 2d. century). Just that for a long time nobody could get their hands on a copy.
In any case, like John Mace I wouldn’t look for any even-slightly-off-mainstream Christian church to add ANY new book to the canon any time in the next few centuries. On top of it that, if there is anything at all Gnostic about it, its chances of redirecting any mainstream dogma drop to a snowflake’s in you-know-where. Gnosticism was one of the earliest (if not the first) declared heresies.
What’s odd is, the people who are usually quickest to embrace the Gnostic gospels are the people who’d be most aghast if they knew what the Gnostics stood for.
Hint: the Gnostics weren’t hippies, they weren’t feminists, and they weren’t believers in “Do yer own thang!”
I don’t much like what mainstream Chrisitianity stands for either. Does that mean that “who managed to kill each other off the best” is a good guide of who was correct?
If Christians accept the gospel of Judas or not, they still owe him for their salvation; if Jesus wasn’t betrayed there may have been no crucifiction, thus no death or ressurection. I do not remember the verse or chapter but the New Testament states that Judas was pre- ordained to turn Jesus in.
Christianity was always devided,it wasn’t until after 300 years that what books were inspired (or what was not) was decided. Many manuscripts were burned or destroyed,so it is just a matter of faith as to what really went on in the first few centuries of Christianity.
PLease elaborate. since the winners went on to persecute torture and murder those who didn’t agree, what was so much worse about the Gnostics or the Essenes? Perhaps astorian could help.
Not really. Just that there is a high likelihood that the sort of Utopian New Age Christianity (UNAC) that so many people seem to want to somehow “debunk” orthodoxy, either did not really exist and is a construct of their c.2000AD interpretation of various tendencies and schools within Christianity, or at most is a pick-and-choose of one or more of several such tendencies and schools, but not more or better supported by “original sources” (such as they are) than is orthodoxy. Some seekers of UNAC will reach for some mainstream-persecuted religio-cultural phenomenon of the past, such as the Gnostics, Essenes or Cathars for validation, when that doctrine may contain elements not really particularly suitable to what they set out to promote.
“Mainstream” is the descendant of some of those schools that adapted and survived in “The World” and acquired a layering-on of other non-JC-derived philosophical and cultural elements from the various civilizations through which they moved; not not some conspiratorial “hijack” of “real” Christianity. Even the “official” NT lets through that although the original church in Jerusalem organized itself along some sort of “communal” model, within the decade there were theological and leadership disputes and splinter sects and simony and all sorts of less-than-happy-shiny things going on.
There’s a new book by Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman called Misquoting Jesus. It is about the history of our current version if the Bible, the NT in particular. Very informative on how the Bible changed in the first few centuries and how the books were selected. There’s a thread in Cafe society about it here
Ehrman also has a book called The Lost Gospels which I will be reading, about the many other books that were considered sacred in early Christianity and then discarded as theological winners became the official church and persecuted the other groups declaring them heretical.
As others have noted, there are dozens of these early gnostic-type gospels. Most were “purged” by the redactors of the current gospels (along with their sects). It is probably authentic, just not a huge story - though it could shed light on the early period of Christianity, when it was still in a creative ferment.
The Catholic Encyclopedia states that there were at least fifty “gospels” of which four are canonical, and the following are those gospels of which fragments have actually survived:
Question: I don’t know all that much about the Gnostics, but I believe that they were really big on the notion that the creator of this world was basically evil, and consequently that material things (such as the human body) were evil (though souls were good) - and thus that sex, which perpetuates the body, was evil. Do things like priestly celebacy in Catholicism ultimately derive from Gnostic influence?
It was the Cainites. They probably wrote the Gospel of Judas. They believed that the OT God was evil and that the way to salvation was to break every OT law. They also venerated traditional Biblical “villains” such as Cain (where they got their name), Esau, the Canaanites and of course, Judas Iscariot.