The Gospel of Judas

[Kushana]

Dear Voronwë,

(If I did not love this I would not do it. )

Dear Jnyusa,

This is what would fascinate me the most about any ancient colonial period. Surely there was culture shock for all the Peoples occupied by Greece and then Rome.

Before the Romans were the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians, and Alexander's successors -- and of course we have some texts, formal and informal (and archaeology) -- but nothing with the depth and texture of the Talmud and Mishna. (We do have odd things like a second Temple in Egypt, which didn't cause half the furor one might guess it would have. )

Onto the reading list it goes, but it might be summer 2007 before I get to it. I try to immerse myself in one new topic every summer.

Which reminds me, I have a great deal of fun-reading I'd like to do, myself.

It's usually great fun, but for professional reasons I was chained to a certain field in math last summer and I'm afraid it will be so this summer, too.

Good luck! I think my work will last well into the summer, too.

To be honest, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what I found on Gnosticism via google

It doesn't help that Google was being particularly muddled and inexact on the topic.

... but I doubt that I could read scholarly texts on this subject because I lack the background.

<K. thinks> Have you read Pagels? (There are two good books of Gnostic texts: Bentley Layton's Gnostic Scriptures and Marvin Meyer's The Gnostic Bible, but for a good, readable introduction to Gnosticism, itself, I still can't think of anything better than Elaine Pagels' two books Adam, Eve, and the Serpent and Gnostic Gospels. There's N. C. Lieu's books -- but they only cover one branch of Gnosticism (Manichaeism), which is great if you want to know about Augustine's youth - or the great and splendid oddness that is Manichaeism - but they will tell you things that don't apply to other ilks of Gnosticism. Oh! Ye gods, read Hans Jonas' The Gnostic Religion, that's a good starting place. (After that Kurt Rudolph's Gnosis is a good supplement to any of the above. )

Short answer: read Jonas. His book is lovely and readable -- older but classic.

I intended this facitiously - because of their mutual emphasis on ‘logos.’ But it meant something different to Heraclitus than it meant to John.

OK.

I had forgotten how familiar you are with Scientology. Now I remember your posts about this on TORC.

It's just a hobby: one topic that fascinates me is why people enter (or leave) a religion, and there are a lot more contemporary sources than ancient ones. (I can think of two: Augustine's Confessions and Apuleius' Golden Ass. )

-Kushana

[TheEllipticalDisillusion]

Interesting stuff, Kushana. I might go out and look for Pagel's book about gnosticism because this discovery of the GoJudas has peaked my interest in learning about gnosticism (not that I'm converting or anything). I read through one of the translations of the GoJudas you posted on TORC. It's difficult to read because of all of the missing lines and words. The parts complete parts make sense (for the most part), but the incomplete parts are garble to me. Actually the one part that made very little sense to me was the talk between Jesus and Judas about illuminaries and the number of angels they receive, etc. Too many numbers.

[The Watcher]

TED -

For a nice start, read Pagel. And, many of the gnostic texts can be viewed (in their faulty translations) online as well.

Gnosticism is really NOT so scary. I have always been somewhat bemused as to why these discoveries have provided so much controversy over the last several decades myself. Maybe since I stand apart from all such judgements, it is rather like watching a sporting event in which you could care less about the eventual outcome, knowing that the adversaries will meet up time and time again anyway.

My own opinion is that since nothing dates directly from the events of at least Jesus' life even within a narrow window of several decades, any and all of what is considered NT fodder is questionable. Not suspect, merely questionable. Everyone who would have taken the time to record it or even provide an oral redaction or recitation had their reasons and motives for doing so. So, who knows what is accurate, original, correctly interpreted, or anything else? As far as the political and religious disputes that occurred over the next several centuries within Christainity alone, makes it even more questionable. I will not even go into the similarities and borrowed metaphors and images that come from completely foreign but not unknown non-Judaic sources.

More people have been persecuted and killed in the name of God (and here I specifically AM referring to the Judeo/Christian/Islamic God) than in any other travails that have plagued humankind. That alone proves the point to me. Anyone who is purporting to reveal the "truth" is no more valid in the long run given the time frames that have transpired, and the whole faith based frameworks that such revelations are based upon.

Even if Faith is given, the hand of man is all too suspect.

[Kushana]

(not that I'm converting or anything)

There's no need. One doesn't have to be a mushroom in order to be a mycologist.

I read through one of the translations of the GoJudas you posted on TORC.

Currently it's the only one -- unless someone's made *very fast use* of the Coptic posted on the National Geographic website.

It's difficult to read because of all of the missing lines and words.

Alas, those are there in the original. (The brackets and dots in English are used with such care that another scholar could translate the text back into Coptic and show _exactly_ which letters are missing. ) No one knows what to make of the choppy parts, or much of the rest of the Gospel, either, yet.

(It's fun to have something new. )

-Kushana

[Kushana]

(in their faulty translations)

<K. clears her throat softly>

What's your problem with the translations? (Which ones?)

Gnosticism is really NOT so scary.

It's no more or less strange than any other religion. (I happen to be charmed and delighted by that strangeness, if I didn't respond that way I wouldn't be a historian, I suppose. )

I will not even go into the similarities and borrowed metaphors and images that come from completely foreign but not unknown non-Judaic sources.

Zoroastrianism! (Which, actually, does come through Judaism ... it's only after contact with the religion that Judaism develops a devil, an afterlife, a last judgement, a general resurrection of the dead, the restoration of the world to perfection at the End, certain very distinctive ideas about the messiah(s) ... it may have also influenced their ideas about monotheism (Zoroastrianism has one God) and given them a certain element of intolerance towards non-Jews and Jews who believed and practice differently (which, oddly enough, Zoroastrianism doesn't and has almost never had, even while it served as the religion of an empire) -- these are all Zoroastrian ideas, and the contemporary Jewish forms are *very similar* to the Zoroastrian ones. The Zoroastrians came first, were the state religion of the Empire Jews had been exiled into, and no one else in the region has ideas like this. )

These same ideas passed from Judaism into Gnosticism, Christianity, and Islam -- but Zoroastrianism has never had religious wars, forced conversions, or denigrated the humanity of non-Zoroastrians. It is not their way to call other people 'of the devil' or to take on the work of God -- allowing conversion into the religion is evidently only a recent phenomenon. (These are all traits I thought were the natural consequences of monotheism added to belief in a devil. )

They are also extraordinarilly sweet, pleasant people: it took me back a peg, since many religions and denominations specifically aim to produce good, conscienscious people (and I have met many good and consciencous people of every belief and none) -- but I had thought no one could be so much so without being a saint.

To this day if I wish to be sharp with someone I remember the example of the Zoroastrians and try to find a kinder way. I'm used to religious people and how the influence of religion can change a person (in positive and negative ways) -- but the Zoroastrians are singular.

<K. goes off to re-think the necessary correllaries of monotheism>

-Kushana

[The Watcher]

Kushana -



Faulty only in the sense of translations being subject to a loss of meaning due to time, culture, and a non-correlation of specific wordings from one language to another.

For example, read Shakespeare, and then translate it accurately into modern English context. You know all too much about such things I suspect already. Now, let us suppose Shakespeare lived in 300 AD and wrote in Aramaic, Greek, or Coptic.

That is all I meant.

Zoroastrianism has fascinated me as well. I would love to hear the viewpoints of some of the Judaic followers here on how they feel such concepts entered into our notions of the biblical God, I personally feel that all religions have borrowed heavily to some degree or another from each other. Ever since trade routes began, ideas and texts and tales travelled just as freely as goods did. Other influences certainly are some of the Egyptian religious concepts, Mithraism and other mystery cults, and even certain ideas contained within Hindu and Buddhist teachings. Then, there is Greek philosophy, Roman law and organization, all of these things entered into the melting pot of what developed out of that area of the world over the centuries.

[Jnyusa]

Kushana:

Bentley Layton's Gnostic Scriptures and Marvin Meyer's The Gnostic Bible, but for a good, readable introduction to Gnosticism, itself, I still can't think of anything better than Elaine Pagels' two books Adam, Eve, and the Serpent and Gnostic Gospels ... read Hans Jonas' The Gnostic Religion, that's a good starting place. (After that Kurt Rudolph's Gnosis is a good supplement to any of the above. )

This is getting too exciting. I see I’m going to have to squeeze it in to the summer somehow. Thank you for those references, Kushana!

it's only after contact with the religion that Judaism develops a devil, an afterlife, a last judgement, a general resurrection of the dead, the restoration of the world to perfection at the End, certain very distinctive ideas about the messiah(s) ... it may have also influenced their ideas about monotheism

Ah - this is interesting. I’ve wondered where ideas about the devil came from ... And also how Judaism actually became monotheistic; it’s my understanding that the ancient Hebrews were not monotheistic until at least the time of Moses. (That’s not the orthodox view, of course.)


The Watcher:

I would love to hear the viewpoints of some of the Judaic followers here on how they feel such concepts entered into our notions of the biblical God.

I would love to offer a viewpoint on this but I know zero about Zoroastrianism.

Jn

[Kushana]

Faulty only in the sense of...

There are some not-the-best translations out there, and online resources tend to favor the older (copyright-free) ones... but in general I've been happy with the translations availiable online. Search-a-word has saved my sketchy memory, at times: the texts I work with are usually don't have computerized incarnations of any kind and sometimes don't even have paper indexes ... one just simply has to learn the text.

While this is laudable scholarship, it's not good if you're trying to find something *quickly* -- i.e. "Where does Jesus appear to his followers in the form of a small child?" (Acts of John 88 and Gospel of Judas 33. )

This is a good example of your point: the word in this passage of Judas isn't the usual one for "child" (I couldn't find it in Cerny's Dictionary, at all) and the translators have simply taken their best guess at it (their second best guess being "phantom". ) I expect a lively scholarly discussion over just what form Jesus takes ... being able to take several forms was expected of divine beings in Greco-Roman religion, so it could be anything.

Every religion has been influenced by others and continues to be so: all religions take pains to distinguish themselves from competitors (and argue against them), consult with their neighbors on common problems, borrow appealing ideas, and discourage the borrowing of appealing ideas they don't approve of. Every religion must find ways to talk to its contemporary adherents and yet remain itself (often preserving much older borrowings in the process. ) Every religion begins in an environment populated by other religions; if it said something completely new in a completely new way, no one would sign up for utter incomprehension. (Even Paul, while trumpeting the newness and difficulty of his preaching, uses ways to talk about it that were very familiar to his audience -- and his Christianity was not completely unprecidented, to begin with. )

I tend to see borrowing as the trait of a living, breathing religion -- although I undestand why religions would want to brand themselves as Classic (and unchanging) or Unline Any Other; the history of doctrine seldom makes for a snappy pamplet.

-Kushana

[Kushana]

This is getting too exciting.

I think so! Happy reading ... and please post what you think!

Ah - this is interesting. I’ve wondered where ideas about the devil came from

It's a very strange idea ... it gets even stranger when one examines the usual backdrop(s) for Judaism and finds nothing similar to it and only suppositions for why Judaism might have come up with the idea, on its own.

I think my favorite thing was discovering that Zoroastrianism has no Problem of Evil: for them God is utterly good, and wills and does only good -- God never authorizes, condones, or participates in evil (that's Evil's job ... and Evil never does good, even accidentally, the two are utterly separate. ) Much of the theology around this in younger religions results from how the borrowed ideas were used, and did not come from Zoroastrianism, itself. I'm enjoying having my ideas about monotheism tampered with.

... And also how Judaism actually became monotheistic; it’s my understanding that the ancient Hebrews were not monotheistic until at least the time of Moses. (That’s not the orthodox view, of course.)

Certainly. I consulted with a colleague in Hebrew Scritpures who said real enforcement of monotheism did not occur until the Exile. (Much later. )

I would love to offer a viewpoint on this but I know zero about Zoroastrianism.

Let's back up, then. What does the idea of something central and cherished being borrowed from an older, different religion (which may or may not be dead, now -- depending on which item we're talking about and whether it was really borrowed, or not) provoke reflection in anyone, of any religion?

A good friend once showed me his favorite poem from his tradition. I loved it as well and went to look up its author ... and found he was a member of a very different religion. Although his sentiments had appealed to my friend's tradition enough to be included in a book of devotional readings, still the poem was not X. My friend just went quiet: we've never spoken about it again. (I'd say being included in the book certainly made it X, but I understand his disappointment. )

-Kushana

[Jnyusa]

I would love to offer a viewpoint on this but I know zero about Zoroastrianism.

Let's back up, then. What does the idea of something central and cherished being borrowed from an older, different religion ... provoke reflection in anyone, of any religion?

Well, I don't adhere to the orthodox view of my own religion, and for me the idea of more ancient attachments is very exciting.

It is one of my great regrets that so many early writings were destroyed by subsequent conquests, along with the cultures and languages that supported them, so that reconstruction in our modern day is very difficult.

The idea that Judaism might be carrying seeds from somewhere else which would help us to understand some aspect of human history that is otherwise lost ... I am more than happy to open my satchel, so to speak, and look for those remnants.

And if those other Peoples are still existing, so much the better, for I am sure that they too have evolved and the differing ways we have adapted those early beliefs and the commonality that remains will tell us even more about our thought-ancestors.

Daniel Quinn supposes that the story of Eden was not a Jewish story originally, but rather the story of those people who lived in the land to which the early Hebrews migrated. I am not the least bit offended by this notion - on the contrary, it makes early Genesis all the more interesting to me because those would seem to be the only tales we have from the early Canaanites. The other texts that tell this story are derivative from the Hebrew bible and shed light on what came after, not what was there before.

Jn

[Jnyusa]

One other quick question for when you are in this neighborhood again:

I consulted with a colleague in Hebrew Scritpures who said real enforcement of monotheism did not occur until the Exile.

The Egyptian exile, the Babylonian exile, or the Diaspora?

Jn

[Kushana]

Babylonian.

-Kushana

[Jnyusa]

Wow, that's late. And also very interesting.

I'm thinking that I have to read Jeremiah more carefully.

Jn

[Impenitent]

That is not surprising; the beginning of the Talmudic era makes sense.

[Primula Baggins]

I am so glad you're back, Imp.

[Jnyusa]

Well, I need some help from Kushana on history. This has been keeping me awake for two nights, googling dates in between preparing lectures.

It was Imp's post above that got me started, because I always think of the Talmudic era as starting much later than ~500 BCE, but Imp is right that it was at the time of the return from Babylon that the canon of Tenakh and mishna-Torah were assembled. I guess the term "Talmud" came to be used quite a bit later, but the inputs to the Talmud began at that earlier time.

So I'm googling blithely along and reading the bits of biography that we have for Hillel and Shammai ... and all of sudden it hits me, really for the first time it actually dawned on me ... that if Jesus was born during the reign of King Herod, then he was a contemporary of Hillel.

When I thought about the New Testament in that context, I think that for the first time it really made no sense to me at all. The content of it simply made no sense to me in conjunction with the time when it was supposed to have been written. But I'm also aware that our confidence about dates is rather sketchy, so I want to ask Kushana to confirm the bits that I was able to find (or disconfirm them) and also comment, if she is willing to do so, on whether there exists any scholarly thought about what would seem to be missing from gospel accounts of 1st century Judea.

Hillel's life overlapped the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE, most of it having been lived in the earlier century. There is an apocryphal account of his being the High Priest until 20 CE but this does not seem likely. I believe the better historical estimate is that he was considered the greatest teacher in the land during the last decade of one century and the first decade of the next, and died around 10 CE.

Anyway, what struck me about this timing is that it is really impossible to imagine Jewish writers talking about the teachings of Jesus without mentioning Jesus' own teachers, or the rabbis whose thought he espoused. It is inconceivable, to me at least, that a Jew writing about another Jewish teacher who appeared 10-20 years after Hillel and espoused Pharisaic thought would fail to make any mention of Hillel. It's like ... writing a biography of Oppenheimer and failing to mention that he knew Einstein, or a biography of Guy Kay and failing to mention his work on the Silmarillion.

Granted that Jesus lived in the outback of Judea ... but the story tells that he was brought to the Temple as a child and disputed with the Rabbis to their amazement. I can't imagine any Jewish writer leaving out that tiny detail that it would have been Hillel or his immediate contemporaries whom Jesus impressed so! Is the story simply apocryphal and disregarded as such?

The first thought that hit me was that none of the writers of the gospels could be who they claimed to be. I know the stories weren't written down until they were transmitted to Greek-speakers, but I have a certain amount of confidence in oral history among oral cultures, and it is this confidence that was shaken. It occurs to me that the writers not only could not have lived in Judea themselves but they could not have heard this story from people who actually lived in Judea at that time (though Paul certainly seems to have been a practicing Pharisee). So I started to check other dates, and also to wonder whether I'd got the story right to begin with.

1. Jesus is supposed to have been born during the reign of Herod. Is that correct? If so, that means the latest he could have been born is 4 BCE because that's the year that Herod died.

2. He is supposed to have been crucified during the prefecture of Pontius Pilatus, which was 26-36 CE.

3. Shammai was appointed High Priest to the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem (by the Romans) in 20 CE and served until 30 CE. If the gospel accounts are accurate about the identity of the High Priest, then Jesus could not have been crucified earlier than 30-31 CE.

That would make his age somewhere between 34-35 at the very youngest and possibly in his forties when he died. In those days that was quite old.

And I'm also thinking that is is unlikely that he was born in the very last year of Herod's reign because ... well, this is an anecdotal, common sense sort of reason and that sort of reason is not always reliable, but ... Herod was so despised and his death so gruesome that if your child were born in the year that Herod died you would remember it that way. Herod's death would be tacked on to the description of your child's age as if it were an adjective. I have no trouble remembering Voronwë's birthday because of its proximity to the Kennedy assasination, and people do tend to remember and relate significant world events that occured in proximity to their birth. So, I am inclined to think that either this story was transmitted by people who were not familiar with the place and people they were talking about, or Jesus was born earlier than 4 BCE. But if the latter, then he was at least in his late 30s when he died.

The Council of Jerusalem took place between 50-62 CE, is that correct? Supposedly Peter and James were still alive then. That would also make them pretty old for those days.

The reign of Herod and the prefecture of Pilatus would seem to fix Jesus' life and death within a fairly narrow time frame, but this was a period of immense practical importance to Jewish thought, and the fact that there is no mention of this in the gospels strikes me now as ... impossible. Something is missing here. Or am I just looking at this through the wrong lens?

Jn

[Impenitent]

What was not convenient, was edited out. Is that a mischievous thing to say?

[Jnyusa]

Well, not mischievous because redactions probably were done when the oral history was being written down, but ... not particularly satisfactory because I can't think of a good reason why mention of either of the two best-known teachers of the time would be inconvenient.

The only thing I can think of, if the writers were practicing Jews or at all familiar with contemporary Jewish history, would be a motivation to exclude those two great men from an account that had become over time rather slanderous toward both their schools of thought.

One of the things I was reading over the past two days was an accounting of the various breaches of law of which Jesus is accused by the Pharisees in the gospel accounts, along with an explanation that none of these things are breaches of Jewish law even under strict construction and would certainly not have been cause for accusation from the more liberal Pharisees. So either the oral accounts were misunderstood as they passed from Jew to non-Jew, or else the incidents were simply fabricated somewhere along the way. Though I also don't understand where lies the profit in making the Pharisees look bad.

The other possibility which is not so pleasant is that the gospels got some serious editing after they were written down and that this was done by people with a definite agenda, but that's something that only Kushana (among us) could comment on, I think.
Jn

[Impenitent]

It was your 'last resort' possibility I was thinking of. The Pharisees - or rather, the dominant stream of Jewish thought - would have been quite a frustration to the founding church fathers. Fabrication, editing, excising...it makes sense to me, though it is an unpalatable and unacceptable explanation for others.

[Faramond]

Jn, I am sure you are looking for Kushana to answer these questions!

I had a class once on the life and teachings of Jesus, that included some objective historical analysis.

From a historical perspective, the bit about amazing his teachers at age 12 is considered apochryphal. I believe it only appears in one Gospel. The Gospels almost entirely deal with Jesus' ministry, after he was 30 ( according to Christian belief ). The only exceptions are his birth and this episode when he was twelve. By the way, historians also consider the reason given for why Joseph and Mary were in Bethlehem to be absurd, and they usually conclude that Jesus was really born in Nazareth. ( The motive to claim he was born in Bethlehem would be to conform with prophecies about the Messiah, I think. ) I'm not saying here what the facts are one way or the other, I'm just relating my understanding of what scholars say.

Scholars also believe that the Gospels we now have were all written at least 40 years after the events of the Gospels.

I had know idea who Hillel was, aside from the name used for Jewish campus organizations! I read just a little about him, and it is clear that many of his teachings are very similar to things Jesus said, including the emphasis both had for the Golden Rule. I suppose the cyncial view would be that the gospel writers wanted to be sure that Jesus was the source of these ideas, and so there would be no mention of Hillel!