Notes From My Knapsack 4-16-06
Jeff Gill

As Easter Passes By

"The Gospel of Judas" is getting a great deal of press right now. This is an ancient papyrus, the old Egyptian form of paper made of Nile River reeds, with Coptic writing of the fourth century about group called the "Gnostics."
What you’ve likely heard is less that unimpressive precis than a breathless "this could completely change everything we thought we knew about Jesus and his disciples." Which it doesn’t.
I’ll grant you I speak as a practicing Christian – I still can’t quite get it right – and preacher fellow, but the history and archaeology of this discovery is pretty straightforward. What is mysterious and confusing is who owns the thing, and the path includes a stop in Akron, Ohio, and an antiques dealer named Bruce Ferrini. All roads go through the Buckeye State, don’t they?
You can see most of what you need to know at www.nationalgeographic.com, but suffice it to say: if you came to me with a document, that you said was a copy made in 2001 of a letter written in 1940, that purported to tell the true story of Abraham Lincoln’s love life, I think most people would understand my skepticism.
It would be worth considering, mostly for what people were believing, or wanting to believe, in the 1940’s about a man who died this weekend (Apr. 15) in 1865, but the odds that there was new, reliable information about events in 1865, let alone the 1850’s, are pretty awful small.
That’s what we’ve got with "The Gospel of Judas." A really interesting look at Gnostic groups of the period following 140 A.D. to the Constatinian era, around 340 A.D.
One thing that seems to some odd about the training of clergy is the time spent on learning the names and bases of ancient heresies. If a heresy existed in the age of the first seven councils of the church, what’s that to us today?
But those ancient un-orthodox doctrines have a way of keeping coming back; we haven’t found too many original diversions over the ages. Gnostics taught that there are secret teachings that only a select few could comprehend about how the world was evil, spirit good, and how to get from one to the other.
Docetism said Jesus only seemed to be human, but was actually all spirit, and only his human appearance died on the cross – a form of Gnosticism. Likewise Marcionism: Marcion said the God of the Old Testament was actually evil, and those books and teachings should be tossed in the trash, along with half of what we call the New Testament today. He forced the early church to "set canon," or determine which books were canonical, a process that included the Hebrew scriptures.
Arianism divided Jesus into wholly human before his baptism, entirely divine after, but Arius lost that theological argument (only after a few centuries of dispute); Pelagianism was the work of an English monk who taught that humans were born good, and only received sinfulness slowly by contact as they grew up.
Then there’s Donatism, Sabellianism, not to mention the Ebionites. St. Augustine was a Manichaean in his youth, and I’m still trying to figure out what they believed, but they believed they’d have a good time doing it.
Heresy is a good subject to study, to learn the basic outlines from the outside of what constitutes faith, and where the edges of belief have been defined. Each age, like each generation, pushes their own edges, but usually not as originally as they think.
Or as an elderly gentleman I knew years ago told me: "Every generation thinks they invented sex, and that older folks had no idea about it. Which when you think about it . . ."
Yep.
So it is with belief systems: most radical new ideas have a history and standard set of arguments that answer them, if you know the story. If I’m going to make a mistake, I’d like to have the defense it was an original one.
"The Gospel of Judas," in fact, has much of the same story Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice put into "Jesus Christ Superstar" back in 1970. Which is itself getting kinda old, come to think of it.
But I’ll watch it again this week anyhow.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; send your outdated ideas to disciple@voyager.net, and he will likely recycle them.