When Same-Sex Marriage was a Christian Rite

http://colfaxrecord.com/detail/91429.html

Thos Payne
Colfax Record
Sun, 24 Aug 2008 00:00 EDT
© SS. Sergius & Bacchus - 7th cent.

A Kiev art museum contains a curious icon from St. Catherine's Monastery on Mt. Sinai in Israel. It shows two robed Christian saints. Between them is a traditional Roman pronubus (a best man), overseeing a wedding. The pronubus is Christ. The married couple are both men.

Is the icon suggesting that a gay "wedding" is being sanctified by Christ himself? The idea seems shocking. But the full answer comes from other early Christian sources about the two men featured in the icon, St. Sergius and St. Bacchus, two Roman soldiers who were Christian martyrs. These two officers in the Roman army incurred the anger of Emperor Maximian when they were exposed as 'secret Christians' by refusing to enter a pagan temple.

Both were sent to Syria circa 303 CE where Bacchus is thought to have died while being flogged. Sergius survived torture but was later beheaded. Legend says that Bacchus appeared to the dying Sergius as an angel, telling him to be brave because they would soon be reunited in heaven.

While the pairing of saints, particularly in the early Christian church, was not unusual, the association of these two men was regarded as particularly intimate. Severus, the Patriarch of Antioch (AD 512 - 518) explained that, "we should not separate in speech they [Sergius and Bacchus] who were joined in life". This is not a case of simple "adelphopoiia." In the definitive 10th century account of their lives,

St. Sergius is openly celebrated as the "sweet companion and lover" of St. Bacchus. Sergius and Bacchus's close relationship has led many modern scholars to believe they were lovers. But the most compelling evidence for this view is that the oldest text of their martyrology, written in New Testament Greek describes them as erastai or "lovers". In other words, they were a male homosexual couple. Their orientation and relationship was not only acknowledged, but it was fully accepted and celebrated by the early Christian church, which was far more tolerant than it is today.

Contrary to myth, Christianity's concept of marriage has not been set in stone since the days of Christ, but has constantly evolved as a concept and ritual.

Prof. John Boswell, the late Chairman of Yale University's history department, discovered that in addition to heterosexual marriage ceremonies in ancient Christian church liturgical documents, there were also ceremonies called the "Office of Same-Sex Union" (10th and 11th century), and the "Order for Uniting Two Men" (11th and 12th century).

These church rites had all the symbols of a heterosexual marriage: the whole community gathered in a church, a blessing of the couple before the altar was conducted with their right hands joined, holy vows were exchanged, a priest officiated in the taking of the Eucharist and a wedding feast for the guests was celebrated afterwards. These elements all appear in contemporary illustrations of the holy union of the Byzantine Warrior-Emperor, Basil the First (867-886 CE) and his companion John.

Such same gender Christian sanctified unions also took place in Ireland in the late 12thand/ early 13th century, as the chronicler Gerald of Wales (Geraldus Cambrensis) recorded.

Same-sex unions in pre-modern Europe list in great detail some same gender ceremonies found in ancient church liturgical documents. One Greek 13th century rite, "Order for Solemn Same-Sex Union", invoked St. Serge and St. Bacchus, and called on God to "vouchsafe unto these, Thy servants [N and N], the grace to love one another and to abide without hate and not be the cause of scandal all the days of their lives, with the help of the Holy Mother of God, and all Thy saints". The ceremony concludes: "And they shall kiss the Holy Gospel and each other, and it shall be concluded".

Another 14th century Serbian Slavonic "Office of the Same Sex Union", uniting two men or two women, had the couple lay their right hands on the Gospel while having a crucifix placed in their left hands. After kissing the Gospel, the couple were then required to kiss each other, after which the priest, having raised up the Eucharist, would give them both communion.

Records of Christian same sex unions have been discovered in such diverse archives as those in the Vatican, in St. Petersburg, in Paris, in Istanbul and in the Sinai, covering a thousand-years from the 8th to the 18th century.

The Dominican missionary and Prior, Jacques Goar (1601-1653), includes such ceremonies in a printed collection of Greek Orthodox prayer books, Euchologion Sive Rituale Graecorum Complectens Ritus Et Ordines Divinae Liturgiae (Paris, 1667).

While homosexuality was technically illegal from late Roman times, homophobic writings didn't appear in Western Europe until the late 14th century. Even then, church-consecrated same sex unions continued to take place.

At St. John Lateran in Rome (traditionally the Pope's parish church) in 1578, as many as thirteen same-gender couples were joined during a high Mass and with the cooperation of the Vatican clergy, "taking communion together, using the same nuptial Scripture, after which they slept and ate together" according to a contemporary report. Another woman to woman union is recorded in Dalmatia in the 18th century.

Prof. Boswell's academic study is so well researched and documented that it poses fundamental questions for both modern church leaders and heterosexual Christians about their own modern attitudes towards homosexuality.

For the Church to ignore the evidence in its own archives would be cowardly and deceptive. The evidence convincingly shows that what the modern church claims has always been its unchanging attitude towards homosexuality is, in fact, nothing of the sort.

It proves that for the last two millennia, in parish churches and cathedrals throughout Christendom, from Ireland to Istanbul and even in the heart of Rome itself, homosexual relationships were accepted as valid expressions of a God-given love and commitment to another person, a love that could be celebrated, honored and blessed, through the Eucharist in the name of, and in the presence of, Jesus Christ.

Notes on the findings of Prof. John Boswell concerning the performance of same-sex marriages by the church from the 4th century to the present.

DNA of Jesus-era shrouded man in Jerusalem reveals earliest case of leprosy

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-12/thuo-doj121609.php

DNA of Jesus-era shrouded man in Jerusalem reveals earliest case of leprosy
Rebecca Zeffert
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:14 EST
© Prof. Shimon Gibson
This is part of the tomb where the shrouded man was found. Note the remains of plaster around the entrance.
Burial shroud proves Turin Shroud not from 1st century C.E. Jerusalem.

The DNA of a 1st century shrouded man found in a tomb on the edge of the Old City of Jerusalem has revealed the earliest proven case of leprosy. Details of the research will be published December 16 in the PloS ONE Journal.

The molecular investigation was undertaken by Prof. Mark Spigelman and Prof. Charles Greenblatt and of the Sanford F. Kuvin Center for the Study of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Prof. Carney Matheson and Ms. Kim Vernon of Lakehead University, Canada, Prof. Azriel Gorski of New Haven University and Dr. Helen Donoghue of University College London. The archaeological excavation was led by Prof. Shimon Gibson, Dr. Boaz Zissu and Prof. James Tabor on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

The burial cave, which is known as the Tomb of the Shroud, is located in the lower Hinnom Valley and is part of a 1st century C.E. cemetery known as Akeldama or 'Field of Blood' (Matthew 27:3-8; Acts 1:19) - next to the area where Judas is said to have committed suicide. The tomb of the shrouded man is located next to the tomb of Annas, the high priest (6-15 C.E.), who was the father in law of Caiaphas, the high priest who betrayed Jesus to the Romans. It is thus thought that this shrouded man was either a priest or a member of the aristocracy. According to Prof. Gibson, the view from the tomb would have looked directly toward the Jewish Temple.
No second burial © Prof. Shimon Gibson

This is a sample of hair of the shrouded man, which had been ritually cut before burial.

What is particularly rare about this tomb is that it was clear this man, which is dated by radiocarbon methods to 1-50 C.E., did not receive a secondary burial. Secondary burials were common practice at the time, where the bones were removed after a year and placed in an ossuary (a stone bone box). In this case, however, the entrance to this part of the tomb was completely sealed with plaster. Prof. Spigelman believes this is due to the fact that this man had suffered from leprosy and died of tuberculosis, as the DNA of both diseases was found in his bones.

Historically, disfiguring diseases - particularly leprosy - caused the afflicted individuals to be ostracized from their communities. However, a number of indications - the location and size of the tomb, the type of textiles used as shroud wrappings, and the clean state of the hair - suggest that the shrouded individual was a fairly affluent member of society in Jerusalem and that tuberculosis and leprosy may have crossed social boundaries in the first century C.E.

Disproves Turin Shroud?

This is also the first time fragments of a burial shroud have been found from the time of Jesus in Jerusalem. The shroud is very different to that of the Turin Shroud, hitherto assumed to be the one that was used to wrap the body of Jesus. Unlike the complex weave of the Turin Shroud, this is made up of a simple two-way weave, as the textiles historian Dr. Orit Shamir was able to show.

Based on the assumption that this is representative of a typical burial shroud widely used at the time of Jesus, the researchers conclude that the Turin Shroud did not originate from Jesus-era Jerusalem.

The excavation also found a clump of the shrouded man's hair, which had been ritually cut prior to his burial. These are both unique discoveries because organic remains are hardly ever preserved in the Jerusalem area owing to high humidity levels in the ground.

Social health in antiquity
© Prof. Shimon Gibson

This is a sample of the shroud which shows the simple two-way weave used for burial shrouds in 1st century C.E. Jerusalem.
According to Prof. Spigelman and Prof. Greenblatt, the origins and development of leprosy are largely obscure. Leprosy in the Old Testament may well refer to skin rashes such as psoriasis. The leprosy known to us today was thought to have originated in India and brought over to the Near East and to Mediterranean countries in the Hellenistic period. The results from the first-century C.E. Tomb of the Shroud fill a vital gap in our knowledge of this disease.

Furthermore, the new research has shown that molecular pathology clearly adds a new dimension to the archaeological exploration of disease in ancient times and provides us with a better understanding of the evolution, geographic distribution and epidemiology of disease and social health in antiquity.

The co-infection of both leprosy and tuberculosis here and in 30 percent of DNA remains in Israel and Europe from the ancient and modern period provided evidence for the postulate that the medieval plague of leprosy was eliminated by an increased level of tuberculosis in Europe as the area urbanized.

Does Death Exist? New Theory Says 'No'

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/does-death-exist-new-theo_b_384515.html

Robert Lanza, M.D.Scientist; author, "Biocentrism"
Posted: December 8, 2009 04:06 PM
Does Death Exist? New Theory Says 'No'

Many of us fear death. We believe in death because we have been told we will die. We associate ourselves with the body, and we know that bodies die. But a new scientific theory suggests that death is not the terminal event we think.

One well-known aspect of quantum physics is that certain observations cannot be predicted absolutely. Instead, there is a range of possible observations each with a different probability. One mainstream explanation, the "many-worlds" interpretation, states that each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe (the 'multiverse'). A new scientific theory - called biocentrism - refines these ideas. There are an infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death does not exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them. Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling - the 'Who am I?'- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn't go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?

Consider an experiment that was recently published in the journal Science showing that scientists could retroactively change something that had happened in the past. Particles had to decide how to behave when they hit a beam splitter. Later on, the experimenter could turn a second switch on or off. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle did in the past. Regardless of the choice you, the observer, make, it is you who will experience the outcomes that will result. The linkages between these various histories and universes transcend our ordinary classical ideas of space and time. Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply holo-projecting either this or that result onto a screen. Whether you turn the second beam splitter on or off, it's still the same battery or agent responsible for the projection.

According to Biocentrism, space and time are not the hard objects we think. Wave your hand through the air - if you take everything away, what's left? Nothing. The same thing applies for time. You can't see anything through the bone that surrounds your brain. Everything you see and experience right now is a whirl of information occurring in your mind. Space and time are simply the tools for putting everything together.

Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world. In the end, even Einstein admitted, "Now Besso" (an old friend) "has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us...know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Immortality doesn't mean a perpetual existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of time altogether.

This was clear with the death of my sister Christine. After viewing her body at the hospital, I went out to speak with family members. Christine's husband - Ed - started to sob uncontrollably. For a few moments I felt like I was transcending the provincialism of time. I thought about the 20-watts of energy, and about experiments that show a single particle can pass through two holes at the same time. I could not dismiss the conclusion: Christine was both alive and dead, outside of time.

Christine had had a hard life. She had finally found a man that she loved very much. My younger sister couldn't make it to her wedding because she had a card game that had been scheduled for several weeks. My mother also couldn't make the wedding due to an important engagement she had at the Elks Club. The wedding was one of the most important days in Christine's life. Since no one else from our side of the family showed, Christine asked me to walk her down the aisle to give her away.

Soon after the wedding, Christine and Ed were driving to the dream house they had just bought when their car hit a patch of black ice. She was thrown from the car and landed in a banking of snow.

"Ed," she said "I can't feel my leg."

She never knew that her liver had been ripped in half and blood was rushing into her peritoneum.

After the death of his son, Emerson wrote "Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature."

Whether it's flipping the switch for the Science experiment, or turning the driving wheel ever so slightly this way or that way on black-ice, it's the 20-watts of energy that will experience the result. In some cases the car will swerve off the road, but in other cases the car will continue on its way to my sister's dream house.

Christine had recently lost 100 pounds, and Ed had bought her a surprise pair of diamond earrings. It's going to be hard to wait, but I know Christine is going to look fabulous in them the next time I see her.

Colossal Flood Created the Mediterranean Sea

http://www.livescience.com/environment/091209-mediterranean-sea-flood.html

Colossal Flood Created the Mediterranean Sea
By Andrea Thompson, Senior Writer
09 December 2009

The Mediterranean Sea as we know it today formed about 5.3 million years ago when Atlantic Ocean waters breached the strait of Gibraltar, sending a massive flood into the basin.

Geologists have long known that the Mediterranean became isolated from the world's oceans around 5.6 million years ago, evaporating almost completely in the hundreds of thousands of years that followed.

Scientists also largely agree that the Mediterranean basin was refilled when the movements of Earth's crustal plates caused the ground around the Gibraltar Strait to subside, allowing the ocean waters of the Atlantic to cut through the rock separating the two basins and refill the sea.

But exactly how the waters cut their way through and how long it took them to do so wasn't known.

A new study that used seismic data and holes drilled into the rock at the strait revealed that the ocean water cut a 124-mile- (200-kilometer-) long channel across the strait over the course of several thousand years.

The team that conducted the study estimates that the water flowed across slowly at first, over a period of several thousand years. (Though slow in this case is still three times the rate of discharge of the Amazon River today.) But 90 percent of the water likely came over in a rush over the course of several months to two years. Peak rates of water level rise in the basin may have been as high as 33 feet (10 meters) per day, the study authors report.

But rather than rushing over in a giant version of Niagara Falls, the flood likely took the shape of a huge water ramp several miles wide, descending from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, the study, led by Daniel Garcia-Castellanos of the Institut de Ciencies de la Terra Jaume Almera, CSIC in Barcelona, Spain.

The study's findings are detailed in the Dec. 9 issue of the journal Nature.

Ancient Book of Mark Found Not So Ancient After All

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091211203717.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Ancient Book of Mark Found Not So Ancient After All
ScienceDaily
Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:00 EST

The University of Chicago has found after careful study that what was previously was thought be a very old copy of the Gospel of Mark in its library is a modern fraud.

A biblical expert at the University of Chicago, Margaret M. Mitchell, together with experts in micro-chemical analysis and medieval bookmaking, has concluded that one of the University Library's most enigmatic possessions is a forgery. The book, a copy of the Gospel of Mark, will remain in the collection as a study document for scholars studying the authenticity of ancient books.

Scholars have argued for nearly 70 years over the provenance of what's called the Archaic Mark, a 44-page miniature book, known as a "codex," which contains the complete 16-chapter text of the Gospel of Mark in minuscule handwritten text. The manuscript, which also includes 16 colorful illustrations, has long been believed to be either an important witness to the early text of the gospel or a modern forgery, said Mitchell, Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature.

"The mystery is now solved from textual, chemical, and codicological (bookmaking) angles," said Mitchell, who first became intrigued by the codex when she saw it as a graduate student in 1982. Comprehensive analysis demonstrates that it is not a genuine Byzantine manuscript, but a counterfeit, she said, "made somewhere between 1874 and the first decades of the 20th century."

Mitchell said experts from multiple disciplines made the findings possible. "Our collective efforts have achieved what no single scholar could do -- give a comprehensive analysis of the composite artifact that is an illustrated codex. The data collected in this research process has given us an even deeper understanding of the exact process used by the forger," said Mitchell. "It will, we hope, assist ongoing scholarly investigation into and detection of manuscripts forged in the modern period."

Since 1937, when Edgar J. Goodspeed a University of Chicago biblical scholar, acquired the Archaic Mark, the manuscript has been an enigma. As early as 1947, scholars speculated about its authenticity. Because it is the closest of any known manuscript to the venerable 4th-century Codex Vaticanus for the text of Mark's Gospel, Mitchell said, it was believed to be "either a very important textual witness (from the 14th Century) or a forgery based upon some late 19th-century critical edition of the Greek New Testament incorporating the readings of the Vatican manuscript." The modern blue pigment in the illustrations, indentified in 1989, would support the latter, but Mitchell explained this finding was not definitive because the pigment could have come from a restoration effort on an earlier manuscript.

In 2006, the University of Chicago Library digitized the Archaic Mark, making it available to scholars worldwide and stimulating renewed interest in it. The following year, in response to that growing interest in the mysterious manuscript, Alice Schreyer, Director of the Special Collections Research Center, convened a committee to lead a complete and definitive examination of the material components of the Archaic Mark.

The Library commissioned materials analysis from McCrone Associates, and enlisted the aid of Abigail Quandt, a rare books expert and preservationist at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Last January, Joseph G. Barabe, a senior scientist at McCrone, took 24 samples of parchment, ink and a range of paints used in illustrations. Barabe analyzed the samples using an array of techniques -- polarized light; energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry; the scanning electron microscope for elemental analysis; X-ray diffraction; Fourier Transform infrared spectroscopy; and Raman spectroscopy. Under microscopic analysis, Barabe and his colleagues found no evidence of retouching of any kind in the manuscript, disproving earlier suspicions of restoration attempts.

Barabe determined the Archaic Mark was created after 1874 -- using materials not available until the late 19th century -- on a parchment substrate dating from about the middle of the 16th century. Carbon dating determined the animal hide was from some time between 1485-1631.

The rest of the authentication team confirmed and helped interpret Barabe's findings.

Quandt carefully reconstructed the steps the modern forger took to produce the manuscript, from preparing the parchment, to the painting of images and inscription of text, as well as the application of the modern coating, cellulose nitrate. Quandt also identified specific ways in which its production defies usual Byzantine procedures, and she determined that the reused parchment contains no recoverable text underneath.

Mitchell completed the analysis with a study of the textual edition the forger had used. She confirmed and refined Stephen C. Carlson's proposal that the modern edition from which the forger copied the text was the 1860 edition of the Greek New Testament by Philipp Buttmann. Mitchell identified telltale readings in the Archaic Mark that arose from the original 1856 edition of Buttmann's critical text, reproducing errors later corrected in the flurry of collations of the famous manuscript Vaticanus between 1857 and 1867.

Mitchell, Barabe and Quandt have detailed these findings in a paper scheduled for February publication in the journal Novum Testamentum.

God's beliefs mirror our own

http://futurity.org/society-culture/gods-beliefs-mirror-our-own/

God's beliefs mirror our own
Steve Koppes
Futurity.org
Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:31 EST

People often set their moral compasses according to what they presume to be God's standards, say researchers from the University of Chicago. "The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing," they note.

University of Chicago - Religious people tend to use their own beliefs as a guide in thinking about what God believes, but are less constrained when reasoning about other people's beliefs, according to a new study.

Nicholas Epley, professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business [1], led the research, which included a series of survey and neuroimaging studies to examine the extent to which people's own beliefs guide their predictions about God's beliefs. The findings - published in the Nov. 30 early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) [2] - extend existing work in psychology showing that people are often egocentric when they infer other people's beliefs.

The PNAS paper reports the results of seven separate studies. The first four include surveys of Boston rail commuters, Chicago undergraduate students, and a nationally representative database of online respondents in the United States. In these surveys, participants reported their own belief about an issue, their estimated God's belief, along with a variety of others, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Major League Baseball's Barry Bonds, President George W. Bush, and an average American.

Two other studies directly manipulated people's own beliefs and found that inferences about God's beliefs tracked their own beliefs. Study participants were asked, for example, to write and deliver a speech that supported or opposed the death penalty in front of a video camera. Their beliefs were surveyed both before and after the speech.

Nicholas Epley, professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, led the research, which included a series of survey and neuroimaging studies to examine the extent to which people's own beliefs guide their predictions about God's beliefs.

The final study involved functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the neural activity of test subjects as they reasoned about their own beliefs versus those of God or another person. The data demonstrated that reasoning about God's beliefs activated many of the same regions that become active when people reasoned about their own beliefs.

The researchers note that people often set their moral compasses according to what they presume to be God's standards. "The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing," they conclude. "This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing."

But the research in no way denies the possibility that God's presumed beliefs also may provide guidance in situations where people are uncertain of their own beliefs, the coauthors note.

Researchers from Australia's Monash University contributed to the study that was funded by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Templeton Foundation, and National Science Foundation.

Gospel According to Judas

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/04/02/elaine_pagels/print.html

April 2, 2007
Gospel According to Judas
The recently unearthed Gospel of Judas “contradicts everything we know about Christianity,” says religious historian Elaine Pagels.
by Steve Paulson

As almost every child knows, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus, selling his life for 30 pieces of silver. If there's an arch villain in the story of Jesus, it's Judas Iscariot. Or is it? The newly discovered Gospel of Judas suggests that Judas was, in fact, the favorite disciple, the only one Jesus trusted to carry out his final command to hand him over to the Romans.

Rumors about the gospel have circulated for centuries. Early church fathers called it a "very dangerous, blasphemous, horrendous gospel," according to historian Elaine Pagels. We now know that the manuscript was passed around the shadowy world of antiquities dealers, at one point sitting in a safe deposit box in a small town in New York for 17 years. Pagels herself was once asked by a dealer in Cleveland to examine it, but he only showed her the last few pages, which revealed little more than the title page. She assumed there was nothing of significance. Finally, the manuscript was acquired by the National Geographic Society, which hired Pagels as a consultant to study it.

More than any other scholar, Pagels has brought the lost texts of early Christianity to public attention. A Princeton historian of religion, she wrote the 1979 bestseller "The Gnostic Gospels" -- the book that launched the popular fascination with the Nag Hammadi manuscripts found by Egyptian peasants in 1945. That book, which won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, was later chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century. Pagels went on to write a series of acclaimed books about early Christianity and, along the way, recounted her own personal tragedies -- her young son's death after a long illness and, just a year later, her first husband's death in a hiking accident. It's no surprise that Pagels has felt compelled to wrestle with some of religion's thorniest subjects, like how to make sense of suffering and evil.

For much of her career, Pagels has straddled two worlds -- the academic and the popular. She's often the go-to expert when a magazine needs a comment on the latest theory about Mary Magdalene or some other bit of revisionist Christian history. But her standing among the scholars who study early Christianity is more complicated. Conservative scholars tend to dismiss the Gnostic texts as a footnote in Christian history, hardly worth all the hype that's been generated by "The Da Vinci Code" and other racy stories. Not surprisingly, these scholars have questioned Pagels' interpretations of early Christian texts.

With Harvard historian Karen L. King, Pagels has written a new book, "Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity." The authors argue that this recently discovered gospel offers a new understanding of the death of Jesus. I spoke with Pagels by phone about the bitter quarrels among early Christians, why it's a bad idea to read the Bible literally, and the importance of this new discovery.

When was the Gospel of Judas written?

As far we can tell, probably at the end of the first or early second century.

So it's clearly not written by Judas himself, or even dictated by Judas.

That's right. And most New Testament scholars would say the gospels in the New Testament -- all of them attributed to disciples or followers of disciples -- were probably not written by the people whose names are on them. If you say, "the Gospel according to Matthew," you might not be pretending to be Matthew if you wrote it. You might be saying, this is the gospel the way Matthew taught it, and he was my teacher. So these are certain followers of Jesus who collected and transmitted his teaching.

Does this Gospel of Judas reveal something new about early Christianity?

Yes, the Gospel of Judas really has been a surprise in many ways. For one thing, there's no other text that suggests that Judas Iscariot was an intimate, trusted disciple, one to whom Jesus revealed the secrets of the kingdom, and that conversely, the other disciples were misunderstanding what he meant by the gospel. So that's quite startling.

It's shocking to suggest that Judas wasn't just one of the disciples but was actually the favorite disciple of Jesus.

That's right. And also the idea that he handed over Jesus to be arrested at the orders of Jesus himself. This wasn't a betrayal at all. In fact, it was obedience to a command or request that Jesus had made.

But how do we reconcile this with all the other stories we've ever heard about Judas? He's the symbol of treachery and betrayal.

Well, he has become the symbol of treachery and betrayal. But once you start to look at the gospels one by one, you realize that followers of Jesus were trying to understand what had happened after he was arrested and killed. They knew Judas had handed him over to the people who arrested him. The earliest gospel, Mark, says Judas handed him over, but it doesn't give any motive at all. The people who wrote after Mark -- Matthew's and Luke's gospels -- apparently felt that what was wrong with the Gospel of Mark was that there was no motive. So Matthew adds a motive. Matthew says Judas went to the chief priests who were Jesus' enemies, and said, "What will you give me if I hand him over to you?" And they agree on a certain sum of money. So in Matthew's view, the motive was greed. In Luke's gospel, it's entirely different. It says the power of evil took over Judas. Satan entered into him.

I think Luke is struggling with the question, If Jesus is the son of God, how could he be taken by a mere trick, by a human being? And Luke is trying to show that all evil power was concentrated in Judas. So they are very different stories. However, other gospels, like John's, suggest that Jesus not only anticipated what was going to happen but initiated it. The Gospel of John says that he told Judas to go out and do what he had to do, which Jesus knew was to betray him. So the Gospel of Judas just takes the suggestion one step further. Jesus not only knew what was going to happen but initiated the action.

There's something else that's striking about the Gospel of Judas. The writer is very angry, and he's especially angry at the other disciples.

Yes, that's where we realized that it's not just a story about Jesus and the disciples. It's a story about this follower of Jesus -- the Christian who's writing this story, maybe 60 years after the death of Jesus. Even using the name of Judas is a slap in the face to the tradition. You realize that whoever wrote it was a very angry person. And we were asking, What's going on here? Why is he so angry? And we discovered that it's very dangerous to be a follower of Jesus in the generations after his death. You know, they say his disciple Peter was crucified upside down. And Paul was probably beheaded by the Romans. James was lynched by a crowd, and so were Stephen and other followers. So leaders of this movement were in great danger. And other Christians were also in danger of being arrested and killed because they followed Jesus. The question for many of them was, What do you do if you're arrested?

And to acknowledge that you were a Christian would probably kill you.

Exactly. All you had to do is say no. Or you can try to escape or bribe the people persecuting you. And many did. The only answer that most Christians agreed was right was to say, "Yes, I'm a Christian." You defy them and you go heroically into the lions. So we've always thought of Christianity as a religion that glorifies martyrdom. Now we realize that we've had that impression because the people who weren't in favor of martyrdom had their writings buried and burned and trashed and ridiculed. And they were called cowards and heretics.

So the Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It's challenging leaders of the church. Here the leaders are personified as disciples who are encouraging people to get killed, to "die for God," as they called martyrdom. This gospel is challenging them and saying, when you encourage young people to die for God, you're really complicit in murder.

Are there also theological issues at stake? This gets at the meaning of suffering, and the nature of evil as well.

It does. This was at a time when all followers of Jesus were struggling with the question, Why did Jesus die? What does it all mean? In the New Testament, the gospels say he died as a sacrifice. Paul says Christ, our Passover lamb, was sacrificed for us. Why? Well, to save us from sin.

But this author is saying, wait a minute. If you think God wants his son to be tortured and killed before he'll forgive people their sins, what kind of God do you have in mind? Is this the God who didn't want animals to be sacrificed in the temple anymore? So this author's asking, isn't God a loving father? Isn't that what Jesus taught? Why are we saying that God requires his son to die for the sins of the world? So it's a challenge to the whole idea of atonement, and the idea that Christians -- when they worship -- eat bread and drink wine as if it were the body and blood of Christ. This person sees that whole thing as a celebration of violence.

You can see why some early Christians would have attacked this gospel. This is very threatening to other Christian accounts of why Jesus died.

It contradicts everything we know about Christianity. But there's a lot we don't know about Christianity. There are different ways of understanding the death of Jesus that have been buried and suppressed. This author suggests that God does not require sacrifice to forgive sin, and that the message of Jesus is that we come from God and we go back to God, that we all live in God. It's not about bloody sacrifice for forgiveness of sins. It suggests that Jesus' death demonstrates that, essentially and spiritually, we're not our bodies. Even when our bodies die, we go to live in God.

Does this raise questions about how we should think about the Resurrection? In orthodox Christian accounts, this is considered a resurrection of the flesh.

That's right. The idea that Jesus rose in the flesh is very important for a lot of Christians. And certainly for the martyrs. When people were going to get themselves killed, some of them were asked, Do you believe that you're going to be raised from the dead in your body? And many of them said yes, of course we do. That's why we're doing this. So those promises of bodily resurrection and heavenly rewards were very important for many Christians.

Some of the things we're talking about would seem to have great resonance in the Islamic world. Do you see any parallels between this Christian history and what we're seeing among Muslim martyrs today?

I do. The author of the Gospel of Judas wasn't against martyrdom, and he didn't ever insult the martyrs. He said it's one thing to die for God if you have to do that. But it's another thing to say that's what God wants, that this is a glorification of God. I think he would have spoken in the way that an imam might today, saying those who encourage young people to go out and supposedly die for God as martyrs are complicit in murder. The question of the uses of violence is very much at the heart of the Gospel of Judas. If you have to die as a martyr, you do because you don't deny Christ. But you don't go around encouraging people to do it as though they would get higher rewards in heaven.

Can you put the Gospel of Judas in perspective, alongside some of the other Gnostic texts that have come to light in recent decades -- the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene? Do these really change our understanding of early Christianity?

Before, we had a puzzle with just a few pieces. Now we have many more pieces. We begin to see that in the early Christian movement, people discussed and struggled with all the issues that we now think of as normative Christianity, like, What does the death of Jesus mean? There wasn't one kind of understanding of Jesus in the early Christian movement. Actually, there were many.

In recent years, there's been a huge debate over what to make of the Gnostic Gospels. And plenty of Christian scholars and theologians say there's good reason they were not admitted into the Christian canon. They say the Bible presents the most reliable story of Jesus based on eyewitness accounts. For instance, Ben Witherington has written, "The four canonical gospels have stood the test of time and other apocryphal gospels and texts have not ... This is because the canonical gospels are our earliest gospels and have actual historical substance, while the later gospels have none."

Well, Witherington has a particular point of view to prove. I would say it's very hard to date these other texts. Some of them are as early as the gospels of the New Testament, like the Gospel of John. But what's different is the emphasis. Let me give you an example. The Gospel of Thomas says that all who recognize that they come from God are also children of God, instead of teaching that Jesus is the only son of God through whom one must be saved. It's a teaching that is akin to what the Quakers and some other Christian groups teach, including some Greek and Russian Orthodox groups. The divine is to be found in everyone, and we can discover, at some level, that we're like Christ. It's not a complete contradiction, but it is somewhat different.

But aren't there crucial doctrinal issues at stake in terms of what it means to be a Christian? For instance, was Jesus the son of God? Was the return of Jesus an actual resurrection of the flesh?

In the fourth century, the Council of Nicaea established certain doctrines about what it means to be orthodox: belief in one God, maker of heaven and earth, and one Jesus Christ, his only son and Lord. So Jesus Christ is the only one who brings salvation to the whole world. There are, of course, Christians who believe in Jesus but also wonder whether people can't find God in other religions -- if they're Jews or Muslims or Buddhists and so forth. There's nothing Jesus himself said that contradicts that, as far as I can see. But fourth-century Christian orthodoxy did set out the doctrines you're talking about.

Some people say the historical study of early Christianity really doesn't matter to a person's faith. Being a Christian means you believe in certain things, like the Resurrection, like the Virgin Birth. These are matters of faith, not of historical research. You can choose not to believe those things, but then you're not part of the Christian creed. How do you respond to that argument?

Well, it's absolutely true that the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection can't be verified historically. On the other hand, if you start to look at it historically, you find out that there are plenty of people who call themselves Christians who see those very things differently. There have been Christians from the beginning -- St. Paul is one of them -- who say the Resurrection is not a matter of this kind of body. Paul talks about resurrection as a matter of being transformed. Yes, it's about the body, he said, but it's more like a body of the stars or the moon or the sun -- a body of light. So there are many ways that people have understood themselves to be Christians.

This has huge implications for so many people today, especially those who simply can't accept these kinds of miracles. It does raise the question of whether you can be a Christian if you don't believe any of the Bible's supernatural stories.

I don't think you have to discard all the supernatural stories. The Bible is really about what is beyond the natural. But there are other ways of understanding. For example, the Gospel of Philip, which some people called a heretical text, actually says Jesus had human parents as you and I do. His parents were Mary and Joseph. But when he was born of the spirit, he became the son of the Heavenly Father and the Holy Spirit. In Syriac and Hebrew, the spirit is spoken of in feminine forms, so metaphorically, one could speak of her as a divine mother, just as one speaks of God as a divine father. So there are Christians who didn't reject the Virgin Birth, but said wait a minute, why would you take it literally? Why don't you take it as an image for spiritual reality?

You have spent decades studying early Christian history. Do you consider yourself a Christian?

Yes, I do. And the reason I can is that I understand that there are countless people who've been Christians for 2,000 years, in many different ways. It's not a matter of one version, you must believe this exactly the way I tell it to you. Christian theologians have always said that the truth of God is beyond our understanding. And so we speak in metaphors. Paul said we see through a glass darkly.

I've heard that you didn't grow up in a religious family.

Well, it was a Protestant family, nominally. We went to church, but my father had rejected the Bible for Darwin. He decided the Bible was a bunch of old fables and that evolution was right. So I was brought up to think the Bible was just kind of irrelevant. I grew up and became deeply and passionately interested in it and went to a church and was born again. I was 14 or 15. It was quite wonderful, and I loved what I found there.

Even though your father was a confirmed atheist.

It did shock him, yes. Of course, that's one way adolescents like to shock their parents. I didn't do it for that reason, but it had that effect. The power and the passion of that kind of evangelical Christianity was very real for me. And it was a discovery of something very important -- a spiritual dimension in life that I was not able to ignore. On the other hand, after a year of living in that church, one of my friends in high school was killed in an automobile accident. The people at the church asked, was he born again? And I said, no, he wasn't. And they said, well, then he's in hell. And I thought to myself, I don't believe that. That doesn't match up with what I'd heard about God. So at that point, I decided I had to find out for myself what I could about the early Christian movement, what I believe about it, and what is being said in the name of Jesus that I found not true.

That's fascinating. Basically, it was because you couldn't buy into that fundamentalist version of Christianity that you launched your career as a historian of Christianity.

That's the truth, yes.

Well, this does raise the question of what we mean by God and what we mean by transcendence, and whether there is a transcendent reality out there. Is that discussion of transcendence meaningful to you?

Oh, certainly it is. If we don't understand how important spiritual life is to people, I don't think we're going to understand human beings or the 21st century. There are many people who said religion is essentially over now, and everyone will become rational. They don't understand that the way humans are has a lot to do with religious experience.

Your late husband, the eminent physicist Heinz Pagels, wrote very eloquently about the mysteries of science. Did he influence your thinking about this intersection between science and religion?

Oh yes, he was deeply interested in philosophy and religion and science, and understood how profound and complicated those issues are. When you're dealing with science, for example, you're dealing all the time with metaphors. So to assume that religious language isn't metaphor doesn't make sense to me.

There's a big debate right now over whether religion and science are two totally different domains, as Stephen Jay Gould once said, or whether they overlap. Where do you come down on that?

That's a very tough question. I think religion and science both have a lot to do with understanding and imagination, but they certainly explore the world in very different ways. For example, when the eminent physicist Stephen Weinberg wrote in his book "The First Three Minutes," "the more we know about the universe, the more we know it's pointless and meaningless," my late husband said, "That doesn't make any sense." Einstein thought the more we knew about the universe, the more we knew about the divine intelligence. There are many ways to make inferences from physics. And inferences like that are not scientific at all; they're philosophic.

Of course, there's still a huge debate about whether Einstein was religious or not. The atheists want to claim him for their camp, but religious people say he was actually quite open to religious ideas.

Part of the problem is that Einstein used the language about God as a metaphor. When he said, "God does not play dice with the universe," he meant the universe is not put together in an accidental way. It does show a kind of intelligent process in it. Einstein was speaking about God in the way that physicists would -- aware that language like that is always going to be metaphorical, speaking beyond our understanding. But many people took him literally and said he's a religious man. Scientists said he was just using language carelessly.

Isn't that part of the problem that we get into when we talk about metaphor and the religious imagination? If you don't take scripture literally, how do you take it?

You can take scripture seriously without taking it literally. If you speak about the Resurrection of Christ, all we know historically is that after Jesus died, his followers became convinced that he was alive again. Now, what does that mean? They told many stories. Some of them said, I saw him with my own eyes, I touched him, he actually ate food, he was not a ghost. That's in Luke's gospel. And others said, I saw him for a moment and then he faded -- the way many people say they've seen people they knew who died. What I'm saying is there are many ways that people who believe in the Resurrection speak about Christ being alive after his death without meaning that his body got out of the grave and walked.

It sounds like you're saying that it's perfectly possible to take the Bible very seriously, to be a Christian, and yet not to believe in the supernatural miracles that so many people simply cannot accept.

Well, that may be. I don't dismiss all supernatural miracles, like a healing that can't be explained. Those do happen sometimes.

You've been studying these texts for decades. Has your scholarly work deepened your own faith?

Yes. And the scholarly work is part of the spiritual quest. Opening ourselves to exploring as much as we can about this can be, in fact, an act of faith. At Princeton, there's a course in the study of New Testament that some evangelical students were warned not to take. They called it "Faith Busters 101." And some of them come just to flex their muscles and see if they can sit there and stand it while somebody teaches them about how the gospels were written. But what they usually discover is that learning about those things doesn't change the fundamental questions about faith.

Does faith necessarily involve some leap into mystery, into something that can't be explained?

I think it does. Earlier this year, I was asked to do an interview with somebody who had written a book to demonstrate that Jesus had been raised bodily from the dead. And they expected me to say that was impossible. But I can't say it's impossible. From a historical point of view, there's no way you can comment on that. It's just not susceptible to that kind of analysis. So there's a lot that history can't answer and that science can't answer. I mean, there's a lot about all of our lives that we have no rational understanding of. And so faith comes into our relationships with the people we love, and our relationship to our life and our death.

There seems to be a rather vigorous movement among scientists to try to explain the origins of religion. I'm struck by how often these theories come from atheists. And I think the underlying impulse is to demystify the divine. But can religion really be explained from the outside, by people who are not themselves religious?

Probably not. For example, suppose you found the basic brain chemistry that explains religious perceptions. In fact, there are neurologists in New York trying very hard to understand precisely that. And you find that when people who've clinically died say they've had a near-death experience, they've gone into a brilliant light and then they've come back from some place. This is the flashes of light on the brain as it expires. Well, it may be. And it may not be. Is this a trick that our brain plays on us? Or is this intimations of some other kind of reality? I don't think science is going to answer that question.

Isn't there an inherent limitation to any of those brain-imaging studies? Because there's the whole question, Are we just imagining this? Or is there really some contact with the divine?

Exactly. For example, there's a study now at New York University about epilepsy. We know that epileptics often have an experience of seeing an aura. They can have an epileptic convulsion and they have a kind of vision. It was understood in ancient times to be demonic possession. So if people then say, epilepsy has a certain relationship to electrical activity in the brain, and that's what precipitates these experiences, does that mean that they are not real? I don't think that answers the question.

What do you make of the recent claim by the atheist Richard Dawkins that the existence of God is itself a scientific question? If you accept the idea that God intervenes in the physical world, don't there have to be physical mechanisms for that to happen? Therefore, doesn't this become a question for science?

Well, Dawkins loves to play village atheist. He's such a rationalist that the God that he's debunking is not one that most of the people I study would recognize. I mean, is there some great big person up there who made the universe out of dirt? Probably not.

Are you saying that part of the problem here is the notion of a personal God? Has that become an old-fashioned view of religion?

I'm not so sure of that. I think the sense of actual contact with God is one that many people have experienced. But I guess it's a question of what kind of God one has in mind.

So when you think about the God that you believe in, how would you describe that God?

Well, I've learned from the texts I work on that there really aren't words to describe God. You spoke earlier about a transcendent reality. I think it's certainly true that these are not just fictions that we arbitrarily invent.

Certainly many people talk about God as an ineffable presence. But if you try to explain what transcendence is, can you put that into words and explain what it means?

People have put it into words, but the words are usually metaphors or poems or hymns. Even the word "God" is a metaphor, or "the son of God," or "Father." They're all simply images for some other order of reality.

There's one aspect of the Bible that's especially troubling. What do you make of the many passages that condone violence? Killing infidels seems to be what God wants.

You mean in the Hebrew Bible?

Yes, I'm particularly thinking about the Hebrew Bible.

Well, yes. When you read the discussion of holy war in the Hebrew Bible, it's violent, definitely. This was a war god, identified with a particular tribe, with particular kinds of religious war. Christians often don't read that now. But when I talk with Jewish leaders, they say, yes, we remember that very well because we remember the Crusades. And the Muslims of course say the same. They say, why are you talking to us about violence? Christians have done violence in the name of Christ for nearly 2,000 years.

So how should we read those passages that are so violent?

That gets us back to the question, Can you read the Bible seriously without reading it literally? There are parts of the New Testament which encourage slaves to remain slaves. Do we take that literally? Those were fighting words during the Civil War when some Christians said slavery was part of God's plan and some people should live and die as slaves. I think few would agree with that now. But it was a position that one could seriously take on the basis of many biblical passages.

You're saying that we have to understand context.

I think we do. You were saying that some people believe faith has nothing to do with history. The fact is, somebody wrote those texts. They wrote them in a world in which slavery was taken for granted. That's a different world. So if we don't understand that, well, it says, Slaves, obey your masters, for this is right.

Long-Lost Gospel of Judas Recasts 'Traitor'

http://www.temcam.com/fellows/showarticle.php?article=240

April 6, 2006
Long-Lost Gospel of Judas Recasts 'Traitor'
by Cathy Lynn Grossman
(article co-written by Dan Vergano)

Lost for centuries and bound for controversy, the so-called gospel of Judas was unveiled by scholars Thursday.

With a plot twist worthy of The Da Vinci Code, the gospel — 13 papyrus sheets bound in leather and found in a cave in Egypt — purports to relate the last days of Jesus' life, from the viewpoint of Judas, one of Jesus' first followers. Christians teach that Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, but in this gospel, he is the hero, Jesus' most senior and trusted disciple and the only one who knows Jesus' true identity as the son of God.

"We're confident this is genuine ancient Christian literature," said religious scholar Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He and others on the translation team spoke at a National Geographic Society briefing, where they released a translation.

The manuscript claims that Jesus revealed "secret knowledge" to Judas and instructed him to turn Jesus over to Roman
authorities, said Coptic studies scholar Stephen Emmel of Germany's University of Munster, one of the restoration team members. In the gospel text, Judas is given private instruction by Jesus and is granted a vision of the divine that is denied to other disciples, who do not know that Jesus has requested his own betrayal. Rather than acting out of greed or malice, Judas is following orders when he leads soldiers to Jesus, the gospel says.

Other theologians, biblical scholars and pastors say this contrary text is not truly "good news" (the meaning of "gospel") and will make no difference to believers as Easter approaches. The Bible, they say, is a closed book, nearly universally accepted as the official church teachings since the fourth century.

"Just because you can date a document to early Christian times doesn't make it theologically true," said Pastor Rod Loy of the First Assembly of God in North Little Rock "Do you decide everything you read on the Internet is true because it was written on April 6, 2006? Fiction has been around for as long as man."

Found by a farmer

Radioactive-carbon-dating tests and experts in ancient languages establish that the document was written between A.D. 300 and 400, the team said. Written in Coptic, an old Egyptian language, the gospel was unearthed by a farmer in a "tomb-like box" in 1978, said Terry Garcia of the National Geographic Society. It is part of a codex, or collection of devotional texts, found in a cave near El Minya, Egypt.

The farmer sold the codex to an antiquities dealer in Cairo, without alerting Egyptian antiquities officials. In a secret showing in 1983, the antiquities dealer, unaware of the content of the codex, offered the gospel for sale to Emmel and another scholar in a Geneva, Switzerland hotel room.

Given a hurried half-hour to examine the codex, Emmel first suspected the papyrus sheets discussed Judas, he said, based on a hasty glimpse of the text, which was littered with references to the disciple in Coptic. But the asking price was too exorbitant, as high as $3 million, Garcia said.

For the next 16 years, the document moldered in a Hicksville, N.Y., bank safe-deposit box, deteriorating until Zurich-based antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos purchased it in 2000, alarmed at its fragmentation, Garcia said. National Geographic said it did not know the purchase price.

In 2001, the codex was acquired by the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Switzerland, Garcia said. The foundation invited National Geographic to help with the restoration in 2004 and also reached an agreement with the Egyptian government to return it after its restoration.

Restoration of the thousands of papyrus fragments has made 80% of the gospel legible. The National Geographic Society learned of the find 2½ years ago, Garcia said. The society recruited the scholarly restoration team and got a $1 million grant from the Waitt Foundation for Historical Studies.

The gospel "is an intriguing alternative view of the relationship between Jesus and Judas," Emmel said. It also has Jesus relating a new creation myth and account of humankind's origins to Judas, which suggest God didn't create the world, contrary to conventional Christian belief.

The key passage has Jesus telling Judas "'you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me,'" Emmel said. The passage reflects the view that material things and the body are traps for the inner soul and also suggests a form of mysticism found in some early Jewish thought, said team adviser Marvin Meyer of Chapman University in Orange, Calif.

The Judas gospel is probably a copy of a heretical text denounced by a Christian bishop around A.D. 180, Emmel said. But other scholars, such as Michael Penn of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., say there is no way to be certain it is the same text, given the plethora of devotional texts that were floating around among early Christians.

The Judas papyrus is one of dozens of gospels found in recent decades whose texts fall outside the canon of today's New Testament Bibles. The canon was largely set at the Synod of Rome in 382 when the dominant Christian leaders of the time established the authority of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as the accepted version of Jesus' birth, life, crucifixion and resurrection.

Scripture, like history, was codified by the winners, by those who emerged with the greatest numbers at the end of three centuries of Christianity, said Michael White, director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins at the University of Texas-Austin, He has counted more than three dozen gospels that didn't make the canonical cut. The ones that did, he said, were not in total harmony but shared a theological view of the passion, the crucifixion and their significance that became the core of the new religion.

"In the ancient world, Christianity was even more diverse than it was today," Ehrman said. Not until later centuries did the standard devotional texts known as the New Testament become the bedrock of the Christian faith. Dozens of alternative gospels and creeds lost out in the process.

"I suspect the gospel of Judas was not one of the close calls in this process," said Penn, who was not on the National Geographic team.

The gospel of Judas is broadly representative of "gnostic" beliefs prevalent in the two or three centuries after the death of Jesus, said the Rev. Donald Senior of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, who was an adviser to the restoration team.
Gnostic beliefs hold that secret and personal insights are the key to redemption, rather than faith in Jesus' resurrection, for example. Rather than shedding a new light on Judas' relationship to Jesus, Senior suggested, the gospel illuminates the diversity of thought among early Christians.

And as for Judas' supposed betrayal?

Craig Hill, professor of New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., would let the villain off history's hook, papyrus or not.

"What Jesus did — raising crowds and civic unrest — would have gotten him killed anywhere in the Roman Empire," Hill said.
National Geographic is banking on the new gospel to capture the modern imagination. It plans to feature the gospel in its magazine, books and TV special this Sunday (National Geographic Channel, 8 p.m. ET/9 PT). The Maecenas Foundation will give the manuscript to Egypt's Coptic Museum after the restoration is complete, Garcia said.

'No bearing' on the Easter story

The Judas gospel has "no bearing whatsoever on (the Easter) story, much less on the faith of the Christian church," said the Rev. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. He dismissed the gospel of Judas as nothing more than "an ancient manuscript that tells an interesting story."

No scholar has called the gospel a forgery. But one concern, Penn said, is that it was purchased from an antiquities dealer rather than discovered by an archaeological team.

Scholars fear that such purchases will drive further looting of archaeological sites.

Coptic scholar Rodolphe Kasser of the University of Geneva, who headed the restoration team, said the priority for scholars was saving the gospel before it deteriorated completely.

Tests of the gospel included radiocarbon dating conducted at the University of Arizona, and chemical analysis of the papyrus and ink used in the codex as well as its leather binding. Restoration involved computer and hand patching of the document to reassemble its pages.

"The publication team appears to have done everything possible to authenticate the gospel as an ancient work," said religious scholar Mark Chancey of Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

"There seems to be little doubt that it is, indeed, a late third- or early fourth-century work, and not a modern forgery."

Princeton University religious scholar Elaine Pagels, a restoration adviser best known for her work on the Nag Hammadi texts, said, "The gospel of Judas is an astonishing discovery that along with dozens of similar texts have in recent years have transformed our understanding of early Christianity."

She compared it to other gnostic works, such as the gospels of Thomas and of Mary Magdalene, denounced as heretical by the early church but "loved and copied and circulated by people who thought of themselves as Christians."

Many similar "apocryphal" gospels are attributed to important figures in early Christianity, Chancey said, though most scholars doubt that they were actually written by their purported authors.

"It is clear, for example, that Judas did not write this work," Chancey said. The gospel clearly reflects second-century developments, long after Judas, he said.

Experts do see some value in a Bible news flash that prompts modern believers to re-examine the character of Judas.

The Rev. James Martin, associate editor of the Jesuit magazine America, spent months last year as the theological consultant on an off-Broadway play, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. The script had Judas on trial and concluded that he went to hell as much for his suicidal despair as for betraying Jesus.

"He chose damnation rather than accepting God's forgiveness, and that is our fate if we are so proud we think our sins are beyond God's reach," said Martin.

Meyer noted that Judas has often been used by Christians to attack Jews throughout history.

"The view of Judas as this evil Jewish person who turned Jesus in fed the flames of anti-Semitism," he said, so providing a new view of Judas may help counteract such views.