The Gospel of Judas

MeditationMom

Hi, Yechidah

You seem very knowlegable. I haven't even read the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Gospels of Nag Hammadi, yet. (Next on my list.)

My question would be, "has the Catholic Church, for example, responded to this Gospel, or is this all so new a discovery that that hasn't happended, yet?". The implications of this Gospel are quite astonishing, turning Christianity on its head.

I wonder, if other Gosples are considered authentic and equal in value to the four Gospels of the Bible, is there ever going to be an official revision of the Bible in which these would be added? Is that even a possibility? In this Gospel Jesus is discribed as laughing - I don't recall that anywhere in the Bible - in all of Christian Art, never a laughing Jesus.


The key theological themes of this Judas Gospel are:
-The creator of this world is not the one true God
-this world is an evil place to be escaped
-Christ is not the son of the creator
-salvation comes not through the death and resurrection of Jesus, but through the revelation of secret knowlege that he provides -

in stark contrast to:
We believe in the one God, the Father, the almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible

That all being said, inspite of the faulty doctrines and teachings in any given tradition there seem to be plenty of enlightened mystics in all of them and maybe we need to listen to them more than we do.

I have heard of one mystic saying to his disciples, "when the master dies, don't walk, run, as fast as you can from the ashram, as immediately the fighting will start among the deciples, about who understood the master the best and churches will spring from all the different groups."

Yechidah

Ave Sister, glad to see you started this topic

The Gospel of Judas was discovered in around 1975 in Egypt, but due to the difficulties in legalities and the trouble in translating such an old document, a translation of it has only surfaced this year. The Nag Hammadi Library was discovered even earlier, in 1945, again in Egypt, and took some time to translate too. So, the Catholic Church has had quite some time to respond to these, and probably have done so already (I haven't looked into their responses yet), though they would have undoubtedly, while recognising it as a genuine document, considered it a heresy like all Gnostic scriptures.

You mentioned in another post that this gospel might be older than the canonical ones we have in the Bible, but that cannot be verified. The ones in the Bible, while being changed and mistranslated over the years, have their origin in the first century CE. The Gospel of Judas we have today is an older version of what scholars believe was an original Greek version dating from between 130-180 CE. The orthodox heresiologist Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, also mentioned it in his "Against Heresies" in 180 CE, so if this is indeed the same gospel he mentioned, it has to come from before then.

There are, however, many more Gnostic gospels out there, such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth. These texts often give a more stark and controversial view of things than Judas does, but it is the recent popularisation of Gnosticism (through The Matrix and Da Vinci Code phenomenon) that has led to the recent publication of the translation of the Gospel of Judas as a remarkable and historic event. Indeed, the Gospel of Thomas may actually have been composed before 50 CE, before the canonical gospels, though others argue it was around 100 CE, after they had been written.

The thing about the canonical gospels is that they were not canon until the 4th Century and later, after the Council of Nicaea, when Emperor Constantine called on the various bishops to "standardize" the Christian church. It was this historic event that effectively set up Catholicism as the ONLY Christianity, and eventually led to Gnostics being persecuted and wiped out for the most part (the Mandaeans in Iraq are an exception to this, though the recent war is threatening their community).

So, the scholars have proven certain things about these gospels, but that doesn't mean that the Catholic church is going to accept them as anything but heretical. That has been their stance from the beginning, and I doubt that will change. So, I can't see the material in the Bible being changed anytime soon (or at all, for that matter), least of all for Catholics. However, and I must stress this, the Bible is not the word of god and should not be considered canon or the only material we should draw reference or influence from. The Gnostic gospels do not need to be in the Bible for us to use them.

As for the "laughing Jesus", that tends to be a fairly common notion in Sethian Gnostic texts. The idea is that someone else was crucified in place of him (either his "earthly robes", which is not his true self, or Simon), and he stood watching and laughing, knowing he had fooled them. The basic meaning of this is that we crucify our "lower selves", which are not our true selves, and we can laugh at the fact that we have not truly been crucified, but set free.

I agree regarding what you say about mystics of all paths, faiths, and religions. I freely read material from other religions and enjoy the beauty and truth that can be found within, irregardless of whether I belong to that denomination or not.

LLLSHJ,
Yechidah.

MeditationMom

by Yechidah-As for the "laughing Jesus", that tends to be a fairly common notion in Sethian Gnostic texts. The idea is that someone else was crucified in place of him (either his "earthly robes", which is not his true self, or Simon), and he stood watching and laughing, knowing he had fooled them. The basic meaning of this is that we crucify our "lower selves", which are not our true selves, and we can laugh at the fact that we have not truly been crucified, but set free.

Thank You, Yechida. So many belief systems, so much to learn, and unlearn!
This Sethian Gnostic idea is very interesting to me. I have heard of many Indian and Arabic mystics being stoned to death, laughing. (are there any Christian mystics/mathyrs you know of who died laughing?) It is funny when deluded believers try to "destroy" the truth a mystic tries to convey, by trying to kill him.
I do not think Jesus could have been standing there laughing at Simon being cruzified, unless Simon was laughing as well, I guess. But certainly he could have been laughing on the cross.

Many, many years ago - maybe 30 - I was in a seminar in which we had to do an exercise. We were told to generate absolute fear and terror in ourselves. The teaching was that if we did not have that capability we would end up living our life in fear and act out of fear, rather than out of love. This seemed really important and I gave it my all.

Trying to generate this fear I imagined myself being chased to be killed, which turned out to be a stoning mob in my imagination. My fear level went way up - racing heartbeat, sweating, shaking you name it. As the first stones started "hitting" me and the situation was a situation of absolutely no escape, the fear turned into real terror with my body tensing into protecting itself from the stones. Then all of a sudden it turned into this realization that I was not my body and could not be killed. The whole scene became very funny. All my fear and terror turned into a most wonderful belly laugh, full of love and compassioin for the poor fools who were so caught up in their fears that they believed they had to stone me to death. It was total joy and freedom. Maybe just a serotonin overload, but it sure gave me an amazing insight into the reality of our bodies, our fear of death and how it motivates us, and what freedom from all that would be like.