Was Jesus Christ The Divine Son Of God? II
April 30, 2006
By: Sellers S. Crain, Jr.
The news media has recently inundated us with the stories about the newly rediscovered Gospel of Judas. It is supposed to be an account of the Gospel of Christ from Judas' own recollections. It presents a very different picture of the crucifixion and of Judas himself. If this account is to be believed it would involve Jesus and Judas in a plot of deception wherein Judas only betrayed Jesus at His insistence. Instead of the culprit Judas is revealed to be in the four certified gospels, he comes across as a dutifully serving hero. This "gospel" exists, so what are we to make of it?
The National Geographic Channel recently presented a special on The Gospel of Judas. If one expected for that presentation to be "fair and balanced" such a misconception was quickly removed as the liberal bias of this network was vividly displayed. Most of the so-called scholars, who in my opinion have sold their soul to the devil for a title, could not contain their enthusiastic support for the scholastic value of this document. Few dissenters to that position were allowed much time to express their opposing view.
The ancient manuscript itself made a long and arduous journey before becoming a public commodity. It was first discovered by a farmer near a small village in Corara in Egypt. It was in the same general area where Nag Hamadi Library was discovered. Not knowing what he had, but realizing it was an old book, the farmer sold it to an Egyptian antiquities dealer who dealt in black market historical artifacts. It was later stolen by an antiquities dealer who at first pretended to be interested in purchasing it along with some other ancient documents. It was later discovered by the original purchaser who then offered it to some American experts in the field of ancient texts, but they could only come up with $100,000 when the Egyptian dealer who has no idea of it's worth wanted millions. When the American scholars could not come up with that amount of money, the antiquities dealer then stored the ancient codex in a safe deposit box in Hicksville, New York where it lay unprotected from exposure for 16 years gradually disentegrating. It was rediscovered by an antiquities dealer named Chacos and was purchased in 1999. It has to be restored before it could be translated into Coptic, which is an ancient Egyptian language.
Once in the hands of American scholars, a small portion of the text was submitted to carbon dating which set the date of this document at around A.D. 250 give or take 50 years. One "scholar", in her attempt to add credibility to his work, said that while this is the accepted scientific date, the date of the original document is unknown to us. It is a fact that this "gospel" was known by Irenaeus, one of the "early church fathers", as early as A.D. 180. Some of the "scholars" made a point to say that none of the gospels were written before A.D. 60 or after A.D. 100. However, that is not necessarily so. The traditional date for the writing of Matthew is A.D. 37, and there is no good reason to reject this date.
Most of the scholars in the special wanted us to know that there were not four gospels, but there were many of them, perhaps as many as 30. This revelation was not new. Many of there purported gospels belong to either that category of Apocryphal books (of unknown origin), or those called Pseudepigraphal (of unknown authorship). Many such documents appeared between the years of A.D. 210 to 200. Many of these, which have come to be called the Gnostic Gospels, were written by Gnostics. The Gnostics (gnosis; Greek meaning "to know"), many of whom claimed to be Christian, and believed they possessed a special knowledge that others did not possess. They thought they had inner enlightenment not given to the uninitiated. These false gospels written by them were attributed to actual Bible personalities to give them greater acceptance and credibility. The Gospel of Judas is just another of their productions. One scholar said it is valuable in understanding the Gnostic culture but contains no authentic information concerning Jesus Christ or Judas.
Brotherly,
Sellers
