Zatera Ul

Captain Ed has some good commentary on the Gospel of Judas:

Gnosticism has always been a seductive force, and not just in Christianity. For some reason, a large percentage of people want to believe that real truth can never be easily understood. Humans appear to have a deep-seated need to be part of a secret, inner circle that can unlock hidden truths — or at least to believe in hidden truths. Gnosticism could be accurately described as Christianity’s first conspiracy theory, except that it undersells the strength of the movement and how difficult it was for the early Church to stamp it out.

The Gospel of Judas and the actual assertions on which the fictional DaVinci Code are based represent the eternal attraction of Gnosticism. We cannot believe that God loved us so that He gave us His only son as the perfect sacrifice for all time, and all we have to do to partake in that sacrifice is to believe in Him. (I often think that Jesus understood this so well that he spoke in parables just to address this human need for deconstruction, along with the other eternal human need to have everything explained in small words.) Because this sacrifice is so unbelievable, a lot of people are unable to take it at face value, and that’s when people start thinking about conspiracies, secret knowledge, and so on.

Also, Messy Christian interviewed a man from the National Geographic Society team that has been studying it:

“Gnostic Christians were a special group in the history of ancient Christianity which negated Jewish thinking of God in the terms of almighty good creator of the world. That means, for Gnostics, the cosmos, the world and also humanity have not been created by God but has been created by an inferior, not almighty forces which wanted to imprison the inner spirit of man into a fleshly prison,” he says.

He emphasizes that the manuscript comes from the Gnostics, not from Judas. Some of the Christian commentary on The Da Vinci Code that MFH has been reading notes that Gnostic gospels are not true gospels–they do not bring us the “good news” about Jesus.