Ancient Text Shows a Different Judas

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

For 2,000 years Judas has been reviled for betraying Jesus. Now a newly translated ancient document seeks to tell his side of the story.

The "Gospel of Judas" tells a far different tale from the four gospels in the New Testament. It portrays Judas as a favored disciple who was given special knowledge by Jesus _ and who turned him in at Jesus' request.

"You will be cursed by the other generations _ and you will come to rule over them," Jesus tells Judas in the document made public Thursday.

The text, one of several ancient documents found in the Egyptian desert in 1970, was preserved and translated by a team of scholars. It was made public in an English translation by the National Geographic Society.

Click here for the rest.

As longtime Real Art readers know, I haven't called myself a Christian for over a decade because, you know, somewhere along the line I realized that I no longer believed that the Bible is the word of God. Nonetheless, Jesus, as a moral philosopher, and Christianity, as a social, political, and economic force, continue to be of great interest to me. So this Judas thing is quite fascinating. I'm not sure what the significance of this will be, whether mainstream Bible scholars will give it any validity, but I'm certain that fundamentalists, at least, will denounce it as heretical, just as the First Council of Nicaea did back in 325 AD. Fundamentalists love to denounce things as heretical.

You know, one thing this new gospel drives home to me is how extraordinarily political the process that assembled what we now know as the Bible was. If I understand correctly, there were numerous competing versions of the life of Jesus floating around, especially coming out of the Gnostic sect. The Nicene council which decided what to include in the New Testament was composed of various Christian leaders from througout the Roman world. These guys had a lot on the line as far as power and control was concerned and there's absolutely no way that such concerns did not invade their deliberations. That is, I'd bet a truck load of crucifixes that some of the gospels that didn't make the cut were thrown out for political reasons rather than theological problems.

Anyway, let's all raise a toast to Christianity's new hero, Judas the Betrayer!

UPDATE: You know, I don't really know that the Nicene Council assembled the Bible, and a brief Google search didn't tell me much about who actually did. But I think my general points, that certain gospels were declared heretical while others weren't, and that political power was on the line during the Bible creation process, are still sound. Anyway, I've left in the Wikipedia link because it's an interesting article.

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