If I'm Judas...

[MikeWaters]

I fire my agent.

Too little, too late.

[SeattleUte]

This is the most interesting article on the Gospel of Judus I've seen:

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/

Here is the heart of it:

"[The Gospel of Judus] begins just before Jesus’ last Passover in Jerusalem, as the disciples are offering a prayer to God over the dinner table. Watching them, Jesus laughs. 'Why are you laughing at us?' the nettled disciples ask, and Jesus says that he is laughing not at them but at their strange idea of pleasing their God. (One of the unnerving things about the new Gospel is that Jesus, who never laughs in the canonic Gospels, is constantly laughing in this one, and it’s obviously one of those sardonic, significant, how-little-you-know laughs, like the laugh of the ruler of a dubious planet on 'Star Trek.')

"The disciples are furious at Jesus’ condescension, except for Judas, who thinks he knows what the laughter signifies. 'I know who you are and where you have come from,' Judas says, standing before him. 'You are from the immortal realm of Barbelo.' Apparently startled by his insight, Jesus tells Judas, 'Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the Kingdom.'

"The true mystery, as Jesus unveils it, is that, out beyond the stars, there exists a divine, blessed realm, free of the materiality of this earthly one. This is the realm of Barbelo, a name that gnostics gave the celestial Mother, who lives there with, among others, her progeny, a good God awkwardly called the Self-Generated One. Jesus, it turns out, is not the son of the Old Testament God, whose retinue includes a rebellious creator known as Yaldabaoth, but an avatar of Adam’s third son, Seth. His mission is to show those lucky members of mankind who still have a 'Sethian' spark the way back to the blessed realm. Jesus, we learn, was laughing at the disciples’ prayer because it was directed at their God, the Old Testament God, who is really no friend of mankind but, rather, the cause of its suffering."

The first part actually made ME laugh out loud. I'm starting to see why the Coptics hold such a facination for some people. To me this riff sounds very contemporary, almost like a comic send up of the Gospels.

What this "Gospel" confirms in my mind is that practically since man leaarned to write there have been folks out there with a peculiar pathology causing them compulsively to ceate "scripture" out of whole cloth for egomaniachal reasons, and to try to establish their own peculiar imagined perception of the cosmos.