•
Rating: "You will be above all the other disciples. Because you will sacrifice the man who clothes me".
Christ to Judas
Hold on! Stop everything.
Judas wasn't that villain, scoundrel, traitor that they made us believe at the oratory all these years.
On the contrary.
He, Judas the Iscariot, sacrificed himself to fulfill the Divine Plan, giving up his dignity just to comply with the will of the Son of God.
This is more or less the thesis that emerges from the publication of this controversial "The Gospel of Judas" (Ed. White Star 2006), based on the meticulous translation by Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst, three renowned scholars who painstakingly reconstructed the remnants of this ancient papyrus found nearly destroyed, which, after various transfers from private collectors to various museums, managed to interest the National Geography Society which, together with the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery, funded the entire cultural operation of restoration and translation.
In short, it seems that the papyrus (or what’s left of it) belongs to a historical period close to between 220 and 340 A.D. and was written in the ancient Coptic language, although certain idioms and expressions bring it closer to Greek or certain Egyptian dialects.
Many ecclesiastical and religious institutions have always rejected the idea that there could be an "apocryphal" Gospel different from the 4 officially recognized ones, and it's not even the first time a Gnostic version of a Gospel written by a different hand appears. We recall that the Gnostics believed in the existence of a supreme source of all good, which for them was the divine mind, outside the physical universe. A fascinating thesis that fits well with a certain holistic view of existence typical of this recent period close to the Age of Aquarius.
However interesting, is the re-evaluation and requalification of the character of Judas who until yesterday, as the archetype of the evil Jew, had attracted the hatred and secular anger of the entire world.
Instead, this big book (which in reality, on 174 pages, contains at least 134 pages of prefaces, afterwords, analyses, bibliographies, and interpretations...) re-evaluates the figure of the Traitor Apostle and rehabilitates him as a figure devoted to the will of the Messiah who, when he betrays him in the olive grove, will do so solely to obey what has been asked of him, aware that the other apostles, unaware of everything, will turn against him.
Beyond this, the text turns out to be rather cryptic and heavy to read, perhaps due to the numerous missing parts, the omitted lines, or those made illegible by wear. Considering then the time jump of 2 or 300 years (the presumable date of transcription, truly enormous if one thinks of how much mystification may have occurred in the meantime, between one oral passage and another), it's hard to really consider this work as "Astounding" or "Revolutionary" (as the blurbs on the back cover promise) especially since, I repeat, the portion strictly related to the title occupies just about 40 pages out of 174!
There is instead the suspicion that, in the long run, the entire operation was orchestrated as a Great Marketing Operation cleverly designed to sell the content of some semi-decomposed papyrus sheets as "exceptional," which, when all is said and done, has very little that is revolutionary or shocking.
The most innovative thing that struck me, just not to be entirely negative, is that Jesus, unlike in other known Gospels, laughs a lot here or as Rodolphe Kasser says in the introduction of the book: "He laughs at the weaknesses of the disciples and the absurdities of human life. Death, as an abandonment of this nonsensical physical existence, should not be a cause for fear or dread. Far from being an occasion of sadness, death is the means through which Jesus is freed from flesh, in order to return to his heavenly home and Judas, by betraying him, helps the friend to rid himself of the body and liberate the intimate self, the divine self".
And just these few words alone are worth the price of purchase.
Loading comments slowly
