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Was watching some history video about deleted religious texts the other day and it mentioned that some ancient scrolls that may have been part of the dead sea scrolls suggests that Judas was instructed by Jesus to betray him. Which makes sense in the context of the story and its religious implications because Jesus could not be the savior of humanity if he wasn’t crucified.
If you’re talking about the Gospel of Judas, that isn’t from the Dead Sea scrolls, but was its own distinct finding.
The Dead Sea scrolls are a collection of texts of a cult based around a messianic figure, rooted in Judaism, but dated between the 3rd and 1st century BCE, discovered in the 1940s.
They do not mention Judas, but are interesting in that the actual messianic figure himself seems to have written some of the texts, that he uses some of the same verses and stories from the Torah to identify himself as the Messiah that would later be used by (attributed to being used by) Jesus, that some of the texts were written by others of the same cult after his death, and show how they theologically cope with their Messiah seemingly failing his own prophecies and claims.
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The Gospel of Judas, on the other hand, is dated to the 2nd century CE and was …well, the story goes it was found in Egypt some point prior to the 1970s, then got traded around by black market antiquities dealers, spent about a decade in a safe deposit box, nearly totally disintegrated, and was eventually shown to a proper academic expert in greek and coptic, leading to it being painstakingly reassembled, radio carbon dated, linguistically verified as not being a much later forgery, and translated, first publicly widely available in English in 2006.
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The actual story in the Gospel of Judas is stunningly bizarre:
You start off with Jesus literally mocking and laughing at all his disciples other than Judas for seemingly not understanding anything he’s ever said.
Later, privately, Judas confronts Jesus saying that he does understand Jesus… that Jesus is from the immortal realm of Barbelo.
Jesus then goes on to describe that yes, he was making fun of the other disciples because they think he is the Messiah of Yahweh / The God of Judaism, when in actuality Jesus is a human incarnation or avatar of a completely different divine entity, that Yahweh is actually Saklas / Yaldebaoth, a mad, malformed demiurge descended from a long line of other, superior, more wise and beneficent divine entities in an elaborate and historied pantheon (which Jesus admits his own knowledge of is not total and complete), that Saklas / Yaldebaoth falsely believes himself to be the supreme God of all reality when in fact he only has domain over the Earth, which is basically an innately evil realm, and that all humans were accidentally created with a tiny bit of the pure divine spark in them but are all here trapped and cursed to suffer as basically slaves and playthings of Saklas.
The fragment ends with Jesus explaining that basically his master plan for saving all of mankind involves sacrificing himself to help more people realize their true inner divinity, and that he only trusts Judas, his wisest disciple, to make that actually happen.
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To me, it reads like someone took acid or shrooms and wrote a fan fiction drawing from the 4 more mainstream gospels. Its truly wild.
The ‘Judas was actually a good guy’ part is basically a footnote compared to how totally out of left field everything else is.
IIRC, Saklas or Saklos basically transliterates to ‘The Blind One’, which is a name you’d expect a Lovecraftian entity to have.
https://www.gospels.net/judas
How is that any more fantastical than the current interpretation of events?
In one, Jesus thinks he’s the son of god, and in the other he thinks he’s the son of a different god. A benevolent god is just as likely as a selfish one isnt it?
Its amazing what people will believe when there is no better explanation though, in either case.
This is a Gnostic gospel, and they have their own cosmology that breaks with the mainstream Judeo-Christian traditional entirely. By their account, there was a singular creator god, but there were also a bunch of lesser gods. The ancient Jews inadvertently started worshiping one of these lesser gods, mistakenly thinking he was the main guy. Jesus came to set all this straight, and Judas was the only apostle who really figured this out.
Jesus is a very different character in these. He usually comes off as an asshole. In particular, see the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, where a young Jesus kills his friends with his mind for not sharing the ball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gA8hXDJocQ
Is it more fantastical? Not really, but it’s not marching in the same direction as the rest of the story. It’s the difference between Captain Picard’s mom dying when he was young when we saw him dream her as an old woman, versus Captain Picard walking on the bridge and kicking Riker straight in the nuts for no reason and then lighting up a joint. One is a contradiction, but not really that important when it comes down to it (unless you insist that the material is absolutely true, in which case you have other problems). The other is so far off from the character’s normal behavior that we have to assume something is wrong.
Why do you think that old religions like Greek and roman mythology were allowed to slide into widely accepted fiction while others, which often have similarly outlandish stories, are held up as at least a reference to some divine truth?
Is that the right question to ask? I dont like the easy answer that gets spread around of “they just aren’t raised to be critical of their beliefs”. How did people back then make such a decision as what religion to follow?
An interesting insight I gathered from a Bart Ehrman lecture somewhere is that cultures that have a primarily oral-based tradition don’t care as much about consistency in their lore. Not because they’re dumb or anything; it just doesn’t matter to them as much.
Both Judaism and Christianity started as oral traditions. That’s why you have two separate creation stories in Genesis, and different accounts of how Judas died, and the wildly different Gnostic tradition of Christianity. It doesn’t go much deeper than that: an oral culture that used these stories as parables that weren’t really meant as literal truth, but later got treated that way when it evolved into a written culture.
Thats really interesting with Judaism and Christianity, I was not aware they overlapped that much and were so different, I mostly assumed Judaism diverged and has its own thing.
That sort of brings up the next question though, how did people deal with being aware of competing traditions? Or were they just normally only exposed to one at a time? Was it common for something new to be brought to a tribe and they have to reckon with how it fits with their current beliefs?
I suppose its easy now to see the steps one might take to leave a religion or join another, but I can’t translate that to back when people didnt travel as much and everything had to be copied by hand or mouth.
A lot of that region’s religion seems to be the result of psychedelics and not the most gentle kind
Psychedelics are a shortcut to what intense meditation and prayer can achieve, so I see how you can come to that conclusion.
What sparked my “hmm” neurons the most in your comment is that there are canonical parts of the Bible that sound like someone was having a bad trip too - The book apocalypse or however it is properly called. It describes in detail a vision of death, destruction, animals morphing into animals, has a barely coherent plot, everything is soaking in mystic symbolism - it has all the parts of a bad trip, and yet it’s always treated by religious people as at least a valid metaphor of things to come, and not ramblings of someone who ate the wrong cactus in the desert
why make a special exception for this bad trip, and not the other one with an evil yahwe? It really feels to me like the church is cherry picking things to suit their own narrative, instead of somehow dealing with all the apocryphal sources they just ignore them
The varying competing sects and later official churches did exactly that, cherry picking various texts as official canon, in either proposals or meetings of high church officials, for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus.
The first known to propose a list of canon texts was Marcion… who was ironically deemed to be a heretic as he rejected the Old Testament God and the Old Testament itself.
Then you had all kinds of local and regional and imperial Symposiums and Councils to decide what worked and what didn’t…
And surprise surprise, this didn’t even achieve a unanimous consensus!
Even today, major world and regional Christian denominations include books other consider apocryohal, omit books others consider canon, and divide or combine books differently, and a whole lot of that goes back to all of this squabbling in the 3rd century CE basically going unresolved and creating or laying the groundwork for major schisms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon
Check out the Canons of various Christian traditions sections.
It gets especially strange when you end up with a canon book that explicitly quotes and refers to a book that … isn’t canon, in that particular tradition.
dang that is fascinating! Amazing to see someone with vast knowledge on what seems to be a deeply confusing topic, thank you!
also, goodness, no offence if you’re religious but i have no idea how Christianity is treated any different from Greek mythology and the sort - the sources of faith for both are all over the place. Sure Christianity has just one god, but there is an awful lot of different versions of him
and sure you could justify it with various logic like - Satan spreads misinformation, and it’s up to the chosen of God to pick out the truth, but if the God’s alleged chosen disagree what then? How is one supposed to follow this religion and learn from its teachings if every sect/denomination claims they’re the only correct one?
Are Mormons Christian? They say they are, many other Christians say they are not.
One of many reasons: They don’t do the whole Trinity thing.
According to the LDS Church, God and Jesus are separate, distinct. Father and Son yes, but in a literal sense, not as distinct manifestations of the same thing. Holy Ghost is a totally distinct entity as well.
Its maybe less confusing than it is just not talked about. Churches dont like to bring up how mortal people have been sculpting the documents that they say came from god. Its a hard contradiction to swallow, to the point where I think most religious people would change how they worship if they realized the books in their hand are entirely the word of men, written with all of the biases any human has.
Even if we accept it originated from some holy place, the firsthand accounts of those that were with Jesus, we have to accept that that has been translated and copied so many times, by hand, that the words there are no closer to god than Harry Potter.
They have very literally added, removed, and edited all of the major religious documents, and have been doing so since the very beginning. Its the ultimate game of telephone.
Its interesting too how many changes were made purely by mistake, in addition to those likely done on purpose.
If you look into the historical study of the changes to religious documents over time, there is a ton of stuff to read and lectures and such.
I don’t agree. If anything right now we have the opposite problem where the English world for instance pretty exclusively uses a more than 500 year old translation of the Bible, despite much more modern-English versions being translated from some very early Greek versions of the texts (therefore being more readable and less telephone-y). The reasons for the KJV being preferred are many but none make any real theological or linguistic sense.
What really happens though is not so much a game of telephone than the fact that every culture gets to decide on its own (usually provably incorrect and inconsistent) interpretation of the texts, because the whole thing is so internally inconsistent it’s basically a Rorschach test no matter which way you translate it. Progressive Christians will basically tell you that literally none of the Old Testament is to be taken literally which… okay? Extremists sects will do the opposite. Then there’s the whole dogma around Lucifer and Hell, whose existence is clearly an inconsistent amalgamation of old polytheist religions and no matter which way you read or translate it doesn’t translate to the Lucifer or Hell that most Christians ever think about when they say “Lucifer” and “Hell”. That part was just straight up made up over the centuries because it was a convenient scarecrow, yet is is absolutely load-bearing to the dogma of almost every Christian sect. And let’s not even get into the feminists and queer people who’d put Simone Biles to shame with their mental gymnastics justifying the Bible being an Ally, Actually™. That’s not a game of telephone, that’s just Weapons of Mass Denial.