Last week I posted about going to a talk on the Gospel of Judas by Elaine Pagels. It was a fascinating talk on something that I have never read. I have recently started reading The Forbidden Gospels Blog by Dr. April DeConick of Rice University. She has a book that is coming out very soon that contests the meaning of the Gospel of Judas. It makes me want to read the book by Pagels/King and the book by DeConick.

The Forbidden Gospels Blog: The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says

“I didn’t find the sublime Judas, at least not in Coptic. What I found were a series of English translation choices made by the National Geographic team, choices that permitted a different Judas to emerge in the English translation than in the Coptic original. Judas was not only not sublime, he was far more demonic than any Judas I know in any other piece of early Christian literature, Gnostic or otherwise.”

DeConick contends that the Gospel of Judas is not about a “good” Judas, or even a “poor old” Judas. It is a gospel parody about a “demon” Judas written by a particular group of Gnostic Christians known as the Sethians who lived in the second century CE. The purpose of the text was to criticize “mainstream” or apostolic Christianity from the point of view of these Gnostic Christians, especially their doctrine of atonement, their Eucharistic practices, and their creedal faith which they claimed to have inherited from the twelve disciples.