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Exegesis of the Gospel of Judas

Phex: Dorset Doom

03:29 / 09.04.06

I haven't been in the Temple for a while, but after reading the pdf below I thought I'd mine your vast knowledge.
The Gospel of Judas (.pdf)
That's the Gospel of Judas that you have no doubt heard about. It's a complicated text- I would say more closely aligned with the Gnostic viewpoint than the standard Christian view- and there are significant parts missing. What's left is... strange, even for a Gnostic text.
What do others think? What is being said in the text and what relevance does it have to Christianity at large?

05:07 / 09.04.06

All I know about this is that I first read of the concept of Jesus asking Judas to turn him over so that the Grand Plan could be fulfilled in the book of The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis, written in the 60s I believe, and of course later made into the film by Martin Scorcese in the 1980s. I thought it was a great idea when I read the book (which I read before I saw the movie), and it's fascinating to see this text now substantiate that concept. I wonder if Kazantzakis had heard about this concept in other circles or if he came up with it independently...?

E. Coli from the Milky Way

09:27 / 09.04.06

i heard gurdieffj said it too

11:19 / 09.04.06

Interesting and enticing. The bit about Jesus asking Judas to betray him is going to get all of the press but I wonder about the "[secrets] no person [has] ever seen". The recounting seems the be more about the numbers of angels, etc., than anything else. Someone with a good grasp of Gematria could have a lot of fun untangling with Jesus is really saying in these paragraphs.

I'm also intrigued by Judas' utterance, "You are from the immortal realm of Barbelo. And I am not worthy to utter the name of the one who has sent you." Barbelo is spoken of in other Gnostic writings. I wondered immediately about its possible connection with Barbelith which, if I recall correctly, was a word received by Grant Morrison in a numinous, half-waking state. Are we sitting on "the rock of Barbelo"?

E. Coli from the Milky Way

12:07 / 09.04.06

The more i think about it the most sense it appears to have. Let's suppose that jesuschrist is some kind of spiritual teacher from other world (and it takes more sense with all James Arthur speculations about the connection shrooms/christ)

So well, let's suppose jesuschrist mission is to take "heaven's world" to earth (probably throught technology). I think that's why he asks judas to betray him; judas exchanges his master for money. Money is the most methaphysical entitie today in the world. It's almost ethereal, but it moves millions of people. And it had lend us to develop the necessarie tecnologies to, maybe, contact other worlds.

Weirdo!

12:38 / 09.04.06

I found this on the net because I don't have a pdf viewer installed and my pc is running like crap already. It has quite a bit of history of the gospel below the text aswell :

http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/manuscripts/gospel_of_judas/

From within the organized religion of Christianity, maybe it will be just be grouped with the Gnostic texts and not much attention will be payed to it, but that's definitely an interesting read. It's a shame like many of the others that lines and lines of text are missing, but there's still some amazing stuff there. My fave has to be :

"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.”

Judas lifted up his eyes and saw the luminous cloud, and he entered it.

16:37 / 10.04.06

Here's a reprint of an interesting article on the gospel.

A brief excerpt:
In the seventh century, the Bible commentator Theophylact thought Judas had not expected things to turn bad once he arranged a hearing between Jesus and the Jewish authorities, and in anguish at the outcome killed himself to “get to Hades before Jesus and thus to implore and gain salvation”:

Some say that Judas, being covetous, supposed that he would make money by betraying Christ, and that Christ would not be killed but would escape from the Jews as many a time he had escaped. But when he saw him condemned, actually already condemned to death, he repented since the affair had turned out so differently from what he had expected. And so he hanged himself to get to Hades before Jesus and thus to implore and gain salvation. Know well, however, that he put his neck into the halter and hanged himself on a certain tree, but the tree bent down and he continued to live, since it was God’s will that he either be preserved for repentance or for public disgrace and shame.

The dude hosting the reprinting offers more commentary here. Excerpt:

The most interesting part in all of this is the delegation and institutionalization of the role of the Slayer in this myth. In earlier forms it is the Brother who is the Nemesis of the Hero; see how the sociopolitical milieu dictates that in this version, the Nemesis is part of an overarching mechanism of persecution: Judas, the Romans, Pilate – not one character, but an entire kosmos of characters. Judas is the earthly "brother" of Jesus just as Lucifer is the heavenly brother of Michael, but the Judaean backdrop of the story requires that Judas have an entourage including a cohort (100 soldiers), an angry mob, and the entire Sanhedrin.

19:40 / 11.04.06

[Reposting something I wrote on the Switchboard thread for this topic.]

This is to me is probably the most fascinating aspect of the Gospel of Judas - in one interpretation, it completely changes the meaning of the gospels and of Christianity so that the redemption of sins is not meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus - instead, his teachings become the central focus and his death/resurrection are the prototype for what happens to those who follow his teachings. In other words, it's not about sin and redemption but rather about how to get closer to God.

Another way to look at the Gospel of Judas that would affect one's view of Christ relates to the issue of his divinity and humanity. In the canonical gospels, when Jesus says at the last supper that "one of you will betray me," and when he prays in the garden before his arrest, it would seem that because he's God he has divine knowledge of what is about to happen. But if, as in the Gospel of Judas, he asked his disciple to arrange the arrest, than he knew what was about to happen as a man, with no divine or psychic vision.

I agree that this will have little or no effect on mainstream Christianity. But I think it may have great significance on people (like me) who are drawn to the teachings of Christ yet are unable to accept a lot of the tenets of mainstream/organized/orthodox Christianity. I listened to an NPR show on this new gospel today and a few people called in to say that as children raised Christian, they always felt a lot of confusion and saw contradiction in the figure of Judas - he was the catalyst for God's divine plan, so why was he portrayed as a betrayer? Also, (here my memory falters a bit) didn't Judas hang himself just after "betraying" Jesus? I never understood why, if he was so treacherous, he felt guilty enough to kill himself after Jesus was captured - it makes more sense that he did as his beloved leader asked, but felt grief and devastation enough to kill himself afterward.