Gnostic Judas

Wow, now this is interesting.

A manuscript found in the early 1970's, passed around for almost thirty years, finally given to scholars in 2000, is being made public. It's "The Gospel of Judas."

Now, the full article is here, but I'm gonna talk about a couple of points here.

First off, how cool is it to find a manuscript that was pissing off the nascent Christian orthodoxy way back in 180 AD? I mean, I studied a little about Irenaeus back in seminary, and reading about how he was denouncing this document when it was fairly new is really a trip. And now, 1800 years later, this manuscript is able to piss of fundamentalists all over again.

But I have to wonder if the more literalistic Christians will even blink an eye at this. It's clearly a Gnostic text and was *never* accepted by what became the Catholic church as doctrine. The Gospel of Thomas lies in the same category, although it doesn't offer up anything as juicy as Jesus telling Judas that he'll be his best friend ever if Judas sells him out so he can be freed of his problematic physical existence.

For folks who didn't have to spend hours and hours studying this stuff, let me shed a little light.

The Gnostics were an early branch of Christians who drew pretty heavily on the ancient Mystery religions. They were obsessed with "secret knowledge" that was made available only to the Elect. They had secrets that were specially revealed to them that nobody else got and nobody else understood. Think Scientologists, Masons and Mormons. Hell, think Christians, although Christians want to shove that secret knowledge down your throat for your own good. Gnostics were more about the secret part of secret knowledge. The ancient mystery religions appealed to the idea of brotherhoods around a special knowledge and relationship to the divine. You got in, and the longer you were in, the more you learned. It wasn't hear and believe, but believe and eventually we'll tell you what it is that you believe in. Again, see Scientology and Masons and Mormons.

A quick look at the Wiki page on Gnosticism shows that they don't much care for comparisons with Scientology, but if the shoe fits. (I'm saying that Scientologists or Masons, etc. are Gnostics... just that they operate in a similar way and are the best modern parallels).

So, this document doesn't do much in terms of threatening Christian doctrine, but it's still fascinating as hell.