I'm rather surprised...
...at how little I'm seeing on my friends' LJs about the "Gospel of Judas" foofaraw. Only ursulav seems to have said much about it so far, and she mostly spends it busy being her usual clever and funny self.
There was a big discussion about it on local news radio station KGO the other day, on which they kept discussing it as an "early Christian" text, and otherwise missing the point. So, to clear up some misconceptions that the news media are blathering all over the place:
1. Gnosticism had many forms and flavors, and not all were Christian. So what the G of J is is a "Gnostic Christian" text, and to call it merely a "Christian" text is akin to calling Mein Kampf a "Socialist" text because Hitler was a "National Socialist:" technically true, but very misleading.
2. No, this document does not shake up the foundations of the Christian faith. It has been known about all along; it was suppressed about 1700 years ago, largely at the behest of grumpy old St Irenaeus, and no copies were known to exist until this one was uncovered three decades and change ago. But the existence of it, and other non-canonical Gospels, were known and taken into account when the decision was taken that four Gospels -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and wossname -- were trustworthy representatives of the tradition the Apostles had handed on, and the others weren't. That copies of some of the ones that were suppressed have reappeared is historically fortunate, but not theologically significant.
3. Do the non-canonical texts represent authentic traditions suppressed by the Church hierarchy? Well, yes ... and no. In the early days, the accounts of Jesus were handed on verbally, and not written down until most or all of the people who actually experienced those events were dead. (There is some internal evidence that Luke* actually did some research, interviewing those who were still alive and so on.) What seems mostly to have been handed on are two things: collections of kerygma, or sayings of Jesus; and individual stories. Various writers eventually compiled them into texts, each of which would be referred to as an "evangelium" (literally, Good Message, cognate with God-Spiel, Good News, "Gospel"). And the hierarchy of the early Church chose some of these as "accepted" and some as, well, not. The basic criteria for what was "accepted" was not what was politically expedient for the Church hierarchy, as some (KOFF KOFF dan brown) woudl have us believe, but what agreed with the oldest texts.
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* While we don't know who actually wrote "the Gospel according to Luke," we may as well call him or her or them "Luke." It's so much more convenient than "the author of Luke."
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4. Huh? What texts? Well, the oldest texts in the New Testament are not the Gospel accounts. They're the "epistles," or letters, of Paul and others. Writing in the years immediately after the Crucifixion, these capture what was actually believed and practiced by the earliest Christians, and are as close to a contemporary record of what Jesus and his immediate followers taught as we have available to us.
4.1 From a scholarly viewpoint, it's a nightmare; one of the most important mass movements in the history of the world, and almost no record of what its founder actually said and did. Kind of like Socrates, actually ... figuring out Jesus from the New Testament is like figuring out Socrates from the writings of Plato and Xenophon, okay? There's a definite historical figure, and we know something about what he said and did, but a lot of it is at a remove. No wonder some take refuge in literalism, insisting that the Holy Spirit used MML&J essentially as stenographers taking down Divine Dictation; it makes things much easier (though it then leaves literalists scrambling to explain why the HS couldn't seem to get His story straight, or even needed multiple accounts).
4.2 At any rate, so those early letters (and others not canonical but close in time, like those of St. Clement) are crucial for understanding what the original Christians believed and practiced, and that, plus the general sense of the Church as to what it still beleived and practiced, and what those letters actually meant, was the basis for determining which Gospel accounts were in agreement with the faith and which weren't. Those named for Judas, Thomas, and Mary Magdalene, weren't.
5. Yet, obviously, when I say this, it makes it sound like the Church at that time monolithically believed in one coherent religion. I want to emphatically state that this is not so. There were a lot of divergent understandings of what Jesus had said and done and what it all meant. Nor did this begin a century or two later, requiring Irenaeus to come along and condemn heretical Gospels out of the blue; some of the letters of Paul make it clear that there were contending versions of the Christian faith right from the beginning. In some places he condemns errors; in others he tries to get people arguing about nits to reconcile with each other; in a few places, he rails about the cults of personality that had grown up about himself and a few other early evangelical preachers like Peter, or someone called "Apollonius," about whom we know almost nothing, and pleads for the (simple but often forgotten) idea that there was just one Christian faith and that its focus was Jesus, not Paul or Apollonius.
5.1 So if there was all this diversity in the early Church, how can I say that the Church believed X and not Y, and that the choice of some Gospel accounts over others was not a unilateral act of the Church hierarchy?
5.2 This is something that the Catholic Church has preserved pretty well until recent times: something called the sensus fidei, the "sense of the faithful." The definitional statements of faith are generally issued by the Church hierarchy, but state something that the body of believers generally agrees upon. A good example of this is the relatively-recent, historically speaking, the Catholic declarations of Papal infallibility* and the Immaculate Conception of Mary. These were not things that the hierarchys suddenly announced and said, "Okay, now everybody has to believe this too!" but things that the rank-and-file of the Church, on the whole, already believed. While it's hard to prove at this distance in time, it looks as if a similar decision process was used by the ancient Church hierarchy to select the canon of the NT.
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* Don't get me started.
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6. Okay, I haven't read the G of J and can't comment much on its content. The bit that gets quoted in all the coverage, though, makes it pretty clear that this is, yes, a Gnostic text. Specifically, it seems to deny that Jesus was really a man, but was a Divine being who took on the appearance of a man, which had to be destroyed, so Judas was actually Jesus' closest friend and did what Jesus asked him.
6.1 So what is this Gnosticism thing? Actually, it's a pretty dangerous set of ideas*. The basic concept is that the being we think is "God" is actually an evil "Demiurge," who made this whole universe of matter and such against the will of the true God. Matter, therefore, including our bodies, is eeeeevil and to be ignored as much as possible, and transcended, and like that.
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As is orthodox Christianity.
----------
6.1.1 The consequences of this belief are pretty profound; it leads fairly obviously to extreme asceticism and less obviously but no less actually to cults that perform torture and murder as part of their rituals, because they're freeing the victims from attachment/slavery to the eeeeevil flesh. This is, in my opinion and probably most people's opinion, Not A Good Thing.
6.1.2 It also leads to a kind of spiritual elitism that makes the elitism inherent in the Catholic hierarchy piddlin' by comparison. There are the Enlightened Ones, and they are so superior to the Unenlightend that the latter have no rights as vis-a-vis the former (thus justifying the cult activities I mentioned). In a way, this is like the dark twin of Buddhism: instead of Boddhisatvas who remain on the Wheel to help those not yet enlightened, you have these Übermenschen who can do what they please to the Unters. I'm not making this up.
6.2 So how did this Gnosticism thing get started? It came out of the East ... it seems to have been a smushing of Persian religion (of the Zoroastrian sort, okay?) with Greek philosophy and bits of other things.
7. One other thing of interest. One of the ignorant folks on the radio made one really good point. As Meschiach, Messiah, Christ, the Annointed One, Jesus was expected to follow and restore or renew the traditions of ancient Israel. It is no accident that there were twelve Apostles -- they represent the twelve Tribes of ancient Israel.
7.1 But if Jesus was God, and Jesus picked out His own Apostles, then it's kind of embarassing that He picked one who would betray Him, right? Where's your omniscience now, Jeez? So it isn't terribly surprising that a tradition grew up which claimed that Jesus actually commissioned Judas to turn Him over to the Sanhedrin. The canonical Gospels walk right up to the edge on this -- He knew that Judas would betray Him, but He also knew that it was necessary for the work of the Atonement that He be betrayed and all that. So the orthodox view is just a shade different from that of the G of J: Jesus knew what would happen, and picked Judas because of it, but didn't actually ask him to do it; it was an inherent flaw in Judas's character, or some such.
7.1.1 The idea that Jesus wanted Judas to betray him has been very much in the air in popular culture for some time -- it's touched on in both Jesus Christ Superstar and The Last Temptation of Christ.
Okay, that's enough for now. Go read something else.
There was a big discussion about it on local news radio station KGO the other day, on which they kept discussing it as an "early Christian" text, and otherwise missing the point. So, to clear up some misconceptions that the news media are blathering all over the place:
1. Gnosticism had many forms and flavors, and not all were Christian. So what the G of J is is a "Gnostic Christian" text, and to call it merely a "Christian" text is akin to calling Mein Kampf a "Socialist" text because Hitler was a "National Socialist:" technically true, but very misleading.
2. No, this document does not shake up the foundations of the Christian faith. It has been known about all along; it was suppressed about 1700 years ago, largely at the behest of grumpy old St Irenaeus, and no copies were known to exist until this one was uncovered three decades and change ago. But the existence of it, and other non-canonical Gospels, were known and taken into account when the decision was taken that four Gospels -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and wossname -- were trustworthy representatives of the tradition the Apostles had handed on, and the others weren't. That copies of some of the ones that were suppressed have reappeared is historically fortunate, but not theologically significant.
3. Do the non-canonical texts represent authentic traditions suppressed by the Church hierarchy? Well, yes ... and no. In the early days, the accounts of Jesus were handed on verbally, and not written down until most or all of the people who actually experienced those events were dead. (There is some internal evidence that Luke* actually did some research, interviewing those who were still alive and so on.) What seems mostly to have been handed on are two things: collections of kerygma, or sayings of Jesus; and individual stories. Various writers eventually compiled them into texts, each of which would be referred to as an "evangelium" (literally, Good Message, cognate with God-Spiel, Good News, "Gospel"). And the hierarchy of the early Church chose some of these as "accepted" and some as, well, not. The basic criteria for what was "accepted" was not what was politically expedient for the Church hierarchy, as some (KOFF KOFF dan brown) woudl have us believe, but what agreed with the oldest texts.
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* While we don't know who actually wrote "the Gospel according to Luke," we may as well call him or her or them "Luke." It's so much more convenient than "the author of Luke."
-----------
4. Huh? What texts? Well, the oldest texts in the New Testament are not the Gospel accounts. They're the "epistles," or letters, of Paul and others. Writing in the years immediately after the Crucifixion, these capture what was actually believed and practiced by the earliest Christians, and are as close to a contemporary record of what Jesus and his immediate followers taught as we have available to us.
4.1 From a scholarly viewpoint, it's a nightmare; one of the most important mass movements in the history of the world, and almost no record of what its founder actually said and did. Kind of like Socrates, actually ... figuring out Jesus from the New Testament is like figuring out Socrates from the writings of Plato and Xenophon, okay? There's a definite historical figure, and we know something about what he said and did, but a lot of it is at a remove. No wonder some take refuge in literalism, insisting that the Holy Spirit used MML&J essentially as stenographers taking down Divine Dictation; it makes things much easier (though it then leaves literalists scrambling to explain why the HS couldn't seem to get His story straight, or even needed multiple accounts).
4.2 At any rate, so those early letters (and others not canonical but close in time, like those of St. Clement) are crucial for understanding what the original Christians believed and practiced, and that, plus the general sense of the Church as to what it still beleived and practiced, and what those letters actually meant, was the basis for determining which Gospel accounts were in agreement with the faith and which weren't. Those named for Judas, Thomas, and Mary Magdalene, weren't.
5. Yet, obviously, when I say this, it makes it sound like the Church at that time monolithically believed in one coherent religion. I want to emphatically state that this is not so. There were a lot of divergent understandings of what Jesus had said and done and what it all meant. Nor did this begin a century or two later, requiring Irenaeus to come along and condemn heretical Gospels out of the blue; some of the letters of Paul make it clear that there were contending versions of the Christian faith right from the beginning. In some places he condemns errors; in others he tries to get people arguing about nits to reconcile with each other; in a few places, he rails about the cults of personality that had grown up about himself and a few other early evangelical preachers like Peter, or someone called "Apollonius," about whom we know almost nothing, and pleads for the (simple but often forgotten) idea that there was just one Christian faith and that its focus was Jesus, not Paul or Apollonius.
5.1 So if there was all this diversity in the early Church, how can I say that the Church believed X and not Y, and that the choice of some Gospel accounts over others was not a unilateral act of the Church hierarchy?
5.2 This is something that the Catholic Church has preserved pretty well until recent times: something called the sensus fidei, the "sense of the faithful." The definitional statements of faith are generally issued by the Church hierarchy, but state something that the body of believers generally agrees upon. A good example of this is the relatively-recent, historically speaking, the Catholic declarations of Papal infallibility* and the Immaculate Conception of Mary. These were not things that the hierarchys suddenly announced and said, "Okay, now everybody has to believe this too!" but things that the rank-and-file of the Church, on the whole, already believed. While it's hard to prove at this distance in time, it looks as if a similar decision process was used by the ancient Church hierarchy to select the canon of the NT.
----------
* Don't get me started.
----------
6. Okay, I haven't read the G of J and can't comment much on its content. The bit that gets quoted in all the coverage, though, makes it pretty clear that this is, yes, a Gnostic text. Specifically, it seems to deny that Jesus was really a man, but was a Divine being who took on the appearance of a man, which had to be destroyed, so Judas was actually Jesus' closest friend and did what Jesus asked him.
6.1 So what is this Gnosticism thing? Actually, it's a pretty dangerous set of ideas*. The basic concept is that the being we think is "God" is actually an evil "Demiurge," who made this whole universe of matter and such against the will of the true God. Matter, therefore, including our bodies, is eeeeevil and to be ignored as much as possible, and transcended, and like that.
----------
As is orthodox Christianity.
----------
6.1.1 The consequences of this belief are pretty profound; it leads fairly obviously to extreme asceticism and less obviously but no less actually to cults that perform torture and murder as part of their rituals, because they're freeing the victims from attachment/slavery to the eeeeevil flesh. This is, in my opinion and probably most people's opinion, Not A Good Thing.
6.1.2 It also leads to a kind of spiritual elitism that makes the elitism inherent in the Catholic hierarchy piddlin' by comparison. There are the Enlightened Ones, and they are so superior to the Unenlightend that the latter have no rights as vis-a-vis the former (thus justifying the cult activities I mentioned). In a way, this is like the dark twin of Buddhism: instead of Boddhisatvas who remain on the Wheel to help those not yet enlightened, you have these Übermenschen who can do what they please to the Unters. I'm not making this up.
6.2 So how did this Gnosticism thing get started? It came out of the East ... it seems to have been a smushing of Persian religion (of the Zoroastrian sort, okay?) with Greek philosophy and bits of other things.
7. One other thing of interest. One of the ignorant folks on the radio made one really good point. As Meschiach, Messiah, Christ, the Annointed One, Jesus was expected to follow and restore or renew the traditions of ancient Israel. It is no accident that there were twelve Apostles -- they represent the twelve Tribes of ancient Israel.
7.1 But if Jesus was God, and Jesus picked out His own Apostles, then it's kind of embarassing that He picked one who would betray Him, right? Where's your omniscience now, Jeez? So it isn't terribly surprising that a tradition grew up which claimed that Jesus actually commissioned Judas to turn Him over to the Sanhedrin. The canonical Gospels walk right up to the edge on this -- He knew that Judas would betray Him, but He also knew that it was necessary for the work of the Atonement that He be betrayed and all that. So the orthodox view is just a shade different from that of the G of J: Jesus knew what would happen, and picked Judas because of it, but didn't actually ask him to do it; it was an inherent flaw in Judas's character, or some such.
7.1.1 The idea that Jesus wanted Judas to betray him has been very much in the air in popular culture for some time -- it's touched on in both Jesus Christ Superstar and The Last Temptation of Christ.
Okay, that's enough for now. Go read something else.