CelticBear’s Musings

CNN.com – Ancient�text offers revelations about Judas – Apr 6, 2006

Basically, this Gospel of Judas dated around 300 AD and written in the same Coptic Greek as the other Gospels, describes how Jesus asks Judas to betray him in order to fulfill the prophesy and free the spiritual Jesus from the flesh.

I’ve always thought, even back in my fundie Christian teenage days, that Judas got the short end of the stick. I guess I was doomed to skepticism and critical freethinking even back then, as I thought:

1. We celebrate Jesus for the fact that he sacrificed himself to free us from sin.
2. This was all planned in advance by God/Jesus to fulfill prophesy and free us from blood sacrifice.
3. In order to be sacrificed, Jesus by necessity had to be turned over to the Romans and killed.
(Of course, being a fundie Christian at the time, I didn’t yet question the necessity of the sado-masochistic bloody human sacrifice in the first place instead of the all-powerful God just changing the rules.)
4. Ergo, Judas was a tool of God in order to make the sacrifice possible. Judas was necessary and doing God’s will.

It’s one reason why I realy love (even now) the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The British soundtrack is better, but I like the movie too. It shows more about how the Judas character was doing what he thought was right, and necessary for God’s will to be revealed. And in essence, he was! God’s will couldn’t have been fulfilled (so long as God decides to use human agents for his will,) unless Judas did his job.

So the villification of Judas for doing God and Jesus’ will and bringing about the necessary and pre-planned sacrifice is wholy unfair. And his suicide (depending on which gospel you read and how you interpret it) is actually quite sad, in my opinion. He felt so much guilt and sorrow for doing what he then thought was a mistake, leads to his death–meanwhile God/Jesus’ plan was all along going on smoothly. It’s a really tragic story, I think.

And so I’ve always thought it to be extremely absurd for Christians in general to despise Judas, and a lot of fundie Christians to hate Jews for their role in the sacrifice, when all along they were doing what God and Jesus needed and wanted to have done. According to Christianity, you can’t be saved except by Jesus who can only save you because he died, took the keys to hell from Satan, and came back to life to ascend to be at God’s side (wait, how’s the work if God and Jesus are the same?) And Jesus couldn’t have done that if not for the betrayal. Judas should be honored in Christianity as much as that symbol of the tool of murder, the cross, is. Moreso, in fact! Judas should be up there right below “the Virgin” Mary as being an agent of God and making Jesus’ ability to “save” possible.

The Judeo-Christian mythology is really quite fascinating, moreso than any other ancient myth I’ve encountered so far. There is a lot of drama, human character, alegory and metaphor, that is rare in a lot of other myths. Once you get past the instances of inhuman cruelty and absurd rules and advocation of rape, murder, slavery, racism, hatred, intolarance, brutality, infanticide, etc. etc. found all throughout the book, that is.

Dungeons & Dragons game humor:
“Jesus Saves!
…and only takes half damage.”