Very interesting book about the Gnostic gospel of Judas. I was a bit disappointed that Ehrman wrote about the text, but didn’t reproduce any of it. But I learned a lot about the myriad ways Judas is viewed by many gospel authors, and about Gnostic Christianity.

The gospel of Judas is a gospel written about, not by, Judas, and portrays him as the only disciple that really “gets it”–in order to regain his heavenly home, Jesus must shed his mortal skin. He tells Judas that he will be the greatest of all disciples because he will help Jesus discard “the man that clothes him”. By “betraying” Jesus, then, Judas is just doing what he’s supposed to.

I don’t really get why Judas has gotten so much heat. If God planned to send his son to die, why beat Judas up for doing what was in the plan? (Not to mention, why make him an archetype for eeeeevil Jews?) Scapegoats are fun, I guess. It seems to be a common theme among so many Christians that they don’t trust their God to know his own business and make his own judgments.

Anyhoo, interesting stuff here for students of religions and especially Christianity of course. As for me, I always love a good retelling of an old story.

Eris Reads, my book blog

The Gospel of Judas caused quite a stir a few years ago, when it got thoroughly translated (as best as the mishandled fragmentary pieces could be, anyway) and National Geographic made a documentary about it all. It's definitely the most important document for Christianity found in decades.

Nobody is claiming that Judas Iscariot *actually* wrote this gospel; it was probably created in the second century. But it reveals the prominent strains of Gnostic thought in early Christianity, before our orthodox views became quite so dominant. The Gospel of Judas reveals that Judas alone was privileged enough to be "in" on Jesus' plan to die. None of the other disciples were strong or understanding enough to be a part of it, so Judas plays a crucial role in salvation.

It's interesting to see how some early Christians were thinking about Judas, undoubtedly Christianity's most reviled figure (well, second to Satan). Even within the canonical gospels, going chronologically, Judas goes from being scared to greedy to possessed to Satan himself - and that's just within the space of 60 years, it gets worse through medieval times. So the Gospel of Judas shows that not everybody was vilifying him quite so thoroughly, and maybe Judas was given more of a chance by early Christians than we give him today. ( )

Bart Ehrman is such a fascinating writer. His knowledge of early Christianity, and what we have found out about it with discoveries of previously lost texts, makes for interesting reading. In this book he talks about the Gospel of Judas Iscariot, which has been recently translated from its original Coptic. The text itself seems to have been written in the second century.

It is not, of course, a document giving the facts of Judas' life, and certainly not written by him. It is a text that shares the secrets of Gnosticism, that the material world is evil, created by an inferior god, and that Jesus came to bring the secret of how some souls can escape the evil material plane and enter the purer realms. Judas, according to this text, was not Jesus' betrayer, but the only one of the disciples to understand Jesus and do what was necessary for Jesus to escape the material world.

The importance of the work lies in a fuller understanding it gives of the history of the early Church, which had an astonishing variety of beliefs and sects. Ehrman talked more about this variety in his book Lost Christianities.

One of Ehrman's more interesting points in the book is on the nature of oral cultures, which, given a literacy rate of about 10 percent, the ancient world was. "In oral culture there is not a concern for what we in written culture might call verbatim accuracy. In oral societies it is recognized that the telling of a story to a different audience or in a different context or for a different reason calls for a different version of the story. Stories are molded to the time and circumstance in which they are told....This is the case with the Gospels of the New Testament. Even when one of the authors used another of the authors as the source for his stories - for example, when Matthew copied some of his stories from Mark - he changed the stories. Why would he do that? Because he lived in an oral society where hardly anyone thought there was a problem with changing the stories. Of course the stories were to be changed when the audience, the occasion, or the situation had changed. The widespread notion that stories never should be changed but should be repeated without alteration every time is an innovation of modern written cultures. Before the creation of the printing press this was not a widely shared view." (p. 36). This seems important to me because I've felt for a while that the writers of much of the Bible never meant for the text to be taken literally, and Ehrman confirms that this was just not a major concern of oral cultures.

Ehrman is an excellent writer in that he is a scholar able to write to a lay person's level of understanding. I've enjoyed all the books of his that I've read. ( )