| The Gospel of Judas (Part 2) | | Date Created: May 05, 2006, 11:34 AM |
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Dan Brown has made a lot of people wonder whether the actual story got covered up -- a version of events that we can recover from the Gnostic gospels 'supressed' by the high muckety-mucks in the Organized Church. And in the 'true story', Jesus valued the feminine, was married and had kids and so on. (Few notice the false dichotomy: the canonical Jesus obviously valued women and treated them as people. And even the institutional church, far from 'demonizing' Mary Magdalene, recognized her as a saint.)
Boy oh boy, it's exciting as more and more of these documents come to light, right? Yeah, right. Pick two -- any two -- gnostic books and see if their 'back-stories' match. Guess what? They don't. In the gnostic Apocalypse of Peter from the Gnostic collection, Jesus is a non-physical being who couldn't be crucified; he magically gives Simon of Cyrene his own face, so that Simon, not Jesus is crucified. Jesus watches, laughing coldly, from a distance, at the silly human beings. In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus is a spiritual soul trapped in a physical body who is happy with Judas conspiring to kill his physical body in order to free his soul. (No wife, no kids, no moving the family to Milton Keynes is mentioned in either case.)
Quite a few of the gnostic Gospels picture a Jesus who thinks all the disciples are schnooks except the one or two in which he confides. How come it's never the same disciple? Turn to the next and the author of the last one is one of the misled. In the Gospel of Philip, it's Mary, and Jesus kissed her on the mouth. Brown, with no expertise in cross-cultural studies, assumes that this means same thing in that culture as it does in the contemporary West, and further that it led to procreation (as it inevitably does in most movies). But in the gnostic Book of Thomas the Contender, Jesus says "Woe to you who love intercourse with anything feminine and the defilement that goes with it." Or how about the way that the Gospel of Mary affirms the feminine? The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas does the reverse and says that since she's female, Mary can only be saved by being turned into a male.
Now, come on. Does this sound to you like a group who has the true story and is being supressed? Or does it sound rather like a group who cannot stomach what really happened and is rummaging around to reinvent a new version which removes or alters things they found objectionable, like Jesus' salvific death? You can guess what I think, but then again, my opinion is dispensable since my specialist subject is historiography and I'm only an amateur at writing novels.
Tomorrow, the quest for the historical Judas.
<Part 1: radical?> <Part 2: coherent?> <Part 3: historical?> |
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