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The surfacing of the ‘Gospel of Judas’ may or may not rock Christianity:
Scholars say the release of the document will set off years of study and debate. The debate is not over whether the manuscript is genuine — on this the scholars agree. Instead, the controversy is over its relevance.” (New York Times )
Critics dismiss the new document as a Gnostic text written so long after the fact that it can have no claim to accuracy. This will only ring true for those who try to sort Biblical text into the manmade and the revelatory, excluding the former and attempting to base their faith on the promise of the latter. I have always found that a tragic flaw in true believers. A central fact about Christianity is the lack of contemporaneous documentation; everything known about Jesus is retrospective, and all historical texts have a viewpoint and an agenda. It also seems to me that this has some relationship to the core tension between the concepts of Jesus as a man and as God made flesh.
The notion of the ‘good Judas’ is not at all unfamiliar. I first encountered it for example in Kazantzakis’ stunning Last Temptation of Christ (the novel, not necessarily the film…), which may be why in my mind the notion of Jesus asking Judas to take on the role of the betrayer is indelibly wedded to the notion of Christ’s humanity. I think it is likely that this concept, indeed this document, is not so much being freshly discovered as it is emerging from centuries of suppression by the orthodoxy. And what agendas underlie its reemergence? The National Geographic Society is rumored to have paid $1 million for the publication rights…
[And, no, I have no idea how this ties in with Dan Brown’s ideas, which I have not read…]
