Cleo
April 7th, 2006, 05:01 PM
I found this article in today's Star Ledger, and found it remarkably significant to the approaching Easter holiday:
GOSPEL OF JUDAS IS A REVELATION
Manuscript suggests apostle unfairly vilified
Friday, April 07, 2006
BY JEFF DIAMANT
Star-Ledger Staff
For nearly 2,000 years, Judas Iscariot has been reviled as the greedy betrayer of Jesus, his name becoming synonymous with "traitor."
But a manuscript from the early days of Christianity, painstakingly restored and presented to the public yesterday, says Judas was the closest of all apostles to Jesus and was actually doing his direct bidding when he turned Jesus in to the Romans.
The document was made available by the National Geographic Society in Washington, which participated in a five-year international effort to authenticate it, translate it, and piece together its deteriorated papyrus more than two decades after it was found in the desert in Egypt in 1978.
The Gospel of Judas, as it is called, is purportedly based on one-on-one conversations between Jesus and Judas. Its text says Judas "exceeded" the other disciples and was only following Jesus' private instructions when he led Roman guards to him for 30 pieces of silver, paving the way for Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection.
One of several so-called Gnostic gospels that church authorities did not include in the Christian canon in the religion's early centuries, the Gospel of Judas offers a different take on one of the Bible's most famous stories.
"Unlike the accounts in the canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, in which Judas is depicted as a reviled traitor, this newly discovered gospel depicts Judas as a favored disciple, close friend, and acting at Jesus' request when he hands Jesus over to the Roman authorities," said Bart Ehrman, religious studies chairman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"This gospel portrays the act as far from nefarious, but as in fact the greatest thing that Judas could do for Jesus," said Ehrman, who consulted with researchers from the National Geographic Society, the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Switzerland, and the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery in La Jolla, Calif., in studying the manuscript.
The document, sure to be controversial, was unveiled at a time when debate over Jesus and early Christianity is already prevalent in pop culture through best-selling books and movies. "The Da Vinci Code," a novel which has sold 40 million copies on the premise that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child whose descendants are alive today, opens May 19 as a movie starring Tom Hanks.
In recent decades Judas has made it to pop culture through Bob Dylan lyrics ("You'll have to decide/Whether Judas Iscariot/Had God on his side," from "With God on our Side") and controversial movies like "The Last Temptation of Christ," which presents Judas, perhaps in a dream, as persuading an uncertain Jesus of the importance of going through with the crucifixion. "Jesus Christ Superstar" also portrayed Judas sympathetically.
Starting today, the National Geographic Society is selling English translations of "The Gospel of Judas," as well as a book on its restoration, titled "The Lost Gospel: The Quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot." On TV, the National Geographic Channel will air "The Gospel of Judas" on Sunday.
The 26-page Gospel of Judas, written on 13 pages of papyrus, front and back, took a winding road to worldwide exposure. It was found in 1978 in the Egyptian desert, whose sands apparently helped keep it from deteriorating, researchers said yesterday.
It then circulated among antiquities dealers in Egypt, Europe and the United States, landing in a safe-deposit box in Long Island, N.Y., for 16 years before an antiquities dealer bought and transferred it to the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in February 2001.
At that point, it was in hundreds of brittle pieces. Researchers needed five years to delicately put the puzzle together and translate it from Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language. Researchers believe the document itself was a later version of one originally written in ancient Greek.
The researchers plan to give the manuscript to the Coptic Museum in Cairo, Egypt.
Terry Garcia, an executive vice president of the National Geographic Society, said biblical archaeologists believe the rediscovery of the gospel of Judas is one of the three most significant archaeological findings of the last century, along with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library in Egypt, which were rediscovered in 1947 and 1945, respectively.
The Nag Hammadi findings included dozens of early Christian writings that were not viewed as worthy of the canon by early influential Christians like St. Irenaeus of Lyons, who around the year 180 criticized the Gospel of Judas in his work, "Against Heresies."
It is because of the timing of Irenaeus's work that biblical scholars say the Gospel of Judas was first written before 180.
The researchers yesterday did not say the book should be part of the Bible, was representative of what really happened 2,000 years ago, or was even written by Judas himself. They said only that what they examined and translated was 1,700 years old and offered a divergent early Christian view on Judas.
Scholars say the Gospel of Judas is best understood as a Gnostic gospel. Gnosticism, a mystical thought system with followers around the time of Christ, emphasizes the duality of human beings, distinguishing between the body and the spirit -- the former being corrupt, the latter sacred.
Text of the Gospel of Judas depicts scenes from the last days of Jesus' life, with Jesus talking to Judas alone. It portrays Judas as the only disciple who knows Jesus' true identity as the son of God, and he is "singled out by Jesus for special status," said Gregor Wurst, a Coptic scholar at the University of Augsburg in Germany who examined the text.
In the scholars' English translation of the Gospel of Judas, Jesus tells Judas to "Step away from the others, and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it but you will grieve a great deal."
In another part, Jesus predicts Judas will play an important role in the history of salvation: "You will exceed all of them," Jesus says, referring to the other disciples, "because you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."
The phrase, "the man that clothes me," refers to the Gnostic belief in the physical being that surrounds the human spirit, Wurst said.
"Judas is said in this text to help Jesus' inner divine being to get rid of its bodily appearance," Wurst said. "By handing Jesus over to the authorities, Judas opens the way for salvation for Gnostic belief."
The Gospel of Judas is the latest of several Gnostic gospels, all re-examined in the 20th century after the major archeological findings, to transform many people's understandings of early Christianity, said Elaine Pagels, a Princeton University religion professor and author of "The Gnostic Gospels" and "Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of St. Thomas."
"For nearly 2,000 years, most people assumed that the only understanding sources of tradition about Jesus and his disciples are the four gospels contained in the New Testament," she said.
"The Gospel of Judas, which certainly contains the unexpected, joins the other spectacular discoveries that are exploding the myth of a monolithic Christianity and showing how diverse and how fascinating the early Christian movement really was," she said.
GOSPEL OF JUDAS IS A REVELATION
Manuscript suggests apostle unfairly vilified
Friday, April 07, 2006
BY JEFF DIAMANT
Star-Ledger Staff
For nearly 2,000 years, Judas Iscariot has been reviled as the greedy betrayer of Jesus, his name becoming synonymous with "traitor."
But a manuscript from the early days of Christianity, painstakingly restored and presented to the public yesterday, says Judas was the closest of all apostles to Jesus and was actually doing his direct bidding when he turned Jesus in to the Romans.
The document was made available by the National Geographic Society in Washington, which participated in a five-year international effort to authenticate it, translate it, and piece together its deteriorated papyrus more than two decades after it was found in the desert in Egypt in 1978.
The Gospel of Judas, as it is called, is purportedly based on one-on-one conversations between Jesus and Judas. Its text says Judas "exceeded" the other disciples and was only following Jesus' private instructions when he led Roman guards to him for 30 pieces of silver, paving the way for Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection.
One of several so-called Gnostic gospels that church authorities did not include in the Christian canon in the religion's early centuries, the Gospel of Judas offers a different take on one of the Bible's most famous stories.
"Unlike the accounts in the canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, in which Judas is depicted as a reviled traitor, this newly discovered gospel depicts Judas as a favored disciple, close friend, and acting at Jesus' request when he hands Jesus over to the Roman authorities," said Bart Ehrman, religious studies chairman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"This gospel portrays the act as far from nefarious, but as in fact the greatest thing that Judas could do for Jesus," said Ehrman, who consulted with researchers from the National Geographic Society, the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Switzerland, and the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery in La Jolla, Calif., in studying the manuscript.
The document, sure to be controversial, was unveiled at a time when debate over Jesus and early Christianity is already prevalent in pop culture through best-selling books and movies. "The Da Vinci Code," a novel which has sold 40 million copies on the premise that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child whose descendants are alive today, opens May 19 as a movie starring Tom Hanks.
In recent decades Judas has made it to pop culture through Bob Dylan lyrics ("You'll have to decide/Whether Judas Iscariot/Had God on his side," from "With God on our Side") and controversial movies like "The Last Temptation of Christ," which presents Judas, perhaps in a dream, as persuading an uncertain Jesus of the importance of going through with the crucifixion. "Jesus Christ Superstar" also portrayed Judas sympathetically.
Starting today, the National Geographic Society is selling English translations of "The Gospel of Judas," as well as a book on its restoration, titled "The Lost Gospel: The Quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot." On TV, the National Geographic Channel will air "The Gospel of Judas" on Sunday.
The 26-page Gospel of Judas, written on 13 pages of papyrus, front and back, took a winding road to worldwide exposure. It was found in 1978 in the Egyptian desert, whose sands apparently helped keep it from deteriorating, researchers said yesterday.
It then circulated among antiquities dealers in Egypt, Europe and the United States, landing in a safe-deposit box in Long Island, N.Y., for 16 years before an antiquities dealer bought and transferred it to the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in February 2001.
At that point, it was in hundreds of brittle pieces. Researchers needed five years to delicately put the puzzle together and translate it from Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language. Researchers believe the document itself was a later version of one originally written in ancient Greek.
The researchers plan to give the manuscript to the Coptic Museum in Cairo, Egypt.
Terry Garcia, an executive vice president of the National Geographic Society, said biblical archaeologists believe the rediscovery of the gospel of Judas is one of the three most significant archaeological findings of the last century, along with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library in Egypt, which were rediscovered in 1947 and 1945, respectively.
The Nag Hammadi findings included dozens of early Christian writings that were not viewed as worthy of the canon by early influential Christians like St. Irenaeus of Lyons, who around the year 180 criticized the Gospel of Judas in his work, "Against Heresies."
It is because of the timing of Irenaeus's work that biblical scholars say the Gospel of Judas was first written before 180.
The researchers yesterday did not say the book should be part of the Bible, was representative of what really happened 2,000 years ago, or was even written by Judas himself. They said only that what they examined and translated was 1,700 years old and offered a divergent early Christian view on Judas.
Scholars say the Gospel of Judas is best understood as a Gnostic gospel. Gnosticism, a mystical thought system with followers around the time of Christ, emphasizes the duality of human beings, distinguishing between the body and the spirit -- the former being corrupt, the latter sacred.
Text of the Gospel of Judas depicts scenes from the last days of Jesus' life, with Jesus talking to Judas alone. It portrays Judas as the only disciple who knows Jesus' true identity as the son of God, and he is "singled out by Jesus for special status," said Gregor Wurst, a Coptic scholar at the University of Augsburg in Germany who examined the text.
In the scholars' English translation of the Gospel of Judas, Jesus tells Judas to "Step away from the others, and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it but you will grieve a great deal."
In another part, Jesus predicts Judas will play an important role in the history of salvation: "You will exceed all of them," Jesus says, referring to the other disciples, "because you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."
The phrase, "the man that clothes me," refers to the Gnostic belief in the physical being that surrounds the human spirit, Wurst said.
"Judas is said in this text to help Jesus' inner divine being to get rid of its bodily appearance," Wurst said. "By handing Jesus over to the authorities, Judas opens the way for salvation for Gnostic belief."
The Gospel of Judas is the latest of several Gnostic gospels, all re-examined in the 20th century after the major archeological findings, to transform many people's understandings of early Christianity, said Elaine Pagels, a Princeton University religion professor and author of "The Gnostic Gospels" and "Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of St. Thomas."
"For nearly 2,000 years, most people assumed that the only understanding sources of tradition about Jesus and his disciples are the four gospels contained in the New Testament," she said.
"The Gospel of Judas, which certainly contains the unexpected, joins the other spectacular discoveries that are exploding the myth of a monolithic Christianity and showing how diverse and how fascinating the early Christian movement really was," she said.