Joseph's profileFaith Seeking Understand...PhotosBlogListsMore  |  Tools Help |
|
|
Is it true to say that God made you so that he could love you? "So, yes, God made us in order that he might love us. But "love" there
is not primarily his getting satisfaction from us, but rather giving us
the privilege of getting satisfaction from him." –John Piper, Is it true... Faith and Reason - A Clarification"Opposite of faith is not reason-the opposite of faith is unbelief. Opposite of reason is not faith-the opposite of reason is irrationality." –Greg Koukl, Stand to Reason (via Twitter) What do you say about Islam?Excerpt below from Viewpoint: Dr. Michael S. Horton Pakistan: What do you say about Islam? Michael S. Horton: Islam means "submission."
Allah is one person and he does not enter into relationships with human
beings, much less become human in order to save those whom he loves who
stand under his judgment. Each person must submit to Allah, carefully
fulfilling his law, and hope to merit heaven. By contrast, the source
of Christianity is Good News. There is one God in three persons, so
relationship is at the heart of God's own eternal existence. God the
Son became flesh in history, fulfilled the law in our place, bore our
sentence in his death, and rose again for our justification. His
righteousness is imputed (or credited) to us, even though we are
inherently sinful and undeserving of it, as a free gift that we receive
through faith in him. Then and there, we are no longer condemned but
declared righteous, are adopted as co-heirs with Christ, bearing the
fruit of righteousness as branches of his life-giving vine, and will be
bodily raised when Christ returns. We therefore do not fear the Last
Judgment, since we have already heard the verdict: "There is therefore
now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:1). Pensées 441 - A lost God and a corrupt nature "For myself, I confess that so soon as the Christian religion reveals the principle that human nature is corrupt and fallen from God, that opens my eyes to see everywhere the mark of this truth: for nature is such that she testifies everywhere, both within man and without him, to a lost God and a corrupt nature." –Blaise Pascal Greg Koukl on "Jesus Christ, Plain and Simple"The following is an excerpt taken from Jesus, Plain and Simple: Finally, this idea of "Jesus Christ, Plain and Simple" makes it hard to imagine how such a Jesus could transform the world. I have a quote here from Will Durant. He's the author of The Story of Civilization . In part three, "Caesar and Christ: A History of the Roman Civilization and of Christianity from Beginnings to A.D. 325," Will Durant writes this. Now remember, this guy is a world class historian. He mentions that at first there seem to be contradictions between one Gospel and another and there are dubious statements of history and suspicious resemblance to legends of old pagan gods, etc. All this granted he says, "In the enthusiasm of its discoveries, the higher criticism has applied to the New Testament text tests of authenticity so severe that by them a hundred ancient worthies, Hammurabi, David, Socrates, would fade into legend. Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that many inventors would have concealed. No one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic, and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels. After two centuries of higher criticism, the outlines of the life, character and teachings of Christ remain reasonably clear and constitute the most fascinating feature in the history of Western man." Here is a man of world class status that says the higher critics are out in left field and if we follow their methodology nothing would be considered reliable history. Pensées 435- monstrous confusion "Who then can refuse to believe and adore this heavenly light? For is it not clearer than day that we perceive within ourselves ineffaceable marks of excellence? And is it not equally true that we experience every hour the results of our deplorable condition? What does this chaos and monstrous confusion proclaim to us but the truth of these two states, with a voice so powerful that it is impossible to resist it." –Blaise Pascal Pensées 285 "Religion is suited to all kinds of minds. Some pay attention only to its establishment, and this religion [Christianity] is such that its very establishment suffices to prove its truth." –Blaise Pascal Pensées 222 "Atheists.– What reason have they for saying that we cannot rise from the dead? What is more difficult, to be born or to rise again; that what has never been should be, or that what has been should be again? Is it more difficult to come into existence than to return to it? Habit makes the one appear easy to us; want of habit makes the other impossible..." -Blaise Pascal Pensées 198 "The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, indicates a strange inversion." –Blaise Pascal Pensées 195 "For it is not to be doubted that the duration of this life is but a moment; that the state of death is eternal, whatever may be its nature; and that thus all our actions and thoughts must take such different directions according to the state of that eternity, that it is impossible to take one step with sense and judgment, unless we regulate our course by the truth of that point which ought to be our ultimate end." –Blaise Pascal Pensées 194 - reasonable people "Finally, let them recognize that there are two kinds of people one can call reasonable; those who serve God with all their heart because they know Him, and those who seek Him with all their heart because they do not know Him." –Blaise Pascal Even more Pensées 194 "Nothing is so important to man as his own state, nothing is so formidable to him as eternity; and thus it is not natural that there should be men indifferent to the loss of their existence, and to the perils of everlasting suffering. They are quite different with regard to all other things. They are afraid of mere trifles; they foresee them; they feel them. And this same man who spends so many days and nights in rage and despair for the loss of office, or for some imaginary insult to his honour, is the very one who knows without anxiety and without emotion that he will lose all by death. It is a monstrous thing to see in the same heart and at the same time this sensibility to trifles and this strange insensibility to the greatest objects. It is an incomprehensible enchantment, and a supernatural slumber, which indicates as its cause an all-powerful force." –Blaise Pascal More Pensées 194"And how can it happen that the following argument occurs to a reasonable man? "I know not who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am in terrible ignorance of everthing. I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul, not even that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects on all and on itself, and knows itself no more than the rest. I see those frightful spaces of the universe which surround me, and I find myself tied to one corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am put in this place rather than in another, nor why the short time which is given me to live is assigned to me at this point rather than at another of the whole eternity which was before me or which shall come after me. I see nothing but infities on all sides, which surround me as an atom, and as a shadow that endures only for an instant and endures no more. All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least is this very death which I cannot escape. "As I know not whence I come, so I know not whither I go. I know only that, in leaving this world, I fall for ever either into annihilation or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing to which of these two states I shall be for ever assigned. Such is my state, full of weakness and uncertainty. And from all this I conclude that I ought to spend all the days of my life without caring to inquire into what must happen to me. Perhaps I might find some solution to my doubts, but I will not take the trouble, nor take a step to seek it; and after treating with scorn those who are concerned with this care, I will go without foresight and without fear to try the great event, and let myself be led carelessly to death, uncertian of the eternity of my future state."" –Blaise Pascal Penseés 194"The immortality of the soul is a matter which is of so great consequence to us, and which touches us so profoundly, that we must have lost all feeling to be indifferent as to knowing what it is. All our actions and thoughts must take such different courses, according as there are or are not eternal joys to hope for, that it is impossible to take one step with sense and judgment, unless we regulate our course by our view of this point which ought to be our ultimate end." –Blaise Pascal Penseés 185"The conduct of God, who disposes all things kindly, is to put religion into the mind by reason, and into the heart by grace. But to will to put it into the mind and heart by force and threats is not to put religion there, but terror, terrorem potius quam religionem." –Blaise Pascal The first part of the Gospel"We must never forget that the first part of the gospel is not "Accept Christ as Savior" but "God is there." – Francis Schaeffer Schaeffer on the FallWhat does a historic space-time Fall involve? It means that there was a period before man fell; that if you had been there, you could have seen Adam before he fell; that at the point when he revolted against God by making a free choice to disobey God's commandment, there was a tick of the clock. Take away the first three chapters of Genesis, and you cannot maintain a true Christian position nor give Christianity's answers. –Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There Judas and the Gospel of JesusHave We Missed the Truth about Christianity? by N.T. Wright This is the latest book I borrowed from the Library. I am about to finish reading it, so I thought I would begin recording some quotes from the book for future reference, and for the benefit of others who are seeking understanding: Preface I tried again online, and this time it arrived: The Gospel of Judas, edited by Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer and Gregor Wurst, with additional commentary by Bart Ehrman. I also obtained the wonderfully racy and journalistic account of how the original manuscript, having been discovered in the 1970's, was carted to and fro in search of a buyer, getting quite badly damaged in the process, before finally arriving nearly 30 years later on the desk of someone who could piece it together and translate it (Herbert Krosney, The Lost Gospel: The Quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot). (p. 11) I am therefore writing this book to make three points. First, this new "Gospel of Judas," while a spectacularly interesting archaeological find, tells us nothing about the real Jesus or for that matter the real Judas. In particular, it doesn't (as some have claimed) "rehabilitate" Judas over against either the charges laid against him in the New Testament or the anti-Jewish use that was made of the Judas tradition in the Middle Ages. Second, the enthusiasm for this new "gospel" lays bare the real agenda which has been driving both what we might call the scholarly " Quest for an Alternative Jesus" and also the poplar eagerness for such sensational material that we find in books like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Third, the specific teaching of the "Gospel of Judas" only serves to highlight certain features about first-century Christianity that need to be drawn out more fully than is sometimes done. (p. 13) 1. Not Another New Gospel? In the case of the "Gospel of Judas," the 30-year delay between discovery and publication is explained, not by decades of painstaking scholarly work, certainly not (despite at least one press claim, in the British Daily Mail) by any attempt on the part of the church to hush it up, but by the comi-tragic vagaries of the antiquities market. Herbert Krosney tells the story of how the codex, originally discovered by illiterate peasants near the banks of the Nile in central Egypt, made its way to Cairo, and thence by an extremely circuitous route to a bank vault in New York, to Yale University, to an American antiquities dealer, then to Switzerland... and, at last, on to the desk of someone who knew both how to handle it and how to edit it. (p. 21) The codex... actually contains more than the "Gospel of Judas," but this work is (to us at least) by far the most important part of it. The whole codex has become known as the Codex Tchacos, named after Frieda Tchacos Nussberger, the dealer who finally brought the book to Switzerland and passed it on to a proper scholarly editor. It also contains a version of the "letter of Peter to Philip," which we already know from Nag Hammadi; a text entitled "James," consisting of a version of the "First Apocalypse of James," also known in Nag Hammadi, and then, after the "Gospel of Judas" itself, a previously unknown book provisionally entitled "The Book of Allogenes" [From chapter notes: "Allogenes" means "Stranger," one of the titles given to Seth in books of this type] (p. 23) The handwriting and the language itself–a local variation of Coptic, the familiar language of the Nag Hammadi documents–would be virtually impossible to forge. Most scholars assume that the work was translated from a Greek original, for the reason that the same assumption is normally made about the very similar texts from Nag Hammadi and elsewhere. (p. 24) In particular, the document appears quite definitely to be the one referred to by the great theologian of the late second and early third centuries, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, in Southern France.... This is what Irenaeus wrote: [Others again] declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas. (p. 24) 2. Second-Century Gnosticism Irenaeus says that there were indeed some religious groups who actually referred to themselves as gnostikoi, "people of knowledge," and since he was controverting them it may be judged unlikely that he was making this up. (p. 31) The "Gospel of Judas" is in fact a remarkably clear expression of what for many years have been seen as the basic tenets of "Gnosticism." This particular work brings these tenets into sharp focus around a striking narrative: a dialogue between Jesus and Judas, climaxing in Jesus' command to Judas to hand him over to his death, and Judas's carrying out of this command. Marvin Meyer and Bart Ehrman both give commendably clear, succinct and accurate accounts of the worldview and beliefs in question, and the fourfold summary I shall now offer has no quarrel to pick with them. 1. The Most striking feature of Gnosticism, marking it out against the main line of Jewish and early Christian thought, is a deep and dark dualism. The present world of space, time and matter is an inexorably bad place, not only a place where wickedness flourishes unchecked but a place which, had it not been for an evil god going ahead and creating it, would not have existed at all. The world as we know it, in other words, is evil through and through. What is more, human beings, consisting as they do of physical matter, and living in this wicked space and time, are themselves essentially bad–unless, as we shall see, within this shell of evil matter there lurks something very different. 2. This already points to the next main feature. The world as we know it was made by a bad, stupid and perhaps capricious god. There is another divine being, a pure wise and true divinity who is quite different from this creator god. Sometimes this ultimate high god is called "Father," which is confusing for Christians who associate that title with the god who made the world. For Gnosticism, the god who made the world, along with various other intermediate beings who may have had a hand in the project at some stage, is at the least misguided or foolish, and at worst downright malevolent. 3. The main aim of any right-thinking human being, therefore, will be to escape the wicked world, and outward human existence, altogether. "Salvation" means exactly this: attaining deliverance from the material cosmos and all that it means. Only so can one make one's way to pure, higher spiritual existence where, freed from the trammels of space, time and matter, one will be able to enjoy a bliss unavailable to those who cling to the present physical world and who mistakenly worship its creator. 4.The final feature is not so immediately obvious, but it plays a central role in gnostic thought, and indeed is the feature because of which the word "gnostic" and its derivatives are appropriate designations. The way to this "salvation" is precisely through knowledge, "gnosis." Not just any old knowledge. Certainly not through knowing the sort of thing you might be taught in school, or for that matter in an ordinary church. Rather, this special gnosis is arrived at through attaining knowledge about the true god, about the true origin of the wicked world, and not least about one's own true identity. And this "knowledge" can only come if someone "reveals" it. What is needed, in other words, is a "revealer" who will come from the realms beyond, from the pure upper spiritual world, to reveal to the chosen few that they have within themselves the spark of light, the divine identity hidden deep within their shabby, gross outward material form. A wicked world; a wicked god who made it; salvation consisting of rescue from it; and rescue coming through the imparting of secret knowledge, especially knowledge that one has the divine spark within one's own self. Those are the four distinguishing marks of Gnosticism as we find it, not only in the polemic of Irenaeus and other early Christian teachers, but in the texts themselves: the codices from Nag Hammadi and elsewhere, and now the "Gospel of Judas." (pp. 31–34) All of them [Gnostic sayings of Jesus], in the nature of the case, are cast as teachings that will enable the recipients to attain the gnostic-style salvation, that is, escape from the wicked world by acquiring knowledge about themselves as sparks of light, about the origin of the world, and about the true god whom Jesus is revealing and to whom they already, in truth, belong. (p. 35) One key feature of all such texts is their relentless hostility to the main lines of ancient Judaism–which is surprising, considering that not only do many gnostic texts use and reinterpret the Old Testament, but that many scholars believe (not least for that reason) that Gnosticism as we know it in the second century originated in Jewish circles. Be that as it may, these texts routinely pour scorn or even anger on the Jewish god, who is assumed (rightly, on the basis of the Jewish Scriptures) to be creator of the world we live in. He is the evil, malevolent deity, completely different from the ultimate true god, and those who worship him are deceived, foolish and ignorant. (p. 35) Thus whereas most Jews in the two centuries on either side of the time of Jesus were emphasizing the kingdom of God coming on earth as in heaven, and the justice of God breaking in to history to make everything right, rescuing the created order from its plight of corruption and decay and giving to his people renewed (resurrection) bodies to live gloriously within this new world, vindicated after their suffering on his behalf, the Gnostics were teaching precisely the opposite. The true god whom they worshiped was , they believed, "completely removed from this transient world of pain and suffering created by a rebel and a fool." (p. 36) It may well be that it was out of the failure of the various Jewish "Kingdom"-movements in the two centuries either side of the time of Jesus that some Jews, in sad desperation, began to reread their own traditions in this upside-down way. Similar ideas surfaced again much later, within that many-headed Jewish movement known as Kabbalah. If we were to look for a particular moment which might conceivably precipitated a new and strange way of reading the Jewish traditions, and which could explain the rise, around the middle of the second century, of the gnostic movements we know from the writings discovered in Nag Hammadi and elsewhere, and the writings attacked by Irenaeus and others, there is an obvious proposal: the failure of the great revolt of Simeon Ben Kosiba, also known as "Bar Kochba," "Son of the Star." The Romans crushed the revolt in 135, changing the face of Judaism forever. (pp. 36-37) Perhaps that is why, in many gnostic texts, the heroes become villains and vice versa: if the God of the Old Testament is after all a bad god who has let his people down, then maybe the people he disproves of (such as Cain) were in the right after all, and the people he approves of (such as Abel) in the wrong. Thus the strange topsy-turvy world of gnostic speculation takes shape. (p. 37) What's more it is likely that the first signs of this clash are visible within the New Testament itself. Paul refers contemptuously to a kind of "gnosis" which puffs you up, in contrast to love, which builds you up [1 Corinthians 8:1]. And whoever wrote the first letter to Timothy (many think the author was someone other than Paul himself, but it is certainly no later than roughly AD 100) warns the reader [1 Timothy 6:20] to avoid the "foolish empty chatter and contradictions of what is wrongly called 'gnosis.'" Some, he says, have gone that route and have missed the mark in terms of the (true) faith. (p.40) 3. The Judas of Faith and the Iscariot of History ...one of the most glorious names in Jewish history: Judah, the name of Jacob's fourth son. The form "Judas" is simply the Greek version of the same name. The name "Judah" actually means "praise"; Judah's mother, Jacob's wife Leah, declared when she bore him that now she would "praise" YHWH, Israel's God [Gen. 29:35]. What's more, the tribe of Juda came to be seen as the royal family. King David came from Judah. According to ancient prophecy, that was the family from which the true kings of Israel wold emerge.(p.44) One of Jesus' own brothers had the same name; some think he was the author of the "letter of Jude" in the New Testament itself ("Jude" being of course an Anglicized version of the same name, perhaps adopted to avoid saying "the letter of Judas'). This explains why the particular "Judas" who betrayed Jesus was regularly marked out with a further name, "Iscariot," though there is no agreement as to what that word means (a member of the "Sicarii,' the "dagger me," urban terrorists? A man from Kerioth? Perhaps even a retrospective word meaning "the betrayer"?)(p. 45) Matthew says he [Judas] hanged himself, Luke that his stomach split open, and attempts to harmonize the two have seemed to most readers, starting at least with Origen in the third century, to be special pleading. [Note: Mt. 27:3–10, Acts 1:18f.] (p. 48) What is quite clear from the gospels is that Judas's traitorous action has nothing whatever to do with his being Jewish, The suggestion is preposterous: Jesus was Jewish, all the disciples were Jewish, they moved in a largely Jewish world and were spearheading a very specifically Jewish-style kingdom-movement. They were claiming–it was the raison d'etre of the whole movement–that the Jewish God was bringing in his kingdom, in fulfillment of ancient Jewish prophecies, through their mission. (p. 49) In fact, there is no chance of Judas and his betrayal being a figment of early Christian imagination. He is far too closely woven into very early source material for that be even a remote possibility. And... there was no reason for the early Christians to cause themselves such embarrassment as to admit that the man who had betrayed Jesus had been one of the inner circle. (p. 50) The "Gospel of Judas" has no sense of a salvation that is for this world, but only from this world. (p.52) The reason Jesus laughs in the "Gospel of Judas" is not, as Meyer suggests, in a whimsical fashion "at the foibles of the disciples and the absurdities in human life,' but because he is explicitly and scornfully mocking the disciples who are still worshipping the creator god, and doing so in the sacrament of the eucharist. He laughs at them again for wondering about "the great generation," when in fact they will never attain it. And he laughs, too, at the error of the wandering stars, destined to be destroyed, which presumably stand for, or perhaps influence, those humans who wander about in their this-worldly error. I have to say that the attempt to reinterpret this in terms of a friendly, benign, joyful Jesus radiating divine wisdom, over against the gloomy suffering figure of the canonical gospels, is at best an exercise in special pleading and at worst a kind of willful ignorance of what the text is actually asserting. (p. 53–54) [Jesus also laughs in the "Apocalypse of Peter" and in the book called The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, another Nag Hammadi text.] The Jewish scholar Guy Stroumsa summarizes the point like this: Jesus laughs at the sight of the stupidity of the "rulers"–the angels of evil. These act under the command of the god Saklas, who is the God of Israel, the creator of our material and evil world. Saklas and his cohorts intend to crucify Jesus, but they succeed only in killing the material body, and empty shell that the spiritual redeemer succeeded in exiting before the calamity. Therefore Jesus laughs. (p. 54) There we have it: salvation by introspection, or perhaps salvation by Sinatra ("I did it my way"). Was it really, we may ask, worth all the trouble and expense to hear a second-century writer saying what so many in North America and elsewhere already believe? (pp. 57–58) 4. When Is a Gospel Not a Gospel To that extent, as I have often said in the past, the main difference is that, whereas the canonical gospels are news, Thomas and the others are advice. The canonical gospels tell a story of things that happened, through which the world had become a different place; "Thomas" and the others offer a list of musings, teachings, about how one might engage in a different practice of spirituality, and through this means attain disembodied bliss. To that extent, though the gnostic documents do sometimes call themselves "gospels," the manifestly belong to a different genre. (p. 67) In particular, neither of the two obvious meanings of "gospel" in the first century are relevant for the Gnostic. The reference back to Isaiah's messenger of good tidings, coming to tell Jerusalem that her long suffering was at an end an that God was coming back to be king at last, is precisely what the Gnostic does not want to hear. And the wider first-century use of "gospel," as a proclamation about Caesar and his empire, was singularly irrelevant as well. In fact, as I shall suggest presently, that may have been part of the point. (p. 68) To this extent, and seen from the perspective of the canonical gospels, the "Gospel of Judas" is an anti-gospel: a story about the arrival of news which is only good if you have stood the world on its head. (p. 71) The canonical gospels were being read and quoted as carrying authority in the early and middle second century, whereas we do not even hear of the non-canonical ones until the middle or end of that century. Attempts to postulate early (in some cases very early) versions of some of the gnostic texts such as "Thomas" or "Peter" have not commanded much general assent outside a vocal North American minority. Indeed, strong arguments have recently been advanced to show that, despite the desperate attempts to push "Thomas" into the early years of the second century or even all the way back into the first, the high probability is that it, like the other Nag Hammadi documents and the "Gospel of Judas" itself, was composed or compiled in the middle or late second century. (pp. 77–78) Here are the alternative historical possibilities. 1. A movement which began as a first-century Palestinian Jewish Kingdom-of-God movement, couched in apocalyptic language and imagery designed to refer to coming great events and invest them with their theological significance, quickly gave rise to a literature which preserved this perspective, but then gradually gave birth, through transplantation into different cultural and philosophical soil, to a different worldview and literature in which some of the same language was being used but in which the worldview in question was that of Hellenistic dualism. 2. Jesus of Nazareth really did teach a kind of Gnosticism, or even (as is sometimes suggested) a kind of Buddhism, a spirituality of self-discovery on the one hand and escape on the other, and this was then translated by the canonical evangelists and/or their sources into a fictitious first-century Palestinian Jewish Kingdom-of-God movement, complete with remarkably well fitting and dovetailed traditions about the extraordinary human being at its center, while the true message of, and about, Jesus was preserved in traditions which in other respects bear all the hallmarks of a Hellenized, Platonized second-century movement. As a historian I find the first of these sequences credible and natural, the second incredible and forced. When I meet that sort of choice elsewhere in my work–or, indeed, in ordinary life–I know which way to go. (p.79–80) When it all comes down to it, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John believed that Jesus really was Israel's Messiah, and that had indeed come to bring about the kingdom of the one creator God on earth as in heaven. "Judas," like "Thomas" and the other Gnostic texts, believe that that would have been a disastrous mistake and that Jesus had come to show the way out of Judaism, out of the wicked created order, and off into a different realm altogether. (p. 81) For the earliest Christians, the word "gospel" was on the one hand rooted in the Old Testament, and was on the other hand confronting a very different "gospel" out on the street. That very different "gospel" was the "gospel" of Caesar. This is perhaps the most telling difference between the Gnostics (however much they may have thought they were revering Jesus) and the Christians represented by people like Ignatius, Justin and Irenaeus. (p. 82–83) 5. Lord of the World or Escaper from the World? In the middle of this story [four canonical gospels], blindingly obvious to almost everyone in the first century and astonishingly opaque (so it seems) to almost everyone in the twenty-first, is the story of Jesus and Caesar... Caesar's accession and his birthday were occasions of "good news": euangelion in Greek, the same word as in the New Testament. (pp. 86–87) And John's gospel ends, as they all do only more so, not with an escapist spirituality embodied by Jesus and now to be imitated by his followers, but with the note of creation renewed and of Jesus as its Lord and God. (p. 88) The Gnostic can escape from political confrontation into the world of private spirituality. The Pauline Christian must trust the world's true Lord and stay to see the thing through, even, if necessary, at the cost of martyrdom. (p. 89) The greatest theme of Paul's greatest letter is precisely God's justice, God's longing to put the world right once and for all, bringing with it the promise of salvation not from the world but for the world [Note: Romans 8:18–27]. But that promise generates and sustains, not the normal type of political or military revolution, but a cheerful celebration of the victory of Jesus the Messiah over death itself, the tyrant's last weapon, so that the very cross which had been the symbol of Caesar's hated rule now becomes the symbol of the unsearchable depths of love at the heart of the creator God, Israel's God. And victory over death does not mean colluding with death, regarding death itself as a friend, as does the "Gospel of Judas." Victory over death means regarding death as the ultimate enemy, defeated by Jesus and no longer able to terrify [1Cor. 15:20–28]. (p. 91–92) Here is the irony: that the gnostic gospels are today being trumpeted as the radical alternatives to the oppressive and conservative canonical gospels, but the historical reality was just the opposite. The Gnostics were quite content to capitulate to their surrounding culture, in which mystery-religions, self-discovery, Platonic spirituality of various sorts, and coded revelations of hidden truths were the stock in trade. In other words, the Gnostics were the cultural conservatives, sticking with the kind of religion that everyone already knew. As such, when we read their writings without the rose-tinted spectacles of Meyer, Ehrman and others, they are bound to strike us (to use our modern, anachronistic language) as fairly thoroughly sexist, anti-Semitic, and lacking the courage to stand out against the ideologies and authorities of their day. It was the Christians who were breaking new ground, and risking their necks as they did so. (p.101) For Gnosticism the created order is essentially bad. There is no point in expecting things to be put right within it either now or in the future. Salvation therefore consists precisely not in resurrection–why would you want to get a body back again?– but in escaping from it altogether. As Bart Ehrman expresses it graphically, According to most gnostics, this material world is not our home. We are trapped here, in these bodies of flesh, and we need to learn how to escape... Since the point is to allow the soul to leave this world behind and to enter into "that great and holy generation"–that is, the divine realm that transcends this world–a resurrection of the body is the very last thing that Jesus, or any of his true followers, would want. (p. 103) 6. Spinning Judas: The New Myth of Christian Origins One of the first things that the editors of the "Gospel of Judas" have tried to make out–and one of the things that have inevitably attracted headlines–is that this new document rehabilitates Judas Iscariot, after all the bad press he has had for betraying Jesus to the authorities. (p. 109) Notice how Meyer smuggles in a medieval view into the canonical gospels in order to make it appear that the "Gospel of Judas" presents a good, and politically correct, answer to them. Nowhere in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John is their in fact the slightest suggestion that Judas's betrayal, and his guilt for it, have anything whatever to do with his being a Jew. When Meyer says "the Biblical tradition," he really means "the tradition which, a thousand years after the Bible was written, used it in one particular way." As we have said already, Jesus was a Jew; all the disciples were Jewish; two other people in Jesus' immediate following (one of the Twelve, and one of Jesus' own brothers) were called "Judah" (p. 110–111) The only really Jewish thing about the "Gospel of Judas" is that by referring to Adam, Seth and so on, it makes use of the book of Genesis. But it does so in order to subvert Judaism, to overturn it completely from within, by deliberately reading the text against the grain. If "Judas" was written by the "Cainites," they were deliberately making the villain of Genesis (Cain) in to the hero, just as they were doing to the apparent villain (Judas) of the gospels. (p. 113) Nobody in the first century–certainly not the canonical evangelists or their sources–saw the betrayal of Judas as in any sense a sign of a"break" between Jesus and Judaism. Like Meyer, Ehrman is simply reading medieval ideas back into texts which are completely innocent of them.... any suggestion that a revisionist account of Judas and his betrayal will throw the switch between a "Jesus against Judaism" view and a "Jesus within Judaism" view is whistling in the wind. (p. 115) We must not forget... that the "Gospel of Judas" speaks of the creator God, the God of Judaism, as an inferior and actually malevolent deity. As Ehrman says elsewhere... for the Gnostics this Jewish god is not to be worshiped but to be avoided... We might note the comment of a leading contemporary Jewish scholar, Guy Stoumsa: The Gnostics' attitude towards the God of Israel as an inferior deity and the Prophets of Israel as his minions is a clear example of what can be called metaphysical anti-Semitism. (p. 116) After all, the document says nothing about Judas being Jewish; and all that it does say about the Jewish people, by strong implication, is that they are worshipping the wrong deity. They are laughed at, and their worldview is to be rejected. (p. 117–118) But it isn't only a rehabilitation of Judas that the editors claim is on offer in this text. It is also a new and inspiring vision of Jesus himself. (p. 118) The reference to Elain Pagels, whose work we have already mentioned in various contexts, is telling: in her famous book The Gnostic Gospels she continually draws parallels between facets of ancient gnostic belief and telltale aspects of our contemporary self-help culture such as (some forms of) Buddhism, existentialism and the psychotherapy movement. At one point she likens Gnosticism to the philosophy of Feuerbach, a nineteenth-century German whose proposal, that when we talk about God we are really talking about humankind, was important for the existentialist theology of the 1930s, and for the revisionist theories which grew from that, providing the soil in which the new Myth has grown and flourished. Anything will do, it seems, as long as it is not classic Judaism or Christianity. (p.123) The point is that the fashion for favoring gnostic texts, even admittedly very bizarre ones, over against the canonical Scriptures has a great deal more to do with social and religious (or indeed anti-religious) fashions in North America than with actual historical research. (pp. 123–124) 7. The Challenge of Judas for Today In this final chapter I want to suggest, as I have just hinted , that the "Gospel of Judas" might indeed represent the point at which the ordinary reader, long used to being fed a diet of conspiracy theories, "secret gospels," "lost sources," and a host of similar things, would at last wake up, rub her eyes, and declare that if that's what it's all about–meaning by "that" the kind of thing we find in "Judas"–then it's obviously all a mistake, and maybe there is something in classic Christianity after all. (p. 137) It isn't just that they have to apologize, as we saw earlier, for a wonderfully rambling and obscure cosmology. No: it is that the worldview of "Judas" is so dark, so uncompromising, so utterly dualistic, that they must know that the ordinary reader, not least in cheerfully affluent North America, is very unlikely to take it seriously. The only thing to hope for, it seems, is bodily death: is that really a message likely to appeal even to the gnostically inclined in today's world? (p.138) Along with creation, Israel, atonement and resurrection, another Jewish and Christian doctrine that "Judas" leaves out of the equation, because it would make no sense in that worldview, is judgment... we should remind ourselves that in the biblical tradition judgment is good news, not bad. It means that the creator God has promised to make the world right at last, to sort it out, to sift it and straighten it and heal its ancient wounds and wrongs. (p. 139) Once you have removed "religion" from the real world, there is no imperative to do anything about that world. Take away the notion of the world as the good creation of the good God, and the belief that this god intends to put the world to rights at last, and you cut the nerve of the imperative to anticipate the final justice by working for it, in advance, in the present time. All you are left with (along with the need to escape by "discovering who you really are") is the desire, from time to time, to impose your will on the world, calling such an imposition "justice" no doubt, as all empires (and protest movements) do, but draining that word of any objective correlate. (pp. 140-141) Has the "Gospel of Judas" betrayed the dark secret of Gnosticism ancient and modern, that it believes that the god who made this world is a stupid , wicked sub-deity bent on mischief? And how many people, faced head on with that god on the one hand and the Father of Jesus Christ on the other–the latter being, by definition, the God who created the world out of pure self-giving love and has redeemed it by that same pure self-giving love, the God who reveals his glory in taking the weight of the world's evils on to his own shoulders in the person of his suffering son, the God who unveils his future plans for the created order in raising that son from the dead as the start of his new creation–how many people will seriously say that they don't much like the Christian God and prefer the gnostic on instead? (p. 143–144) Of course, Gnosticism ancient and modern holds out a baited hook, Accept its proposals and you can find "divinity" within yourself. Your own deepest feelings and desires can be legitimized because, after all, if you have looked deeply within your own innermost being, what you have glimpsed is the self-authenticating spark of the divine. You don't after all need rescuing–except from the wicked world around you, not least the wicked world that has tried to squeeze you into its own shape, to make you just another duckling, and to mock you for your ugliness, when you knew all along that you were really a swan. (p.144) Unlike the challenge of Jesus, this message doesn't tell you to deny yourself and take up your cross, but to discover yourself and follow your star. That is its great attraction. Unlike the promise of Jesus, however, this message doesn't offer you a world renewed and filled with the justice and joy of the God who made it, but a world rejected and scorned by those who have found a way of escaping it.(p. 144) Classic Christianity, in short, has a lot more life and promise than have ever been imagined by those who propose the new Myth, or by those who offer newly discovered gnostic texts as the panacea for our ills. It is a shame that the churches have been so muzzled, so often self-blinded to the full dimensions of the gospel they profess, the gospel of Jesus himself. In that gospel, as opposed to that of "Judas," we discover a Jewish message intended for the whole world: a message about a creator God who loved the world so much he called the Jewish people to be the bearer of its salvation, and at the fullness of time sent the Jewish Messiah to carry out that saving purpose; a message about this Messiah inaugurating the sovereign, wise, healing kingship of this creator God, in his actions and teaching and supremely in his death and resurrection; a message about the future completion of the new creation which began in the events concerning Jesus, a completion guaranteed by those events and to be put into operation by the power of the life-giving Spirit of this same creator God; a message which calls human beings of all sorts, not to discover a spark of divinity within, but to respond in gratitude and obedient faith to the powerful word which announces Jesus as the world's true Lord, and to discover in following him and belonging to his sacramentally constituted family a new dimension of life in the world rather than an invitation to escape from the world; a message which compels the followers of Jesus, energized by the power of his Spirit, to go out into the world and make new creation happen, confident that as that work has already begun in Jesus' resurrection, and will be completed when heaven and earth are united at last, so the signs of that completion can truly be brought to birth in changed lives and societies in the present time. This is the real gospel. It has to do with the real Jesus, the real world, and above all the real God. As the advertisements say, accept no substitutes. Egypt, the land of Ham - since 2188 BCThe Byzantine chronicler Constantinus Manasses (d. 1187) wrote that the Egyptian state lasted 1663 years. If correct, then counting backward from the time that Cambyses, king of Persia, conquered Egypt in 526 BC, gives us the year of 2188 BC for the founding of Egypt, about 60 years after the birth of Peleg. About this time Mizraim, the son of Ham, led his colony into Egypt. Hence the Hebrew word for Egypt is Mizraim (or sometimes ‘the land of Ham,’ c.f. Psalm 105:23, 27).1 Big bang cosmology
|
|
|
