Gospel of Judas

Posted on 04/06/2006 at 14:29:32  |  Reply  |  Report Abuse |  0

The new Gospel of Judas that was just translated is a monumental discovery, of course, but I'm hearing people claim this is a discovery up there with the Dead Sea Scrolls. The problem is the Dead Sea Scrolls aren't nearly as important to Christians as the massive amount more...

Posted on 04/27/2006 at 15:20:06  |  Reply  |  Report Abuse |  0

And second thing:

***The particular sect thought to be associated with the origin of The Gospel of Judas was known as the Cainites. The peculiar teachings of this sect included the rehabilitation of many characters presented negatively in the Bible -- starting with Cain. In essence, the Cainites attempted to take the negative figures of the Bible and present them in a heroic light. In order to do this, of course, they had to create alternative texts and an alternative rendering of the story of Jesus.

The Cainites were a Gnostic and Antinomian sect who were known to worship Cain as the first victim of the Demiurge Jehovahthe Old Testament God, who was identified by many groups of gnostics as evil. The sect following was relatively small. They were mentioned by Tertullian and Irenaeus as existing in the eastern Roman Empire during the 2nd century. One of their apocryphal texts was the Gospel of Judas.***

***Isaiah 5:20 “20 Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; Who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”***



You are certainly free to follow what you wish.....our ancestors Adam and Eve did so.

And again, that same voice "Did God REALLY say...?" is testing you.


If your heart is your source of truth for you, then what determines the veracity of your heart?

What guarantees its inherent reliability?
Is that not blind trust in something?

And how many examples do we need of when we listened to our heart and it led to disaster? For example, surely those that undertake matrimony do it with the intention that it is what their heart led them to do -- and yet, look at the divorce rate....

So you might say that it's right for that moment....Well, I for one, would like my Reality to have more permanence and consistency -- rather than acting like the whims of a politician during an election year.

We are not beasts, with our eyes permanently focused on the present...We have the ability to imagine and extrapolate for a reason -- to have expectations about the future. 'Right for the moment' is useless for anticipation -- 'Right for all occasions' is what you can incorporate into your being, that becomes the tool that builds and grows you into the person you should be.

Our life here is not all there is -- our life here is also a preparation for the afterlife.
Fine if we were righteous, moral creatures at all times, to be focused only on the present....But we are not, so we have the ability to look back, to learn from our mistakes and repent -- and to look forward, to have hope, when those times when we do fail in the present makes us doubt that we will improve.

If life is a process of building, block upon block, piece upon piece, experience upon experience, the whole being the sum of its parts, to become more complete, more functional -- so then, what a hideous mess incorporating rotten pieces into it would become, based on a 'rightness only for the moment'. But we see symptoms of that in lives all around us.

Posted on 04/27/2006 at 15:27:54  |  Reply  |  Report Abuse |  0

And I did read some of the gospel of Judas...but within the first couple of paragraphs there was a 'discussion' where Jesus tells Judas that he should know where the 'higher things' come from (I'm paraphrasing because I didn't bother to copy or bookmark this malarky), and Jesus calls it ***the immortal realm of Barbelo***.


That was enough for me.
A little research on Barbelo brought these up:


***This listing is of Angels, She-Demons and Dark Goddesses who were seen as evil in the eyes of Christianity, and in several cases, they may or may not have truly been “evil”.

Barbelo : According to the gnostics, was the procreator of the superior angels. Barbelo was so perfect in glory that it was rumored that she even outshone the Father in Heaven. Her crime that put her on the fallen angel list was a few sharp and unkind words to Yahweh when he boasted of being the Creator.***

***The Gnostic term Barbelo refers to the first emanation of God in the various Sethian gnostic cosmogonies. This figure is also variously referred to as 'Mother-Father' (a moniker that hints at her apparent androgyny), 'First Human Being', 'The Triple Androgynous Name', or 'Eternal Aeon'.
In the Apocryphon of John, a tractate in the Nag Hammadi Library containing the most extensive recounting of the Sethian creation myth, the Barbelo is described as "The first power, the glory, Barbelo, the perfect glory in the aions, the glory of the revelation." All subsequent acts of creation within the divine sphere (save, crucially, that of the lowest aeon Sophia) occurs through her co-action with God. The text describes her thus:
"This is the first thought, his image; she became the womb of everything, for it is she who is prior to them all, the Mother-Father, the first man (Anthropos), the holy Spirit, the thrice-male, the thrice-powerful, the thrice-named androgynous one, and the eternal aeon among the invisible ones, and the first to come forth."
The apparent aim of the emanation of Barbelo is to provide an intermediary genitive aspect of the divine. In gnostic accounts of God, the notions of impenetrability, stasis and ineffability are of central importance. To depict such a God as actively participating in creation would puncture such notions, and thus the Barbelo serves in Sethian gnosticism as a method of ascribing creation to the divine, but without corrupting or 'breaching' the divine stasis in the process; she is, in essence, the abstracted genitive aspect of the divine fullness. This significance is reflected both in her apparent androgyny (reinforced by several of her given epithets), and in the name Barbelo, which is an ad hoc Coptic construction signifying both 'Great Emission' (according to Bentley Layton's The Gnostic Scriptures) and 'Seed' according to F.C. Burkitt (In Church and Gnosis).
The gnostic account of the emanation of the Barbelo is structurally quite similar to Tantric systems. In Kashmir Shaivism, Shakti is similarly the second Tattva or first emanation of Shiva.***

Posted on 04/27/2006 at 15:40:03  |  Reply  |  Report Abuse |  0

nijjhar -- Here I thought I'd get a break from Gnostics, but of course, God always has His own Plan...

Tell me this, where does Evil come from?

Posted on 04/28/2006 at 10:10:50  |  Reply  |  Report Abuse |  0

One thing I would like to point out as I have heard from my College Pastor( I go to the college class even though I am in Highschool) is that you don't prove the wrong by focusing on the wrong, you prove it wrong by knowing the truth.

Thats why they give bank tellers real dollar bills so that when they touch a fake one they go, "oh hey thats not right" not vice versa.

The Gospel of Judas was deemed false (or whatever word you want to use that collaborates with that) by the early Church and is not "good" in the eyes of the Lord (who guided the early church to put the Bible together)...therefore I would be careful to encourage how "good" it is.