RU 35/2006 - USA/FRANCE

- USA/FRANCE: A small book, published in April 2006 by the pseudo-scientific editor "The National Geographic" directed towards the large American public and even the whole world, is currently making much noise: "The Gospel of Judas". But let's say it immediately: is not all 'Gospel' what is called like that. In France, the translation of this book, cleverly orchestrated by the media like recently the Da Vinci Code, is already the 9th bestseller with the Fnac library, a bookstore which is known for selling everything that makes money. Money, that's almost the last word of this 'Gospel' which suddenly stops upon the scene when Judas sells Jesus to the Jews, a kind of apotheosis: "And he received some pieces of money and delivered him to them." Beyond the obvious gnosticism which evaporates from every line of this text, the money is in fact the alpha and omega of it. From some "pieces of money" in order to betray Jesus, until the few Dollars (or Euros) of sale of this book in order to betray the truth on Jesus, there is only one step. The generation of traitors is far away from having disappeared. - Let's first see what is the historic foundation of this 'Gospel'? Towards the end of the years 1970, some peasants found at El Minya, in the center of Egypt, a papyrus manuscript written in Coptic language (called later on 'Codex of Tchacos', according to the last owner of the manuscript, the Swiss antiquarian Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos) which could date of the 3rd or 4th century of our era, but the texts themselves are supposed to be older. The document was written initially in Greek and contained the following sections: 'First Apocalypse of James', 'Letter of Peter to Philip', and 'Gospel of Judas'. The "Gospel of Judas", by an anonymous author (of the 2nd century?), covers 26 pages of the manuscript. These writings, like a multitude of others which circulated after the time of Jesus, were rejected by the early Church as apocryphal, i.e. forgery: 'not-inspired' purely human products! Notably the 'Gospel of Judas' was already strongly criticized by Saint Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, towards the year 180 in his book "Adversus Haereses" (against the Heretics): "They declare that Judas the traitor was well informed about these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no one else, accomplished the mystery of the treason. They produced a fictional history of this kind, which they called the gospel of Judas". Note, by the way, that the definitive list of the Holy Scriptures (the Canon) was fixed by the pope Damasus I (366 to 384). But let's follow farther the itinerary of this document found in Egpt: from the peasants, it passed from hand to hand, first to Cairo, then to Switzerland, to New York, to Ohio, and again to Switzerland. It's only in 2000 that scientists could decipher the document minutely, achieving painfully in 2005 the approximate restoration of the original text ' The Gospel of Judas'. Therefore, nothing to say on this scientific aspect of the development of the Coptic primitive text of the 4th century, which is in fact the translation of a lost original text in Greek language which was fabricated by some gnostic Egyptian monks in the 2nd century. - But many things remain to be said on its content and on its utilization by the modern mass media. The content summarizes itself in the quoted sentence of Jesus: after indicating that ordinary Christians are evil (!), Jesus tells Judas: "But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." All the gnosticism of the first centuries reflects itself in this book: the creation is bad, the body is bad, the mind and the knowledge makes free, only an elite will understand. The historian Marc Leroy of the Biblical School of Jerusalem concludes that the text emanates from the gnostic sect of the Caïnits who tried to justify their errors while valuing the condemned figures of Caïn, Esaü (against Jacob), Core (against Moïses) - and Judas Iscariot who betrayed Jesus. This esoteric 'Gospel' intends to remake the history, it doesn't say anything about Jesus' birth, his Death, his Resurrection, his message of Salvation, the sacraments, the Church. However, it says a lot about angels, etheric aeons, stars, the knowledge and 'self-regeneration', when it doesn't frankly invent that Jesus' true father is Barbelo, a feminine power; or that Judas is the best one of the apostles... Revisionism always well functioned, even in the old times. The final word on this 'Gospel of Judas' has been hammered out by a Jesuit, the American theologian Gerald O'Collins: "It was junk then and it's junk now "! Worse than junk, it's Satan's smoke! The manuscript rejoins somehow - but by the contrary - the last vision circulating on Judas in the Church, which was the one in Dante's Divine Comedy (towards 1300), where Judas is dived, with his head first, into the mouth of Lucifer, in the 9th circle of hell, and even in its worse furnace, the one precisely called 'Judas'. As to Satan's new smoke - this book distributed with malicious joy, against hard money coins - we hold to the truth on Jesus Christ related by the Catholic Church. - Argument 'ad hominem': that Judas, did he write his 'gospel' before or after suiciding himself? - (ru; cf. LF 7.4., FC 19.8., DSH 24.8., IHT 24.8.)

- - O.A.M.D.G. - -