The Gospel of Judas
The scoop? Nothing but media hype. Folks say, "oooh, it shakes Christianity to its core," but I've got news. Gnosticism isn't new. It does not shed any light on the origins of Christianity. And the only people saying that are sexy historians who make a living writing sexy books that tell you everything you always wanted to be true. Hm, which is actually how lots of people deal with religion anyway. Go figure. By definition, second and third century documents do not shed a whole lot of light on first century history. Time for some sweet linkage.
Get Religion offers "The Gospel of Ignorance" and "P is for PR Campaign."
Check out Amy Welborn's summary of the National Geographic program, and her note on the hype, "Points that Irk." You may continue to watch Welborn's blog and the American Papist for maximum linkage.
The Pontificator offers us "Another Hidden Gospel and the Hunger for an Esoteric Jesus" and links to articles by Philip Jenkins and Ben Witherington (HT: American Papist)
Satire
Catholic World News: "New Gospel Discovered!" (HT: GetReligion)
Gladly Suffering Fools: "An Excerpt" (HT: To the Quiet)
Meanwhile, the Pope is blessing ninjas. Or something.
2 comments:
I'd actually highly recommend Simon Mawer's fictional account of the discovery of the GoJ, appropriately titled The Gospel of Judas. It's probably the theology equivalent of Grey's Anatomy, but it's at least well written.
You gotta figure anything that's written in coptic can't be of any importance to protestants anyway--coptic sounds too much like "satanic" or worse, "liberal". damn egyptian mystics. i bet they were baby killers too.
Coptic? You ain't kidding. You know that most prots ignore the OT Deutero-Canonicals (a.k.a. the Apocrypha) because a council of Jewish rabbis rejected it in AD 170? And they rejected the documents because they weren't written in Hebrew, only Greek...
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