There’s a fascinating idea that Judas was the one who committed the ultimate sacrifice. That god chose him to be his human incarnate, to truly experience humanity and guilt by committing an ultimate betrayal and becoming the villain of biblical history. All allowing him to finally understand and forgive humanity’s sin, by committing one himself. It follows that this is supposedly maddening knowledge as it breaks the illusion of Christ’s sacrifice.
I’m definitely butchering and ad-libbing the original idea, but I think this makes for a grander story than the traditional “birth myself to sacrifice myself to myself to forgive everyone else” interpretation.
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
If you’re talking about the Gospel of Judas, that isn’t from the Dead Sea scrolls, but was its own distinct finding.
The Dead Sea scrolls are a collection of texts of a cult based around a messianic figure, rooted in Judaism, but dated between the 3rd and 1st century BCE, discovered in the 1940s.
They do not mention Judas, but are interesting in that the actual messianic figure himself seems to have written some of the texts, that he uses some of the same verses and stories from the Torah to identify himself as the Messiah that would later be used by (attributed to being used by) Jesus, that some of the texts were written by others of the same cult after his death, and show how they theologically cope with their Messiah seemingly failing his own prophecies and claims.
The Gospel of Judas, on the other hand, is dated to the 2nd century CE and was …well, the story goes it was found in Egypt some point prior to the 1970s, then got traded around by black market antiquities dealers, spent about a decade in a safe deposit box, nearly totally disintegrated, and was eventually shown to a proper academic expert in greek and coptic, leading to it being painstakingly reassembled, radio carbon dated and translated.
The actual story in the Gospel of Judas is stunningly bizarre:
You start off with Jesus literally mocking and laughing at all his disciples other than Judas for seemingly not understanding anything he’s ever said.
Later, privately, Judas confronts Jesus saying that he does understand Jesus… that Jesus is from the immortal realm of Barbelo.
Jesus then goes on to describe that yes, he was making fun of the other disciples because they think he is the Messiah of Yahweh, when in actuality Jesus is a human incarnation or avatar of a completely different divine entity, that Yahweh is actually Saklas / Yaldebaoth, a mad, malformed demiurge descended from a long line of other, superior, more wise and beneficent divine entities in an elaborate and historied pantheon (which Jesus admits his own knowledge of is not total and complete), that Saklas / Yaldebaoth falsely believes himself to be the supreme God of all reality when in fact he only has domain over the Earth, which is basically an innately evil realm, and that all humans were accidentally created with a tiny bit of the pure divine spark in them but are all here trapped and cursed to suffer as basically slaves and playthings of Saklas.
The fragment ends with Jesus explaining that basically his master plan for saving all of mankind involves sacrificing himself to help more people realize their true inner divinity, and that he only trusts Judas, his wisest disciple, to make that actually happen.
…
To me, it reads like someone took acid or shrooms and wrote a fan fiction drawing from the 4 more mainstream gospels. Its truly wild.
The ‘Judas was actually a good guy’ part is basically a footnote compared to how totally out of left field everything else is.
www.gospels.net/judas
BakerBagel@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
Idk what the official term i theological circles is, but many groups had trouble squaring the circle between the wrathful and jealous god of the Old Testament with the god of mercy and love Jesus preached. Many groups, such as the Gnostics and later Cathars, rejected the god of the Old Testament as an evil fraud.
Aqarius@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I believe “gnosticism” is the term, though I’ve heard them also called “dualistic” heresies.
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I don’t know if there is an actual commonly used scholarly term for that concept in general, but yes, the idea has certainly been a cornerstone of many groups and sects.
shneancy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What sparked my “hmm” neurons the most in your comment is that there are canonical parts of the Bible that sound like someone was having a bad trip too - The book apocalypse or however it is properly called. It describes in detail a vision of death, destruction, animals morphing into animals, has a barely coherent plot, everything is soaking in mystic symbolism - it has all the parts of a bad trip, and yet it’s always treated by religious people as at least a valid metaphor of things to come, and not ramblings of someone who ate the wrong cactus in the desert
why make a special exception for this bad trip, and not the other one with an evil yahwe? It really feels to me like the church is cherry picking things to suit their own narrative, instead of somehow dealing with all the apocryphal sources they just ignore them
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
The varying competing sects and later official churches did exactly that, cherry picking various texts as official canon, in either proposals or meetings of high church officials, for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus.
The first known to propose a list of canon texts was Marcion… who was ironically deemed to be a heretic as he rejected the Old Testament God and the Old Testament itself.
Then you had all kinds of local and regional and imperial Symposiums and Councils to decide what worked and what didn’t…
And surprise surprise, this didn’t even achieve a unanimous consensus!
Even today, major world and regional Christian denominations include books other consider apocryohal, omit books others consider canon, and divide or combine books differently.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon
Check out the Canons of various Christian traditions sections.
It gets especially strange when you end up with a canon book that explicitly quotes and refers to a book that … isn’t canon, in that particular tradition.
shneancy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
dang that is fascinating! Amazing to see someone with vast knowledge on what seems to be a deeply confusing topic, thank you!
also, goodness, no offence if you’re religious but i have no idea how Christianity is treated any different from Greek mythology and the sort - the sources of faith for both are all over the place. Sure Christianity has just one god, but there is an awful lot of different versions of him
and sure you could justify it with various logic like - Satan spreads misinformation, and it’s up to the chosen of God to pick out the truth, but if the God’s alleged chosen disagree what then? How is one supposed to follow this religion and learn from its teachings if every sect/denomination claims they’re the only correct one?
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
They have very literally added, removed, and edited all of the major religious documents, and have been doing so since the very beginning. Its the ultimate game of telephone.
Its interesting too how many changes were made purely by mistake, in addition to those likely done on purpose.
If you look into the historical study of the changes to religious documents over time, there is a ton of stuff to read and lectures and such.
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I don’t agree. If anything right now we have the opposite problem where the English world for instance pretty exclusively uses a more than 500 year old translation of the Bible, despite much more modern-English versions being translated from some very early Greek versions of the texts (therefore being more readable and less telephone-y). The reasons for the KJV being preferred are many but none make any real theological or linguistic sense.
What really happens though is not so much a game of telephone than the fact that every culture gets to decide on its own (usually provably incorrect and inconsistent) interpretation of the texts, because the whole thing is so internally inconsistent it’s basically a Rorschach test no matter which way you translate it. Progressive Christians will basically tell you that literally none of the Old Testament is to be taken literally which… okay? Extremists sects will do the opposite. Then there’s the whole dogma around Lucifer and Hell, whose existence is clearly an inconsistent amalgamation of old polytheist religions and no matter which way you read or translate it doesn’t translate to the Lucifer or Hell that most Christians ever think about when they say “Lucifer” and “Hell”. That part was just straight up made up over the centuries because it was a convenient scarecrow, yet is is absolutely load-bearing to the dogma of almost every Christian sect. And let’s not even get into the feminists and queer people who’d put Simone Biles to shame with their mental gymnastics justifying the Bible being an Ally, Actually™. That’s not a game of telephone, that’s just Weapons of Mass Denial.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
A lot of that region’s religion seems to be the result of psychedelics and not the most gentle kind
Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Psychedelics are a shortcut to what intense meditation and prayer can achieve, so I see how you can come to that conclusion.
webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Warn about the silliness of taking mythological teachings literally.
Provides a more complex mythological teaching and some “you’re the smartest student one for knowing” psychology as huge bait to test if you actually understand or just reading along.
Genuinely philosophy is about the quest knowledge referring to the highest deity being “the unknowable”
Gnostic = Agnostic if i read this well. Am i missing something, honest question…
Where we Saklas all along? Cant help but notice actual church being dogmatic about ancient texts, blind to their meaning
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
‘Gnostic Philosophy’ is actually … basically an anachronistic term that modern scholars do not like to use.
It originated back when all that was really known was that people originally seen as ‘proper’ early Christians referred to various heretical groups as Gnostic.
More research has revealed that there were actually very many different ‘heretical’ groups, such that it only even makes sense to call them heretics after Orthodoxy was formally decided on.
The early Christian movement was extremely diverse and contentious with many groups including or discluding many different texts and theological elements, and basically all of them were simultaneously arguing with, reacting to, and borrowing concepts from each other.
There isn’t really a singular Gnostic version of Christianity or Philosophy. Its an outdated catch all term for distinct and specific groups such as the Valentinians, the Sethians, the Marcionites, Manichaeans… many more.
Many of them actually do have, written down, the secret knowledge that is said to grant one enlightenment or a ticket to heaven upon death once one knows it.
Many others only describe ways of living, thinking and acting that lead one toward the goal of the ‘secret knowledge’ without actually describing the knowledge itself.
Also, a great deal of syncretism, or merging of other religious or mythical tales and philosophical ideas from outside of Judaism and what we now know as modern Christianity was going on, mixing in concepts from Greece, Egypt, Persia, etc.
…
Gnosis means knowledge. Gnostic means one with knowledge or one who knows.
Agnosis mean ignorance. Agnostic means one without knowledge or one who does not know.
They are opposites, not equivalents.
…
At least the Gospel of Judas seems very much to be written with the idea that Yahweh / The Judaic God is actually evil.
A good number, though not all ‘Gnostic’ sects wrote about or just rewrote the story of Genesis to make it much more plain that God was actually the one who lied in that story, and viewed the various other cruel acts of the God of the Torah as irreconcilable with a fundamentally ‘good’ deity.
…
Long story short, you couldnt reconstruct some kind of ‘true, original’ Christianity if we somehow had a copy of every text of what every various sect in the 1st and 2nd century CE held dear: There are irreconcilable differences and incongruities between the amount we so have.
But thats not so dissimilar from today’s widely varying religions and theological concepts that all identify as Christian.
webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
This is enlightening, (pun intended).
May i ask where you acquired this knowledge?
While i know thats the literal meaning of gnostic/agnostic i mean it more in the context of “(a)gnostic (a)theist.”
I used to see myself as an agnostic spiritual but now i am not so sure.
I aim to understand the cosmos, it’s what am. I involve myself with philosophy and science to satisfy my desire to know. To become gnostic.
I am already interpreting so much (to me) real knowledge from just the provided short summary of the gospel of Judas. That must count for something.
But i know i can never truly know the truth, that there will never be a state that i know that i am not wrong, or better nuanced i cant even know if anything at all can possibly reach a state of all knowing. My reality is that i don’t know, i am agnostic.
I am less interested in what other people did with these ideas later on. Like write down the supposed truth, that just seems like missing the point, or maybe it goes a level deeper yet and that truth is that the truth is but a placebo effect.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
How is that any more fantastical than the current interpretation of events?
In one, Jesus thinks he’s the son of god, and in the other he thinks he’s the son of a different god. A benevolent god is just as likely as a selfish one isnt it?
Its amazing what people will believe when there is no better explanation though, in either case.
frezik@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
This is a Gnostic gospel, and they have their own cosmology that breaks with the mainstream Judeo-Christian traditional entirely. By their account, there was a singular creator god, but there were also a bunch of lesser gods. The ancient Jews inadvertently started worshiping one of these lesser gods, mistakenly thinking he was the main guy. Jesus came to set all this straight, and Judas was the only apostle who really figured this out.
Jesus is a very different character in these. He usually comes off as an asshole. In particular, see the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, where a young Jesus kills his friends with his mind for not sharing the ball: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gA8hXDJocQ
Is it more fantastical? Not really, but it’s not marching in the same direction as the rest of the story. It’s the difference between Captain Picard’s mom dying when he was young when we saw him dream her as an old woman, versus Captain Picard walking on the bridge and kicking Riker straight in the nuts for no reason and then lighting up a joint. One is a contradiction, but not really that important when it comes down to it (unless you insist that the material is absolutely true, in which case you have other problems). The other is so far off from the character’s normal behavior that we have to assume something is wrong.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Why do you think that old religions like Greek and roman mythology were allowed to slide into widely accepted fiction while others, which often have similarly outlandish stories, is held up as at least a reference to some divine truth?
Is that the right question to ask? I dont like the easy answer that gets spread around of “they just aren’t raised to be critical of their beliefs”. How did people back then make such a decision as what religion to follow?
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think it’s wild how the Bible basically says there are many other gods. Yahweh only claims to be the greatest and commands his followers to only worship him. Sometimes over the years, that became interpreted as “there is only one God” despite the Bible not saying that.