A 1700-year-old papyrus manuscript suggests history has misjudged the greatest villian of Christianity: Judas was under orders when he betrayed Jesus.
The only known surviving copy of the lost gospel of Judas portrays the treacherous disciple as a loyal deputy acting at the behest of his leader.
In fact, Judas sold Jesus out as an act of obedience not treachery, thereby fulfilling his theological destiny. Key passages from this ancient Coptic manuscript were released by its publisher, the National Geographic Society, a week before Easter, the holiest time of the Christian calendar.
The society, which is rumored to have purchased publishing rights for more than $1 million, plans magazine articles, television specials and book deals amid concerns about the ethics of ancient acquisitions.
The society's panel of scholars has submitted the document to radiocarbon dating, ink analysis and spectral imaging and has declared it authentic.
The Judas gospel is a third or fourth century Coptic manuscript discovered in the desert near El Minya, Egypt, in the 1970s. It was sold to a dealer in illicit antiquities and languished in a safe deposit box in the U.S. before falling into the hands of a Swiss foundation.
The gospel of Judas is believed to be the work of Gnostic Christians, a school of thought erased by the Catholic Church. It is a companion text to The Nag Hammadi Library unearthed in 1945, which have formed the basis of some assertions in Dan Brown's controversial bestseller The Da Vinci Code.
The new account is likely to cause heated worldwide debate, challenging one of the most firmly rooted beliefs in Christian tradition.
Rodolphe Kasser, who led the translation project, said the lost gospel tells us about a Judas entirely different from the one taught in Sunday School.
“You will be cursed by the other generations - and you will come to rule over them,” Jesus tells his disciple in the 26-page papyrus text, which is in the Coptic language and is said to be a copy of an earlier Greek document that was referred to by a Christian church father, Irenaeus, more than a century before.
"They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas," wrote Irenaeus in 180 A.D. Irenaeus condemned all Gnostic writings as a matter of principle.
The translation begins: “The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot.”
Jesus tells Judas: “You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.
Prof Kasser, a clergyman formerly of University of Geneva in Switzerland, said the statement meant Jesus needed to be freed from his human body and wanted this to be done by a friend rather than an enemy.
“So he asks Judas, who is his friend, to sell him out, to betray him.”
“It’s treason to the general public, but between Jesus and Judas it’s not treachery.”
In another section, Jesus singles Judas out for special status, telling him: “Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. The star that leads the way is your star. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal”
For his role Judas would be despised by the other disciples: "You will be cursed by the other generations and you will come to rule them." The gospel ends: "They [the arresting party] approached Judas and said to him. 'What are you doing? You are Jesus' disciple'. Judas answered them as they wished. And he received some money and handed him over to them.”
But critics were quick to respond to the document.
“It really would be a miracle if Judas was the author of this document,
because he died at least 100 years before it was written,” Bible Society
chief executive James Catford said.
Australian biblical scholars said the document will be likely to provide a window on early Christianity because it is one of the oldest copies we have of any Christian writings.
"The text bears witness that to some people Judas was a misunderstood character," said Dr Malcolm Choat, a specialist in early Christianity at Macquarie University. "It fills in the picture but it doesn't make the picture."
The Bible seems to say that Judas hung himself after he betrayed Jesus to the Romans for a purse of 30 pieces of silver in the Garden of Gethsemane. .
As well as the gospel of Judas, the newly discovered 66-page document also contained a text titled James, a letter of Peter to Philip, and a fragment of a fourth text scholars are provisionally calling Book of Allogenes.
The most famous Gnostic "gospel""'-- there are many — is The Gospel of Thomas, discovered in Egypt in 1945.
The existence of the many Gnostic gospels shows that early Christianity was composed of a number of diverse groups, each one calling the other heretical.
Gnostics believed humans were spiritual beings trapped in physical bodies and that salvation was attained through a mystical, "secret" knowledge or experience, rather than through something Jesus did.
Though the original gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the Bible, are believed to have been written in the first century, but most copies we have are dated in the third century and later. These copies of the Gnostic gospels are dated to the early half in the second century, making them the oldest copies of Christian writings we have.
ANOTHER VIEW
More and more scholars are coming to the opinion that the story of Jesus as currently found in the New Testament is highly fictionalized.It is generally known that the oldest versions of the gospels give us only seven apostles, the number was changed to 12 before the fourth century by doubling up on several of the names.
A theory is emerging that the scholars of the Roman Empire had much to do with shaping the present story of Jesus.
From it’s inception, the philosophers of the Roman Empire knew that the only thing that could hold the Empire together for its goal of a thousand years was a single unified religion.
The Roman Empire was an amalgam of many older civilizations and city states, each with its own relgion and spiritual philosophy. To over come these differences the Roman philosophers and scholars began teaching that all these religions were simply variations on a single truth — Jupiter was the same as Zeus, Zeus was the same as Horus, Horus was the same as Mithra, etc.
At the same time they were laying the outline of a Roman religion to be imposed upon the entire empire to unify it.
Their contrived Roman mythology spoke of a divine being coming from heaven to save the world by unifying it into one spiritual truth. (Under the Roman Pontifix Maximus.) They used the writings of a great first century spiritual teacher Apollonius, editing them to fit their purposes.
The savior of this emerging system was known by whatever name best suited a particular religion. Horus, Zeus, Mithra, Christos, etc.
The various nations of the empire were represented as disciples of this savior. Their names were that of the great savior gods of each of these nations, Mithra, Iohnnes, Andros, Tammuz. etc.
Because the Jewish nation had refused to accept the rule of Rome, rebelling several times and almost bringing the empire to its knees with these wars—the name they used to represent Judea was Judas whom they called “the betrayer”- iscariot.
CONCLUSION
We find ourselves with three versions of Judas. One, the traditional, that Jesus erroneously chose a betrayer to be his disciple
Two, that Judas was a close friend of Jesus and he was trusted him to make sure the authorities arrested Jesus and crucified him so that he could die for the sins of the world.
And, three, that the whole story of Jesus is a work of political fiction, loosely based on historical events.
OTHER SOURCES:
JUDAS:
GNOSTIC