Scholars reveal how they scrambled to authenticate Gospel of Judas

A long-lost gospel that casts Judas as a co-conspirator of Jesus, rather than a betrayer, was ruled most likely authentic in 2006. Now, scientists reveal they couldn't have made the call without a series of far more mundane documents, including Ancient Egyptian marriage licenses and property contracts.

The Gospel of Judas is a fragmented Coptic text, traced back to Egypt, which portrays Judas in a far more sympathetic light than did the gospels that made it into the Bible. In this version of the story, Judas turns Jesus over to the authorities for execution upon Jesus' request, as part of a plan to release his spirit from his body. In the accepted biblical version of the tale, Judas betrays Jesus for 30 pieces of silver.

As part of a 2006 National Geographic Society investigation of the document, microscopist Joseph Barabe of McCrone Associates in Illinois and a team of researchers analyzed the ink on the tattered gospel to find out if it was real or forged. Some of the chemicals in the ink raised red flags — until Barabe and his colleagues found, at the Louvre Museum, a study of Egyptian documents from the third century A.D., the same time period of the Gospel of Judas.

Actually, the age of the document tends to disprove the information in it. While the Canonical Gospels circulated during the lifetime of many who would have had personal knowledge of the events described, at least 8 or so generations had passed after the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ before the gospel of judas was authored.

Were someone, today to pretend to author the autobiography of their great, great, great, great, great grandfather would these same experts not be just a little bit skeptical?

Judas turns Jesus over to the authorities for execution upon Jesus' request, as part of a plan to release his spirit from his body.

Gnosticism. Their belief that the soul of each of us is pure but trapped in a body which is inherently corrupt and hateful, sinful by it's very nature. Of course God would not create a corrupt world so Gnostics felt there was some other godlike entity that really created earth. In other words, they felt there were essentially two gods, not one. Furthermore Gnostics generally denied the humanity of Christ because divinity would not allow itself to coexist within a corrupt body (i.e. to live within the world created by that "other" god). So he was purely spiritual and his body was just an illusion; consequently, they say, Jesus never really died for us because he was never really alive in human form. This was heresy of the highest sort in the eyes of the early Catholic Church. Dual gods and Jesus was never resurrected? There's no way to fit that into the orthodox christian theology and they aggressively stamped out Gnostic heresies which found homes even up to the middle ages with the Cathars in France.

Now if you have an axe to grind against the Catholic Church it's fashionable to point to that "persecution" as unjust, and as evidence that the church was trying to usurp the "true" faith. They never say "the truth is that there are two gods, one good and one evil and the evil one made earth and all of our bodies so the good one came to earth in spiritual form pretending to be human and just pretended to die" because most people would say "wait, what? dude, that's not christian". And that's not good for book sales.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.