Sunday, April 09, 2006

The Gospel of Judas, or Let's Try Very Hard Not To Be Silly, Shall We?

Current events once again gives me my idea for my next posting on Faux Logic. There is breathless news about a newly-discovered ancient text, purported to be the Gospel of Judas.

There is nothing new here. The idea of seeing the story of Jesus from Judas's POV has been around for a long time, as evidenced by this early document. You will note that it is not very early, BTW. But the idea seems to be particularly intriguing to our own age. The musical Jesus Christ, Superstar is a gospel of Judas. It is the story of Jesus told from Judas's POV. Nothing wrong with that artistically, if you know that going in. It's an interesting thought, and can potentially tell us a great deal about self-justification and rationalization.

There are other ideas that keep showing up every century, and people think they're new.
Hey, what if they found the body of Jesus, hidden in the Vatican?

Or, Jesus also had some secret teachings, handed down through his disciples.

Or, Jesus preached a gospel of love and forgiveness which his followers, especially Paul, twisted into something harsh and judgemental. (Read Matthew 5-7 for that).

Yeah, fine, all ideas are worth looking into. But you'd think that when people get this brilliant challenging idea that no one in the church has answered before, they would actually check into it, to see if anyone in the church has answered it before.

This particular heresy is the theological version of "Hey kids, I know how we can raise some money for Widow Brown's farm. Let's put on a show!"

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