{"id":3315,"date":"2006-04-06T23:57:21","date_gmt":"2006-04-06T23:57:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/the-gospel-of-judas.html"},"modified":"2006-04-06T23:57:21","modified_gmt":"2006-04-06T23:57:21","slug":"the-gospel-of-judas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/the-gospel-of-judas.html","title":{"rendered":"The Gospel of Judas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yeah, yeah…Gospel of Judas, National Geographic special. Got it.<\/p>\n

But what’s the deal? Well, it’s basically another gnostic text, one of many, emerging from the Egyptian sands, making its way through the backalleys of the antiquities market, and seen, translated and intepreted, up to this point, only by people who are "on the team," so to speak. In other words, this rollout of the text, sponsored by National Geographic (which got the rights to it when the Swiss owners realized they could not sell the manuscript itself because it had been obtained illegally) , is not happening according to normal scholarly procedures, to say the least.<\/p>\n

In short, this work is not a big deal in relationship to events of the 1st century.<\/em> In fact, it is not a deal at all. It tells us about gnostic Christianity, but nothing more. <\/p>\n

Here’s a page with interesting links<\/a><\/p>\n

Good post from Michael Barber:<\/a><\/p>\n

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This gospel was rejected so vehemently, it quickly disappeared\u2014copies of it were not made. That explains why people got all excited a couple of decades ago when an ancient copy of the book resurfaced in Egypt. Actually, it resurfaced and then was stolen from its rightful owners. In fact, that\u2019s the dirty little secret<\/span><\/a> behind this whole story. Before any scholars could look at it, the ancient manuscript was sold unlawfully. As far as I know, National Geographic<\/em>\u2014who is publishing this book\u2014has made no protest to this charge. They apparently are fully aware that it was stolen from Egypt.<\/p>\n

In addition, the document has only been viewed by a handful of people. It seems that only scholars who agree with the motives of those publishing it have had a chance to look at it.<\/p>\n

Clearly, there are a lot of problems here.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Charlotte Allen<\/a><\/p>\n

And here is a really excellent blogpost – your one-stop-shopping post on the issue – from Stromata<\/a><\/p>\n

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Once upon a time, the National Geographic Society would have been content with that, but a sober account of a 2nd Century pseudepigraphion<\/em> wouldn\u2019t make much money (just as Professor Robinson\u2019s forthcoming study<\/span><\/strong><\/a> is unlikely to be a best seller). Hence, \u201cJudas\u201d has been tarted up and made to look like a harlot who, in the word\u2019s of the Mail<\/em> headline writer, \u201ccould threaten the very basis of Christian teaching\u201d.<\/p>\n

Well, no. We already knew that some early semi-Christians taught that Judas was the hero of the Gospel story, carrying out his betrayal at Christ\u2019s behest. Related sects went further, making the serpent in the Garden of Eden the servant of the True God, conceived as the enemy of the lesser deity who created the material world and was worshiped by the Jews. These concepts weren\u2019t credible in the 2nd Century, which is why they died out, and gain nothing merely because one of their proponents\u2019 compositions has survived to the present day.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

More via a Zenit interview<\/a><\/p>\n

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Yeah, yeah…Gospel of Judas, National Geographic special. Got it. But what’s the deal? 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}