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573 of 604 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Once was lost, now is found..., April 6, 2006
This review is from: The Gospel of Judas (Hardcover)
This new book by the National Geographic Society is bound to be of interest. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the outline of the lost gospel being translated and highlighted here, it still presents an intriguing look into the early mind of Christians, who were a very diverse group.
There were originally more than four gospels, and literally hundreds of apostolic letters and manuscripts floating around the ancient world. These were of variable quality literarily and theologically, but it took hundreds of years for the Christian community to come to a consensus about what should be included and what should be excluded. Generally, Gnostic texts were excluded, and this lost gospel of Judas is most likely a Gnostic production, according to the authors. It was referenced by early church leaders such as Irenaeus, who argued strongly for the now-standard vision of four canonical gospels.
What is the issue with this gospel? The central idea that places this text as odds with the canonical gospels is that it paints Judas is a very different light - Judas is no longer the villain who betrays Jesus for his own personal gain, or because of his own spiritual confusion, but rather an obedient servant who, when turning Jesus in to the authorities, is simply following Jesus' own direction as a necessary step for God's plan to come to fulfillment. Judas is portrayed as the closest of the apostles to Jesus, a leader among the apostles, and thus perhaps the object of jealousy.
To be sure, these ideas are not new. Varying images of Judas and confusion about his role have been present throughout much of Christian history, with no single definitive vision of his personality nor his action superseding all others. (See the book on Judas by scholar Kim Paffenroth, published recently). The document highlighted in this text is a 31-page, fragile manuscript dated to approximately the year 300, as a copy of a story that may have originated 150 or more years earlier. The manuscript itself has a colourful history, having been bought, sold, and stolen multiple times. As this book is released, the manuscript is on display at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.
This book promises to be of interest to historians, theologians, biblical scholars, and others who find the early days of Christianity fascinating. Even those (like me) who are not willing to lend canonical authority to this rediscovered gospel will find that it brings up ideas and questions that are worth considering.
This volume goes along with a companion book, 'The Lost Gospel: The Quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot' by Herbert Krosney, also published by the National Geographic Society. That book details more of the story about the manuscript. This book features the manuscript itself, a new translation, and commentary by biblical scholars who can help to place it in context. Theological analyses and textual issues, as well as a discussion about the importance of the Gnostics for early Christian development are found here.
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278 of 302 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Recently released historical document offers another perspective on the events of the Resurrection, April 9, 2006
This review is from: The Gospel of Judas (Hardcover)
Since the DaVinci Code was released, the world has been flooded with books and novels offering "alternative" views on Jesus and the Christian church. The recent release of the text of the Gospel of Judas is quite different, since this is an actual historical document dating back before 300 A.D. and is not the imagination of some hack looking to make a quick buck.
From a strictly historical perspective, what we know is that this work is in Coptic script(probably translated into Coptic from Greek) and was laid down on papyrus in Egypt around 300 A.D. It was discovered in a cave in Egypt, similar to the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, and bounced around private collections until it was acquired by scientists, preserved, and translated. The work relates one unknown author's perspective on the role of Judas in the crucifixion. This document was first mentioned in historical records from around 180 A.D., suggesting that its line of thought existed among certain gnostic sects of the early church, most likely the Cainites.
The Gospel of Judas(to use the common terminology)suggests that Judas was not a betrayer of Jesus but that his role was chosen by Jesus to fulfill his destiny as the redeemer of man. The gospel postulates that Jesus chose his most prized disciple for this task, a task that would paint him in a negative light, because he was the most trusted of the twelve. To many the naming of these gnostic gospels as "gospel" is borderline heretical. In this case the word Gospel is used as the literal definition referring to a genre of work. The scientists who worked on and translated the document make no claim or argument that this gospel is canonical or should be included in the Bible.
The early Christian church was made of many factions, each with their own perspective on the events surrounding the life of Jesus. What the Gospels of Thomas and Judas and other gnostic gospels present to readers and scholars alike is another perspective on the evolution of the early Christian church and its development. It should not be read as canon, certainly those who follow the Bible as the true word would agree with that. Instead it should be read as an alternative theory if only to gain a better understanding of the vastness of thought of the early church and to see how historical distance from any event can offer various viewpoints as to the actual occurance. As a historian, it offers a unique insight into the spread of early christianity and how schools of thought evolved in the first three hundred years after the events of the life of Jesus. For that reason alone this makes for an interesting read.
A.G. Corwin
St.Louis, MO
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63 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Gnostic-Christian text rediscovered, January 20, 2007
This review is from: The Gospel of Judas (Hardcover)
The New Testament portrays Judas as the corrupt disciple who betrayed Christ, and this negative portrait of him, with additional hateful characteristics, has prevailed for centuries. Only in recent times has the figure of Judas been seen in the context of very ancient Hellenic cults in which gods have to be killed by a `sacred executioner' to be reborn, after which this sacred executioner is disowned by and driven out of the community.
These ideas were then incorporated into the teachings of the Gnostics, where the god becomes a Saviour figure who would descend from the Realm of Light into the Realm of Darkness to redeem mankind and then to return to the Realm of Light. Such and similar Gnostic ideas had an influence on certain groups of pre-Christian Judaism and then on early Christianity also.
So far these influences have been deduced by comparing parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls and parts of St John's Gospel with Gnostic works; but the rediscovery of the Gospel of Judas gives us a text that is so explicitly Gnostic that it actually wholly subverts the message of the Gospels in the New Testament. As a result it was of course declared heretical by Bishop Irenaeus in 180 and suppressed. Its text was lost until a manuscript of it in Coptic, dating to around 300 AD, was found in Egypt in around 1978; its fragments, making up 85% of the original, were painstakingly reassembled; and the work was finally published in 2006. The book under review gives us a translation of the reconstituted text, followed by four illuminating essays of explanation and commentary. That by Bart D. Ehrman gives a lucid account of the basic teachings shared by the various Gnostic schools; and a more difficult chapter by Martin Meyer links the teaching of the Judas Gospel with other Gnostic texts, notably the Secret Book of John, in which some of the ideas of the Judas Gospel are more fully developed.
The basic and most startling feature of the Judas Gospel is that Judas was the only disciple who really understood Jesus. Jesus chastizes in the most forthright terms the other disciples for worshipping a false God. This false God - the God of the Old Testament - is the Demiurge (this Gospel refers to his helpers Nebro, the `rebel' and Saklas, the `fool') who created this very imperfect world - an idea basic to Gnosticism. The true God is not a Creator God, but a (male) Spirit with a female emanation called Barbelo and a Self-Generated emanation who is Jesus. The Jesus emanation is pure Spirit but appears on earth in a human envelope, so that he only appears to be human (a doctrine known as docetism); but he needs to be free from this envelope, and he tells Judas that it is to be the latter's mission `to sacrifice the man that clothes me'. It is in obedience to this command that Judas hands over Jesus to his enemies.
Jesus has told Judas that humans are divided into those who also have a spark of the divine in them - and they, like Judas, will live on after death - and those, like the disciples and others who worship the false God, who lack the divine spark and will not live on after death.
All this is mixed up with a complex cosmology which owes something to Plato's linking of individual souls with individual stars.
Gnosticism is an interesting attempt to explain that the existence of imperfection in the created world by attributing this creation to an inferior deity. By proscribing Gnosticism (and, later, Manicheism), Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, was left with the problem of explaining how a Creator God could have created such a flawed world.
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