[span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 255);"]Sounds like a setup and con game to me with Judas as the "shill"![/span][hr style="width: 100%; height: 2px;"] [h1]Judas seen as Jesus' collaborator, not his betrayer
Early Christian manuscript portrays him as favored disciple who was told he'd be 'cursed by the other generations'[/h1][font size="1"]John Noble Wilford, Laurie Goodstein, New York Times
Friday, April 7, 2006[/font]
An early Christian manuscript, including the only known text of the Gospel of Judas, has surfaced after 1,700 years, and it portrays Judas Iscariot not as a betrayer of Jesus but as his favored disciple and willing collaborator.
In this text, scholars reported Thursday, the account of events leading to the Crucifixion differs sharply from the four Gospels in the New Testament.
Here Jesus was said to entrust Judas with special knowledge and ask him to betray him to the Roman authorities. By doing so, he tells Judas, "you will exceed" the other disciples.
"You will be cursed by the other generations, and you will come to rule over them," Jesus confides to Judas in the document, which was made public at a news conference at the National Geographic Society in Washington.
Though some theologians have hypothesized the "good Judas" before, scholars who have translated and studied the text said this was the first time an ancient document lent support to a revised image of the man whose name in history has been synonymous with treachery.
Scholars say the release of the document will set off years of study and debate.
The debate is not over whether the manuscript is genuine -- on this the scholars agree. Instead, the controversy is over its relevance. Already, some scholars are saying that this Gospel sheds new light on the historical relationship between Jesus and Judas. They find strands of secret Jewish mysticism running through the beliefs expressed by some branches of early Christianity.
But others say the text is merely one more scripture produced by a marginalized Christian cult of Gnostics, who lived so many years after Jesus' day that they could not possibly produce anything accurate about his life.
For these reasons, the discoveries are expected to intrigue theologians and historians of religion and perhaps be deeply troubling to some church leaders and lay believers.
"We will be talking about this Gospel for generations to come," said Marvin Meyer, a professor of religion at Chapman University in Orange.
The discovery in the desert of Egypt of the leather-bound papyrus manuscript, its wanderings through Europe and Long Island, and now its translation were announced by scholars assembled by the National Geographic Society. The 26-page Judas text is believed to be a copy in the Coptic language, made around A.D. 300, of the original Gospel of Judas, written in Greek the century before.
Terry Garcia, an executive vice president of the society, said the manuscript, or codex, was considered by scholars to be the most significant ancient, nonbiblical text found in the past 60 years. Previous major discoveries include the Dead Sea Scrolls, which began coming to light in the late 1940s, and the Nag Hammadi monastery collection of Gnostic writings found in 1945 in Egypt.
The latter, including Gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalene, have inspired recent Gnostic scholarship and shaken up traditional biblical scholarship by revealing the diversity of beliefs among early followers of Jesus.
Gnostics believed in a secret knowledge of how people could escape the prisons of their material bodies and return to the spiritual realm from which they came.
"These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion and demonstrating how diverse and fascinating the early Christian movement really was," said Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton who specializes in studies of the Gnostics.
Scholars have long been on the lookout for the Gospel of Judas because of a reference to what probably was an early version in a treatise written by Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, in 180. The bishop was a hunter of heretics and was no friend of the Gnostics, whose writings proliferated in the second through fourth centuries.
"They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas," Irenaeus wrote.
Unlike the four standard Gospels, the Judas document portrays Judas Iscariot as alone among the 12 disciples to understand Jesus' teachings.
Karen King, a professor of the history of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, who is not involved in the Judas project, said this Gospel might well reflect the kinds of debates that arose in the early centuries.
"You can see how early Christians could say, if Jesus' death was all part of God's plan, then Judas' betrayal was part of God's plan," said King, an expert on Gnosticism.
The standard Gospels either give no motivation for Judas' betrayal of Jesus or attribute it to the pieces of silver or the influence of Satan.
At least one scholar said the new manuscript did not contain anything likely to change or undermine traditional understanding of the Bible. James Robinson, a retired professor of Coptic studies at Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles County, was the general editor of the English edition of the Nag Hammadi collection.
"Correctly understood, there's nothing undermining about the Gospel of Judas," Robinson said.
He noted that the Gospels of John and Mark both contain passages that suggest that Jesus not only picked Judas to betray him but actually encouraged Judas to hand him over to those he knew would crucify him.
In a key passage in the newfound Gospel, Jesus had talks with Judas "three days before he celebrated Passover." That is when Jesus is supposed to have referred to the other disciples and said to Judas: "But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."
By that, scholars said, Jesus seems to have meant that in helping him get rid of his physical flesh, Judas will act to liberate the true spiritual self or divine being within Jesus.
Rodolphe Kasser, a Swiss scholar of Coptic studies, directed the team that reconstructed and translated the script, which was written on 13 sheets of papyrus, both front and back. The manuscript was a mess of more than 1,000 brittle fragments.
The effort, organized by the National Geographic Society, was supported by the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art, in Basel, Switzerland, and the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery, an American foundation for the application of technology in historical and scientific projects.
The entire 66-page codex also contains a text titled James, a letter by Peter and pages provisionally called Book of Allogenes, or Book of Strangers.
Discovered in the 1970s in a cavern near El Minya, Egypt, the document circulated for years among antiquities dealers in Egypt, then Europe and finally in the United States. Robinson of Claremont said that an Egyptian antiquities dealer offered to sell him the codex in 1983 for $3 million, but he was unable to raise the money.
The manuscript moldered in a safe-deposit box at a bank in Hicksville, N.Y., for 16 years before being bought in 2000 by a Zurich dealer, Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos. The manuscript was then given the name Codex Tchacos.
When attempts to resell the codex failed, Nussberger-Tchacos turned it over to the Maecenas Foundation for conservation and translation. Ted Waitt, founder and former chief executive of Gateway, said that the Waitt Institute gave the geographic society a grant of more than $1 million for the restoration.
Officials of the project announced that the codex will ultimately be returned to Egypt and housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. For now, the Gospel of Judas will be the center of attention in a television show, magazine article, two books and a public exhibition by the National Geographic.
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