The Gospel of Judas

The Gospel of Judas hit a few sore spots among the religious. This Gospel does indeed say what the media has been spewing- Jesus asked Judas to betray him. At knowledge of the headlines, many Muslims and a few Christians exclaimed that the Gospel must be true.

The book "The Gospel of Judas", published by the National Geographic Society, contains the translation of the Gospel of Judas along with scholarly commentaries given by the editors.

The headlines is a complete explanation for so many questions. How could Jesus have picked the wrong person for a disciple? Why would the Devil have entered Judas in order to send Jesus to his execution? After all, the Devil tried to keep Jesus from fulfilling his mission through temptation. However, the Gospel of Judas brought more questions to the forefront of Christianity than it did of eradicating them.

The Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic text. Gnosticism comes from the Greek word gnosis. This word literally means knowledge. The Gnostic religion more than varies from main stream Christianity, and in some cases Gnostics were not Christian at all. There is some evidence that alludes to Gnosticism having roots in Judaism long before Jesus entered the world. Gnostics, rather than Christianity, supposedly know the secrets that can bring salvation.

The Gospel of Judas contains a recounting of the Gnostic creation myth. Whereas a Christian believes that God created this world and has only love for the human race, a Gnostic believes that the God of this world is a evil creator of the physical universe that has trapped sparks of divinity within human bodies in an evil world. With knowledge of its origin, these sparks can escape this mortal body through death and return to its divine source.

In Gnosticism, there is a variety of ideas about what Jesus was. In some versions, Jesus is a phantom body or Jesus was a mortal man that housed his divinity. In others, Jesus was a dual being- the human man and the divine spirit. In this instance, the divine spirit is not trapped inside the human body, merely a passenger that can come and go at will.