Judas and his so-called Gospel

I think it's pretty disgusting the way certain supposed scholars like to publish articles in order to mislead the masses (knowingly) about the Bible.

One misleading element that was plastered all over magazines of recent times was the hooplah over the so-called Gospel of Judas.

This gospel is no gospel at all but a manuscript written for gnostics by gnostics veiled with Christian themes at a time when Christianity first became a popular religion.The gnostics and their mystery religion had been around long before then but they incorporated Christian nomenclature in order to make their teachings popular.

In other words, even though this gospel is "genuine" in the sense that it is not some hoax perpetrated by moderns and it is actually carbon-dated to about 180 AD, it is not a genuine account of the time Jesus walked among us.

The other 4 (familiar, cannonized) gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John found in Bibles are meant to be taken as eye-witness accounts of the life and times of the man named Jesus. Whether these men were all mistaken in believing he, Jesus, was actually the Messiah or God is not in dispute here, just that they BELIEVED it and KNEW him.

When we're long gone and future generations sift through our remnants they will find "genuine" accounts of, say, the presidency of George W. Bush, some favoring what he did and some totally indicting him. Any books written about Bush at this time will be tested and found "genuine" but they won't necessarily be genuine ACCOUNTS of what trully happened. Or if that's not a good example because he has gotten such wide coverage, how about a lesser-known person? How about yourself? If you don't have a personal diary, people may turn to letters from old boyfriends or other accounts of your life which may prove to not be "genuine" at all, depending on who provided the information and why. Jesus had a lot of enemies and anyone could have written anything about him.

But even that's beside the point. The gnostics themselves, who read this "gospel" at the time, took it for what it was: myth. These guys had themselves a mystery religion based on Neo-Platonistic philosophy and dualistic theology. What mattered to them was the philosophy behind an "account" or story/myth, not that it was historically accurate. They had mythical accounts of Dyonisis and no one in their right mind believed this to be an actual person.

While Jesus was a historical person, he was used in their accounts to illustrate their philosophy. In the Gospel of Judas, he was the guru to Judas's attentive disciple and spoke to him of teachings not found anywhere else in Christianity.

What is fraudulent about the authors of books and articles is that they present the Gospel of Judas as another POSSIBLE account or just as valuable to Christianity as the traditional 4 gospels. That's totally bogus, people.

As I said the gnostics themselves didn't see it that way! And neither did any of the other "heretical" groups already around in early church history. They all, along with church fathers, saw only the 4 as the true eyewitness accounts with valid apostolic authority.

My point, as I said, is not to dispute the validity of the TEACHINGS of the gospels but just to point out that you shouldn't parade around some old "genuine" manuscript as an account of the times of Jeusus Christ that you KNOW wasn't even taken as such by its writers and adherents of its day.

The Gospel of Judas might be of value to historians of religion and maybe even to followers of mystery religions, New Age or gnostic philosophies but not to anyone who wants to know about Jesus the man and what he taught.

There are many other evidences to this but I won't get into them unless you ask because, frankly, you people don't read these posts and lose interest halfway anyway. **But I will say Judas hung himself right after the arrest of Jesus and didn't have time to write this conversation that supposedly took place at that time, no Christian would have circulated it because he was known as the traitor, and also his and all the other gnostic "gospels" were written in AD 150 or later and by this time the NT had been heavily quoted, meaning the 4 traditional gospels were actually written at the time they were supposed to have been written down by people who were actually "there".