bible

Judas

Submitted by wojo on Wed, 2006-04-12 11:03.

I've been hearing more and more of this "revisionist" history of Judas lately. In fact, I even heard mention of it at a Holy Thursday service a few years ago. The question remains: Was Judas simply fulfilling the plan for his life and helping Jesus fulfill God's plan for salvation?

Regardless, I like that this text and others remind us that tradition and church leadership has been an important factor in shaping the modern Bible. To many people see the Bible as similar to the Islamic belief on the Koran--a book handed down directly from God to man--rather than a set of documents that came together over hundreds of years guided by the Holy Spirit. There's some of my Catholic theology coming at you!

New Twist on Judas in Ancient Text

Made in 300 A.D. in Coptic script on 13 sheets of papyrus, both front and back, the document is believed to be a translation of the original Gospel of Judas, written in Greek the century before.

Presented on Thursday by the National Geographic Society at a news conference in Washington, D.C., the Gospel of Judas was discovered in the Egyptian desert near Beni Masar in the 1970s.