RODOLPHE
KASSER – MARVIN MEYER – GREGOR WIRST – COMMENTARY BY BART D. EHRMAN – THE GOSPEL
OF JUDAS – NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC – 2006
An
essential gospel, even if we must be very cautious because of the great
lacunae. Judas can finally be rehabilitated, at least in his intentions. But
beyond Judas it is providing a completely new way of looking at Jesus. First of
all he laughs, which is not one distinctive trait of his in the standard
gospels. But the analysis and notes accompanying the text are far under,
beneath, underneath what we should expect.
I will just give some examples. Hundreds of pages could and should be written
about the unacceptable presentations of Ehrman and Meyer. They start from the
very beginning by considering this text can be classified as "Sethian
Gnosticism" and then they only compare what they can read of the text with
other Gnostic documents of the period and of the same trend. From time to time
they show some parallel elements in the official gospels.
They obviously stand for the standard approach of Jesus and do not even use the
word "traitor" and its derived brothers and sisters in quotes. Judas
is once and forever a traitor and his act is once and forever treachery,
betrayal, etc. That is anti-historical. A historian is supposed to remain
neutral and a history book, even on the worst tyrant, Hitler for example, would
not call him systematically and without a distance-building stance a butcher or
whatever.
But there is a lot worse. They have decided that this gospel was written in
130-150 CE and originally in Greek. They forget that Christ preached to a lot
of people who memorized his preaching with their photographic ears and then
went around repeating what they had heard. The disciples were the perambulating
loudspeakers of what Jesus had said and around them many others had a perfect
memory of just that, what Jesus had said. The oral tradition of an oral society
in which only a very small minority of people can write and read.
A continent like Africa entirely lived on that
tradition till the Europeans pounced upon them with writing, reading and
schooling. Jesus preached in Palestine and Jerusalem (the Temple
essentially). He was a rabbi. So he preached in the local language, Aramaic,
though he probably understood and spoke some Greek and Latin, and he was able
to read Hebrew, and probably write it too. His preaching was only later
translated into other languages, Greek first of all, when the preaching went
out of the Jewish community, essentially due to Paul (who is in no way one of
the twelve apostles and had little commerce with Jesus when alive) and then the
apostles sent by James at the beginning to Egypt and other non-Jewish places.
To pretend the original language was Greek is absurd.
Maybe the original written version was in Greek, and hence had been translated
from Aramaic. But not the original preaching of Jesus or Judas or any other
apostle, including as for that the Jewish legion officer Saul, later to become
Paul, the self appointed apostle of the Gentiles. This of course leads to
mistakes. Both clerical and university research scholars are working in France
on the parallel verses of the synoptic gospels and they have found that the
first verse has a Hebrew or Semitic basis whereas the second verse has a Greek
basis, which means the original preaching and probably writing was in Hebrew
(or Aramaic as for that) and that a second Greek re-writing was added to the
original text when it was translated into Greek.
If we take into account the fact this society was an oral society, then the
oral tradition has to go back to Jesus himself, and there is no other way to
look at things that could be reasonable. Comparing is not proving, but the
teachings of Buddha were also kept three full centuries orally before they were
transcribed in an artificial language created for that purpose. In other words
our commentators are thinking within a western and modern frame of mind.
They miss the real point, that Jesus was bringing together behind him several
trends of people: the zealot radicals (of the Dead Sea among other places) represented
by his own brother James, the "Gnostic" radicals inheriting all kinds
of traditions from elsewhere and when (pagan, Semitic, Asian, Indian, etc)
centering their vision on a ternary mental architecture, also many simple
people in Palestine (Jewish or not) who just wanted the world to change, more
freedom to come, more equality to be made possible, and we could even add to
these the revolutionary radicals of the Barabbas type.
Jesus thus had to bring together various approaches and the best example is the
trinity of his God (is it Jesus' invention or a later improvement?), the role
of the mother, his mother (that reminds us of Barbelo) and Jesus' virginal
birth (that reminds us of the Autogenes the Self Generated) as opposed to the
dual Jewish God of Genesis (God and his Spirit, the two Luminaries, the binary
dividing moments of the creation) and the total rejection of Eve and most women
in the Old Testament's first five books. The last point is
"thirteen".
To ignore that "thirteen" is a structural positive number in that
region at that time is plain incompetence. There were (and still are for the
Jews) thirteen months in the Jewish, Sumerian, Mesopotamian calendars and there
were (though that has been westernized) thirteen zodiac signs, the thirteen having
to do with the Serpent Holder from old Egyptian as well as Greek traditions,
thus Semitic and Indo-European. That changes everything. The thirteen month
sets the lunar year back into a solar frame and the thirteenth zodiac sign is
the healer of the body and the mind. The reversal of the standard evangelical
vision is a lot more pregnant in this context. Note the restoring authorities
have just reinstated nearly in its original place the thirteenth zodiac sign
that used to be on the outside wall of the abbey church
of Saint Austremoine’s Benedictine
abbey in Issoire, France, along with the twelve
others up to the end of the Middle Ages. It used to be at the joining point
between the church itself and the Scriptorium and Library on the south side of
the choir, showing thus it was the door, the link to knowledge and
intelligence.
Jesus says to Judas: "You thirteenth spirit... You will become the
thirteenth... Your star over the thirteenth aeon... The star that leads the way
is your star..." This implies that the note 151 that speculates on the
titular subscript used as the title of the book which reads “the gospel OF Judas”
and not “the gospel ACCORDING TO Judas” might be right but then it implies it
was not written by Judas at all but it was told first orally and then
eventually written by someone else. The question is then: what were the motivations
of this particular person: to report one side of the story that had been
neglected or to promote a new vision of this apostle that had been accused of
the worst crime, treason? It then reflects a debate in the nascent Christian
community that must itself reflect a debate at the time of Jesus: the various
and varied motivations of the followers, the motivations of Jesus himself in
choosing his apostles, hence his direct representatives, the divisions and even
tensions in the Jewish community in Jerusalem and around, not to speak of the
tension with the Dead Sea community led by James, Jesus’ brother. And we are
not considering those called the Arabs around the Jewish community who were
servants and field workers, some of them serfs and probably slaves. The Romans
stand apart of course since they are not originally from the Levant.
That
leads me to the idea that the Christian community that was supposed to become
the Catholic Church was not in the second century AD united and homogeneous and
the role of Paul and his supporters after him should be studied in that
perspective: an outsider proclaiming himself the Apostle of the gentiles, hence
of the non-Jews though he was a Jew, a Roman citizen and an officer in the
Roman Legion. His conflict with James is also to be revaluated seriously to
show the defeat of what James represented. I also think it would be good to
study this Gospel of Judas along with the Gospel according to Mary Magdalene,
the other close associate of Jesus who is most of the time neglected or
side-tracked since she is a woman with the fake debate about her possible
marital relation with Jesus. The invention of the second James that is sent to Spain to die
there is also another distortion that should be studied seriously since it
side-tracks James himself with a doppelganger that moved away. It sounds like
the clearing of Jesus heritage of three people who could represent something
else, hence a challenge to the winning camp.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Two
comments are missing, probably erased by their authors. There should be seven
Have
you ever heard of 'paragraphing'?
The
dead Sea Scrolls have no verses and no chapters. It is the result of our
western mind: we added the punctuation that made the verses and we more or less
considered the chapters were the particular scrolls.
Paragraphs are a convention that appeared in our minds with writing and then
printing more than anything else. When I think there is a constant flow of
thinking and not anything cut up in paragraphs because I think in mental
language. When I speak there are no paragraphs either because I speak in oral
language. Paragraphs only come in written language and I am against it because
it superimposes an ideological meaning on my mental thinking. Have you heard of
the stream of consciousness of James Joyce and of his one paragraph, one
sentence Ulysses? How many pages in the Penguin Edition?
Thanks for the deep intellectual and spiritual (ah ah ah) remark. Inspiringly
thrilling.
Jacques
Dear
Jacques:
It's difficult to believe that a person who claims to be a "Dr." and
has a Sorbonne address doesn't understand the purpose of paragraphing. Let me
explain.
If you don't break up your "prose" into manageable chunks it makes it
difficult to read, especially on a computer screen, and because of that
difficulty many people who might otherwise have read your post won't bother to
read it. But that's fine by me, as you don't seem be worth reading
anyway.
Perhaps one day you'll understand that the purpose of writing is not to write
like Joyce or an ancient scribe but to be read.
Have a nice day!
No
reply. No retort, No rebuttal. Just registered that some people are
paragraph-trained and some are not. I guess my mother forgot to train me in
that kind of cleanliness. Or maybe there is no paragraph potties for that. Yet
she knew how to write. I guess it is the same syndrome as the one of the people
who cannot read novels and can only read short stories, and even very short
stories please. I am used to starting a text with the first word and finishing
it with the last word. In between it is the text and I try to understand it,
not to pause every ten steps to look at the landscape and listen to the birds.
This morning before daybreak Place de la Nation in Paris was invaded by sea gulls. I did not
stop to look at them. I went on walking but I listened to them all the same. I
can still walk and listen at the same time. My first name is not Gerald. And I
am not afraid of crossing any river provided there is a ford somewhere, or maybe
a bridge.
That's what that obsession for paragraphs makes me not think of but feel for
sure, like an elephant in some glass menagerie.
Jacques
Hi.
Jacques. I get that, too. I think like you do. The train of thought is
interrupted by paragraphs. I really struggled to paragraph my book that you
reviewed. I'm here trolling for true believers on Judas. ha ha ha!
See ya
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 11:45 PM