Remember all the hype last year surrounding the National Geographic Society’s release of The Gospel of Judas? Remember how the NGS said that the Gospel of Judas actually proved that Judas didn’t betray Jesus but rather that Judas was merely honoring Jesus’ request to betray him and hand him over to be killed? Remember how conservative Biblical scholars panned The Gospel of Judas? Turns out the conservative scholars were right and the National Geographic Society now has some explaining to do to.
April D. DeConick, a professor of Biblical studies at Rice University and the author of “The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says,” writes in today’s New York Times:
So what does the Gospel of Judas really say? It says that Judas is a specific demon called the “Thirteenth.” In certain Gnostic traditions, this is the given name of the king of demons — an entity known as Ialdabaoth who lives in the 13th realm above the earth. Judas is his human alter ego, his undercover agent in the world. These Gnostics equated Ialdabaoth with the Hebrew Yahweh, whom they saw as a jealous and wrathful deity and an opponent of the supreme God whom Jesus came to earth to reveal.
Whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas was a harsh critic of mainstream Christianity and its rituals. Because Judas is a demon working for Ialdabaoth, the author believed, when Judas sacrifices Jesus he does so to the demons, not to the supreme God. This mocks mainstream Christians’ belief in the atoning value of Jesus’ death and in the effectiveness of the Eucharist.
How could these serious mistakes (by the National Geographic Society) have been made? Were they genuine errors or was something more deliberate going on? This is the question of the hour, and I do not have a satisfactory answer.
I suppose that it should come as no surprise to me that Christians seem to be so quick to go on the defensive against any new sources of knowledge that would threaten their rather close-minded opinions as to the nature of things. I suppose that if I could convince myself that I had obtained Absolute Truth, I would not want anyone messing around with it either. After all, Absolute Truth should be inerrant, unchangable and Absolute should it not? Let us disregard the fact that they, themselves, seem to periodically change their interpretation of said truths while somehow or other maintaining the absurd and contradictary notion that such interpretations can not be changed by the introduction of new information.
I really do have a great deal of respect for Christians for their Ethics if nothing else, but I also have a great deal of pity for them for their inability to extract their collective heads from their collective butts, and view the world from a larger perspective.
There is alot of false teaching going on today,i hate to admite it,but there’s alot of people being fooled ,becouse they do not read the bible,and believe it. ……god bless you