Everything about Judas Iscariot

[Angelos]

I had long been expecting the discovery of the Gospel of Judas. No surprise for me!

As it had been with the other apocryphal Gospels, the choice of the name of the apostle to whom the Gospel of Jesus would be ascribed to was never arbitrary for the producers of fake Gospels who did their best to defend and promote the authenticity of their heretic teachings. For instance, the only so-called Islamic version of the Gospel was claimed to be written by apostle Barnabas simply because the author had read in the New Testament that Paul and Barnabas had fallen out due to an argument. More, that spurious Barnabas knew how Paul struggled with those defending the practice of circumcision for salvation. Accordingly, the Gospel of Barnabas linked the so-called Pauline heresy to Paul’s objection to circumcision in order to present Paul as the apostle led astray by Satan!

Likewise, the writer of another fake Gospel abused the name of apostle Thomas in order to claim that Jesus’ secret teachings were revealed to one of the twelve apostles. But why Thomas? Probably because in John’s Gospel Thomas was the only apostle that had seen Jesus one week after His resurrection.The author of the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas had known that in the 20th chapter of John’s Gospel Thomas was singled out from all the other disciples. He construed this incident as the foundation of his heretic teaching when he claimed Jesus shared His so-called gnostic secrets with no disciple other than Thomas!

Again, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene was the result of an author that replaced the male beloved disciple in John’s Gospel with the female disciple named Mary Magdalene. This awkward change in the sex of the beloved disciple later brought about a scandalous legend making appearances in the forms of secrets and codes allegedly known by famous artists like Da Vinci.

The writer of the Gospel of Judas could not have found a better person than Judas Iscariot to attribute his spurious Gospel to! As you state, **Judas Iscariot **was the man of mysteries even in the New Testament. The author took advantage of these mysteries and combined it with Iscariot’s fame (notorious person actually!) to produce a prominent text of Gnostic teachings. He praised the man called betrayer in the New Testament as the disciple saving Jesus from the man that clothed him. In short, the true character of **Judas Iscariot **and his relation with Jesus was presented in this fake Gospel as the first and foremost mystery in the chain of other mysteries about Jesus’ teachings.

To sum up, apocryphal Gospels were derived from some details in the Canonical Gospels of the New Testament and the apostolic tradition, but those details were deliberately distorted and misinterpreted by some crooks so that Gnosticism and other heretic tenets could gain validity.

Peace to all seeking the truth in Christ

 

[David_Young]

There is an alternative explanaton which is more in keeping with the original accounts: they contradict.

The problem with trying to harmonise accounts like this (and others such as identifying Jesus’ last words on the cross) is that there is no reason to believe the additional back story on the basis of one account alone.

Why doesn’t the writer describe the actual series of events which the apologist puts forward? When the apologetic veers so far away from the account presented to be almost unrecognisable, it is a legitimate question to ask if this really is a reasonable explanation.

 

[Angelos]

There is an alternative explanaton which is more in keeping with the original accounts: they contradict.

The problem with trying to harmonise accounts like this (and others such as identifying Jesus’ last words on the cross) is that there is no reason to believe the additional back story on the basis of one account alone.

Why doesn’t the writer describe the actual series of events which the apologist puts forward? When the apologetic veers so far away from the account presented to be almost unrecognisable, it is a legitimate question to ask if this really is a reasonable explanation.

There is an alternative explanation which is more in keeping with the atheist and agnostic approach to the Scriptures: these accounts contradict. Therefore, there’s no use reading these contradictory parts or commenting on them! Atheists and agnostics should not waste their precious time and energy on this issue

The problem atheistic and agnostic mode of thinking has in regard to rejecting the solutions is that it is miraculously predestined not to accept any solution due to its fundamental indifference to the notion of faith.

How can the inspired writer be expected to devise his text in accordance with the wishes of a group of people that do not believe no matter what happens? When a believer witnesses how an atheistic or agnostic mind regards alleged discrepancies in the Scripture as definite contradictions beyond repair and desperately needs them to support his unbelief, it becomes a legitimate question to ask if it is really worth the effort to debunk the apologetic studies?

Peace & blessings to all,
Angelos N.

 

[David_Young]

An approach that seeks a reasonable answer is ‘predestined’ to reach one that makes sense without contradictions.

The point is, the only way to make contradictions go away in the Bible is to assume at the beginning that there are none. That way, no amount of evidence will convince the believer otherwise.

It is significant that there seems to be quite a chasm between believers and theologians. One would expect, if something of genuine value existed in the text, that this would get smaller rather than wider.

I noticed the contrary to be the case as I was doing my own theology degree, except that was predominantly Protestant.

 

[NuCatholic73]

I recently watched a show callled the ‘Naked Archaeologist’. It had a good argument that Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot were both members of radical groups that wanted to revolt against Roman rule. It was supposed in this show that Judas was a member of the Sicarii, named after the types of knives they hid under their tunics. The knives looked like Roman Sica’s and they longed for God to send his angels to help them in their quest to rid the Holy City of pagans.

Judas turned Jesus in to the Jewish leaders. By Jewish law these priests could not condemn Jesus to death. They could only imprison him forever. It is possible Judas thought Jesus would be safe from the Romans and not face the same fate as John the Baptist or that the imprisonment of Jesus would cause God to get involved and bring about a deadly wrath upon all the hypocrisy and paganism.

The priests lied to Judas and turned Jesus over to the Romans in secret. Judas confronts them and is angry, hurt, and scared. He throws the money back at them and runs down the the mountain to a tree to hang himself.

According to archaeology, right behind this tree is the familial resting place for the families of Annas and Caiaphus. You can see these tombs today and they have been clearly identified. By committing suicide in front of these tombs, Judas made the ground unclean and therefore no one could live there OR rest there. The only way Judas could hurt the High Priests.

So was Judas’ act an act of repentance? Or was it an act of revenge? Judas does believe Jesus is the Christ and this seems to answer a lot of questions about why he did what he did and what he was thinking. What do other people think?

 

[Ismael]

Hi all.

Wikipedia posts this on Judas Iscariot in the ‘Modern interpretation’ section of the wiki page on J.I.

Most Christians still consider Judas a traitor. Indeed the term Judas has entered many languages as a synonym for betrayer.

Some scholars[41] have embraced the alternative notion that Judas was merely the negotiator in a prearranged prisoner exchange (following the money-changer riot in the Temple) that gave Jesus to the Roman authorities by mutual agreement, and that Judas’s later portrayal as “traitor” was a historical distortion.

In his book The Passover Plot the British theologian Hugh J. Schonfield argued that the crucifixion of Christ was a conscious re-enactment of Biblical prophecy and Judas acted with Jesus’ full knowledge and consent in “betraying” his master to the authorities.

Theologian Aaron Saari contends in his work The Many Deaths of Judas Iscariot that Judas Iscariot was the literary invention of the Markan community. As Judas does not appear in the Epistles of Paul, nor in the Q Gospel, Saari argues that the language indicates a split between Pauline Christians, who saw no reason for the establishment of an organized Church, and the followers of Peter. Saari contends that the denigration of Judas in Matthew and Luke-Acts has a direct correlation to the elevation of Peter.[42]

Mark 16:14 and Luke 24:33 state that following his resurrection Jesus appeared to “the eleven”. Who was missing? After all that had transpired one would just naturally think it was Judas. Apparently not, because in John 20:24 we learn that the one missing was Thomas. Therefore the eleven had to include Judas. Furthermore, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:5 that following his resurrection Jesus was seen by “the twelve”. This had to include Judas because it wasn’t until after the ascension, some forty days after the resurrection (Acts 1:3), that another person, Matthias, was voted in to replace Judas (Acts 1:26).[43]

Another clue confirming the absence of the Judas story in the earliest Christian documents occurs in Matthew 19:28 and Luke 22:28-30. Here Jesus tells his disciples that they will “sit on the twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” No exception is made for Judas even though Jesus was aware of his impending act of betrayal. The answer may lie in the fact that the source of these verses could be the hypothetical Q document (QS 62). Q is thought to predate the gospels and would be one of the earliest Christian documents. Given that possibility, the betrayal story could have been invented by the writer of Mark.[44][45][46]

The book The Sins of the Scripture, by John Shelby Spong, investigates the possibility that early Christians compiled the Judas story from three Old Testament Jewish betrayal stories. He writes, “…the act of betrayal by a member of the twelve disciples is not found in the earliest Christian writings. Judas is first placed into the Christian story by Gospel of Mark (3:19), who wrote in the early years of the eighth decade of the Common Era.” He points out that some of Gospels, after the Crucifixion, refer to the number of Disciples as “Twelve”, as if Judas were still among them. He compares the three conflicting descriptions of Judas’s death - hanging, leaping into a pit, and disemboweling, with three Old Testament betrayals followed by similar suicides.

Spong’s conclusion is that early Bible authors, after the First Jewish-Roman War, sought to distance themselves from Rome’s enemies. They augmented the Gospels with a story of a disciple, personified in Judas as the Jewish state, who either betrayed or handed-over Jesus to his Roman crucifiers. Spong identifies this augmentation with the origin of modern Anti-Semitism.

From Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_Iscariot

Do this allegation have any foundation?

Why does Paul say ‘The Twelve’ and not ‘The Eleven’ (since it would have been more correct) in 1 Cor. 15:5.

Does this allegation make sense?:

Mark 16:14 and Luke 24:33 state that following his resurrection Jesus appeared to “the eleven”. Who was missing? After all that had transpired one would just naturally think it was Judas. Apparently not, because in John 20:24 we learn that the one missing was Thomas.

(In my opinion it does not since John 20 describes Jesus appearing to the apostles also when Thomas was present afterward and the other gospels ignore the ‘doubting Thomas’ incident)