Loading...For anyone interested in Gnosticism, the most recent full Gnostic Gospel to appear, the Gospel of Judas, is a real treasure. In my previous post I described the broad contours of Gnostic views and the more specific Sethian understanding of the divine realm, the world, humans, an salvation. Different Sethians, of course, would have different views of things (think of all the Catholics, Episcopalians, or Baptists you know or know of!). The Gospel of Judas presents a particularly intriguing form of the Sethian myth.
I have said some things about the Gospel of Judas on the blog, but it’s been a few years, so it’s worth talking about again. You can find a translation, done by my colleague Zlatko Pleŝe, in the volume we co-edited and translated: The Other Gospels: Accounts of Jesus from Outside the New Testament. We also give the following Introduction to the text; I will give the rest of the Introduction and a bibliography, and a bit of the translation itself, in the next post.
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The Gospel of Judas is the most recently discovered Gospel
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What, specifically, tells you that a Coptic book is a translation from Greek?
Several things, including the grammar (Greek and Coptic are unrelated languages, so the syntax can be analyzed to see if something is a translation or an original compostition; as an analogy, the Septuagint has numerous Semitic features in the grammar that would not be found in Greek compositions), the discovery of the book in earlier Greek fragments, the attestation of the book among earlier Greek readers.
Prior to the love ethic that Jesus taught, I believe there were other “Western” religious and philosophical teachers, especially in Judaism, who advocated a similar ethic. But I want to say that for none of them was a love ethic thought to be strong enough, by itself, to make war, violence, and domination unnecessary for the establishment and maintenance of a peaceful and humane society.
But, after reflection, I’m wondering if, even for Jesus, was a love ethic strong enough to bring about a utopian society. Even if that ethical practice was necessary to gain admission to God’s kingdom, wasn’t God’s power and violence still thought to be necessary in order to bring about that kingdom?
It seems that, nowadays, many people of “good will” implicitly believe that something like Christian ethics are ultimately stronger, even without God, than war, violence, and political power. But that’s not what Jesus believed is it?
For me it’s sobering to consider that BOTH political power, with the potential for coercive violence, AND something like Christian ethics are necessary for a “good society” to be established and flourish in the long run.
My sense is that Jesus had no interest in a utopian society to emerge out of his teachings; he thought God would soon bring the kingdom and that love would be manifest there, not that love would get us there.
As a former Christian but now an Agnostic/Atheist, what would you suggest deserves deep reflection by someone who is seriously considering Pascal’s Wager?
I believe the strongest counter-argument to the wager is that there are numerous religions to choose from many of which are contradictory. So how does one rationally decide which one to bet on, especially since betting on the wrong religion could itself lead to eternal damnation?
However, for me, only the Catholic Christianity (CC) in which I was raised creates enough existential anxiety about the risks of infinite happiness or suffering to be a compelling/forced choice.
If no religion is true and death is the absolute end anyway, has anything of infinite worth been lost by betting on CC? Even if a finite life is all there is it’s not of infinite worth. A CC life might be one of compromised integrity-intellectual and otherwise-but it wouldn’t be a bad way to live—unless it led one to seriously harm other people or sentient beings. But then morality becomes the most important consideration. But is morality, though very important, of infinite worth if there is no God?
I guess you just have to play the game.
Yup, that’s the problem with the Wager. For Pascal it was an either / or: either the Christian God or atheism. But it should seem pretty obvious that if you choose the Christian God and the Muslim God is in fact the right choice then, well, it’s cookies. Not an either/or as the wager implies. ANd yes, choosing the religions/philosophical traditions that provide the best way to live is … not a bad way to live!
Halal cookies! Another problem with the Wager, as Christopher Hitchens was fond of pointing out, is that it assumes the Decider is gullible enough to accept one’s statistically-calculated “belief.”
I don’t think Pascal would have had Buddhism in mind!
Besides being a false dichotomy, Pascal’s Wager presumes that religions are at worst harmless. History dramatically refutes that myth, continuing today. Infinite worth is also a baseless created concept.
Morality probably predates humans. Whenever any group or species of organisms with an adequately complex brain recognizes that, for example, they are all better off if they agree not to wantonly murder one another, and then enforce that agreement, a moral judgment is created. In the ANE, Judaism was one of few (the only?) religions which made a moral code a part of their religion. The biggest risk comes when charismatic or powerful leaders convince their followers that God wants them to do something, such as fly airplanes into buildings.
Professor Ehrman, do we have any information that shows (at least generally) what percentage of first-century Christians were Gnostic/Ebionite/Marcionite and where they were?
Thanks!
Technically, none. All these groups would claim they represented the views of the majority of early (true) Christians, but alas, they are all second century movements. (The Ebionites are porbably justified in claiming that their views were very similar to the earliest followrs of Jesus, but what we *call* Ebionites is a second century movement)
As I learn more about Gnostic beliefs, I find myself wondering how strange Jesus would have thought all of this to be. Then I realize, he would probably find Christianity even MORE bizarre when he realized people worship HIM as God. Sometimes I feel sad for Jesus, the real person of History, who has been exploited for two millennia to preach a message he himself would have found deeply troubling in many regards. Do you ever think about that Professor Ehrman? About how it’s kind of sad and more than kind of ironic that Jesus died violently and his memory was used to justify all sorts of things afterwards?
I’d say it’s not very sad for him personally, since he wouldn’t know about it. (And if he does know about it, he would have known it was going to happen so again wouldn’t be sad about it). But yes, I think about how far all the veraious kinds of Christianity are fron the teachings of Jesus roughly all the time.
Dr. Ehrman,
Would the Son of Man gain for Judea more economic prosperity than Herod the Great, king of the Jews, gained for Judea?
Steve Campbell, author of Historical Accuracy
Herod was addicted to calling public gatherings to recount the beneficial results of his policies to announce that he had brought Judaea greater economic security than it had ever before known.
“Judaea might easily have remained just another of Rome’s assortment of little remembered client states, like Pontus and Thrace, but under Herod, it was transformed into a nation of international repute.”
Taxes were high. However, in years of drought, Herod reduced taxes on his subjects. In hard times, he exploited his contacts in the region to extract priority preference for Judaea in buying corn from Egypt… He had special attention paid to the feeding of the elderly and otherwise vulnerable.
His building projects included new cities and state-of-the-art urban renewal for existing cities. He improved aqueduct and sewage systems.
Through the warmth of Herod’s dealings with Augustus Caesar, he was able to sustain self-rule for Judaea.
Herod the Great: Statesman, Visionary, Tyrant by Norman Gelb, p. 81-83.
The idea that Jesus “had to”,”must”, “wanted to” die for the sins of humanity, has a corollary, that Judas is not a traitor, but the hero of the story?
The backstory of its discovery up to the point when you were invited to be part of the team to authenticate the gospel, reads like some kind of a thriller Dan Brown would fabricate
Yeah, I know…