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Was watching some history video about deleted religious texts the other day and it mentioned that some ancient scrolls that may have been part of the dead sea scrolls suggests that Judas was instructed by Jesus to betray him. Which makes sense in the context of the story and its religious implications because Jesus could not be the savior of humanity if he wasn't crucified.
If you're talking about the Gospel of Judas, that isn't from the Dead Sea scrolls, but was its own distinct finding.
The Dead Sea scrolls are a collection of texts of a cult based around a messianic figure, rooted in Judaism, but dated between the 3rd and 1st century BCE, discovered in the 1940s.
They do not mention Judas, but are interesting in that the actual messianic figure himself seems to have written some of the texts, that he uses some of the same verses and stories from the Torah to identify himself as the Messiah that would later be used by (attributed to being used by) Jesus, that some of the texts were written by others of the same cult after his death, and show how they theologically cope with their Messiah seemingly failing his own prophecies and claims.
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The Gospel of Judas, on the other hand, is dated to the 2nd century CE and was ....well, the story goes it was found in Egypt some point prior to the 1970s, then got traded around by black market antiquities dealers, spent about a decade in a safe deposit box, nearly totally disintegrated, and was eventually shown to a proper academic expert in greek and coptic, leading to it being painstakingly reassembled, radio carbon dated, linguistically verified as not being a much later forgery, and translated, first publicly widely available in English in 2006.
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The actual story in the Gospel of Judas is stunningly bizarre:
You start off with Jesus literally mocking and laughing at all his disciples other than Judas for seemingly not understanding anything he's ever said.
Later, privately, Judas confronts Jesus saying that he does understand Jesus... that Jesus is from the immortal realm of Barbelo.
Jesus then goes on to describe that yes, he was making fun of the other disciples because they think he is the Messiah of Yahweh / The God of Judaism, when in actuality Jesus is a human incarnation or avatar of a completely different divine entity, that Yahweh is actually Saklas / Yaldebaoth, a mad, malformed demiurge descended from a long line of other, superior, more wise and beneficent divine entities in an elaborate and historied pantheon (which Jesus admits his own knowledge of is not total and complete), that Saklas / Yaldebaoth falsely believes himself to be the supreme God of all reality when in fact he only has domain over the Earth, which is basically an innately evil realm, and that all humans were accidentally created with a tiny bit of the pure divine spark in them but are all here trapped and cursed to suffer as basically slaves and playthings of Saklas.
The fragment ends with Jesus explaining that basically his master plan for saving all of mankind involves sacrificing himself to help more people realize their true inner divinity, and that he only trusts Judas, his wisest disciple, to make that actually happen.
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To me, it reads like someone took acid or shrooms and wrote a fan fiction drawing from the 4 more mainstream gospels. Its truly wild.
The 'Judas was actually a good guy' part is basically a footnote compared to how totally out of left field everything else is.
IIRC, Saklas or Saklos basically transliterates to 'The Blind One', which is a name you'd expect a Lovecraftian entity to have.
Idk what the official term i theological circles is, but many groups had trouble squaring the circle between the wrathful and jealous god of the Old Testament with the god of mercy and love Jesus preached. Many groups, such as the Gnostics and later Cathars, rejected the god of the Old Testament as an evil fraud.
I believe "gnosticism" is the term, though I've heard them also called "dualistic" heresies.
I don't know if there is an actual commonly used scholarly term for that concept in general, but yes, the idea has certainly been a cornerstone of many groups and sects.
What sparked my "hmm" neurons the most in your comment is that there are canonical parts of the Bible that sound like someone was having a bad trip too - The book apocalypse or however it is properly called. It describes in detail a vision of death, destruction, animals morphing into animals, has a barely coherent plot, everything is soaking in mystic symbolism - it has all the parts of a bad trip, and yet it's always treated by religious people as at least a valid metaphor of things to come, and not ramblings of someone who ate the wrong cactus in the desert
why make a special exception for this bad trip, and not the other one with an evil yahwe? It really feels to me like the church is cherry picking things to suit their own narrative, instead of somehow dealing with all the apocryphal sources they just ignore them
The varying competing sects and later official churches did exactly that, cherry picking various texts as official canon, in either proposals or meetings of high church officials, for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus.
The first known to propose a list of canon texts was Marcion... who was ironically deemed to be a heretic as he rejected the Old Testament God and the Old Testament itself.
Then you had all kinds of local and regional and imperial Symposiums and Councils to decide what worked and what didn't...
And surprise surprise, this didn't even achieve a unanimous consensus!
Even today, major world and regional Christian denominations include books other consider apocryohal, omit books others consider canon, and divide or combine books differently, and a whole lot of that goes back to all of this squabbling in the 3rd century CE basically going unresolved and creating or laying the groundwork for major schisms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon
Check out the Canons of various Christian traditions sections.
It gets especially strange when you end up with a canon book that explicitly quotes and refers to a book that ... isn't canon, in that particular tradition.
dang that is fascinating! Amazing to see someone with vast knowledge on what seems to be a deeply confusing topic, thank you!
also, goodness, no offence if you're religious but i have no idea how Christianity is treated any different from Greek mythology and the sort - the sources of faith for both are all over the place. Sure Christianity has just one god, but there is an awful lot of different versions of him
and sure you could justify it with various logic like - Satan spreads misinformation, and it's up to the chosen of God to pick out the truth, but if the God's alleged chosen disagree what then? How is one supposed to follow this religion and learn from its teachings if every sect/denomination claims they're the only correct one?
Its maybe less confusing than it is just not talked about. Churches dont like to bring up how mortal people have been sculpting the documents that they say came from god. Its a hard contradiction to swallow, to the point where I think most religious people would change how they worship if they realized the books in their hand are entirely the word of men, written with all of the biases any human has.
Even if we accept it originated from some holy place, the firsthand accounts of those that were with Jesus, we have to accept that that has been translated and copied so many times, by hand, that the words there are no closer to god than Harry Potter.
Sure Christianity has just one god, but there is an awful lot of different versions of him
Are Mormons Christian? They say they are, many other Christians say they are not.
One of many reasons: They don't do the whole Trinity thing.
According to the LDS Church, God and Jesus are separate, distinct. Father and Son yes, but in a literal sense, not as distinct manifestations of the same thing. Holy Ghost is a totally distinct entity as well.
They have very literally added, removed, and edited all of the major religious documents, and have been doing so since the very beginning. Its the ultimate game of telephone.
Its interesting too how many changes were made purely by mistake, in addition to those likely done on purpose.
If you look into the historical study of the changes to religious documents over time, there is a ton of stuff to read and lectures and such.
I don't agree. If anything right now we have the opposite problem where the English world for instance pretty exclusively uses a more than 500 year old translation of the Bible, despite much more modern-English versions being translated from some very early Greek versions of the texts (therefore being more readable and less telephone-y). The reasons for the KJV being preferred are many but none make any real theological or linguistic sense.
What really happens though is not so much a game of telephone than the fact that every culture gets to decide on its own (usually provably incorrect and inconsistent) interpretation of the texts, because the whole thing is so internally inconsistent it's basically a Rorschach test no matter which way you translate it. Progressive Christians will basically tell you that literally none of the Old Testament is to be taken literally which... okay? Extremists sects will do the opposite. Then there's the whole dogma around Lucifer and Hell, whose existence is clearly an inconsistent amalgamation of old polytheist religions and no matter which way you read or translate it doesn't translate to the Lucifer or Hell that most Christians ever think about when they say "Lucifer" and "Hell". That part was just straight up made up over the centuries because it was a convenient scarecrow, yet is is absolutely load-bearing to the dogma of almost every Christian sect. And let's not even get into the feminists and queer people who'd put Simone Biles to shame with their mental gymnastics justifying the Bible being an Ally, Actually™. That's not a game of telephone, that's just Weapons of Mass Denial.
A lot of that region’s religion seems to be the result of psychedelics and not the most gentle kind
How is that any more fantastical than the current interpretation of events?
In one, Jesus thinks he's the son of god, and in the other he thinks he's the son of a different god. A benevolent god is just as likely as a selfish one isnt it?
Its amazing what people will believe when there is no better explanation though, in either case.
This is a Gnostic gospel, and they have their own cosmology that breaks with the mainstream Judeo-Christian traditional entirely. By their account, there was a singular creator god, but there were also a bunch of lesser gods. The ancient Jews inadvertently started worshiping one of these lesser gods, mistakenly thinking he was the main guy. Jesus came to set all this straight, and Judas was the only apostle who really figured this out.
Jesus is a very different character in these. He usually comes off as an asshole. In particular, see the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, where a young Jesus kills his friends with his mind for not sharing the ball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gA8hXDJocQ
Is it more fantastical? Not really, but it's not marching in the same direction as the rest of the story. It's the difference between Captain Picard's mom dying when he was young when we saw him dream her as an old woman, versus Captain Picard walking on the bridge and kicking Riker straight in the nuts for no reason and then lighting up a joint. One is a contradiction, but not really that important when it comes down to it (unless you insist that the material is absolutely true, in which case you have other problems). The other is so far off from the character's normal behavior that we have to assume something is wrong.
There's a fascinating idea that Judas was the one who committed the ultimate sacrifice. That god chose him to be his human incarnate, to truly experience humanity and guilt by committing an ultimate betrayal and becoming the villain of biblical history. All allowing him to finally understand and forgive humanity's sin, by committing one himself. It follows that this is supposedly maddening knowledge as it breaks the illusion of Christ's sacrifice.
I'm definitely butchering and ad-libbing the original idea, but I think this makes for a grander story than the traditional "birth myself to sacrifice myself to myself to forgive everyone else" interpretation.
Where do I read more about this?
I painstakingly used video transcription searches to figure out where I heard this from and I finally found it!
It was touched on in this video Something's Hiding Outside This Game... at 52 minutes.
The actual work being talked about is Three Versions of Judas by Jorge Luis Borges.
I think the user is referencing the Gospal of Judas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Judas
But not sure if there's a larger thought group here to point to
I mean, in the Bible it's explicit that Jesus knew Judas would betray him and didn't do anything about it whether he told him to or not. Not much explanation for that except that a martyr story is a much more powerful message.
Even taking out instruction by Jesus, which would be controversial, the story would not have played out correctly without the betrayal of Judas. He had a pivotal role.
A more friendly interpretation would be that Jesus knew Judas would betray him from the beginning and allowed it to happen, because it was God’s Will.
That's the gospel of Judas, and it's considered part of Gnostic doctrine, which is basically the one thing all Christians agree on, in that they all agree it is absolute heresy.
Like basically considered pagan in terms of how "Christian" it's seen as.
I actually have an idea for an althist based on if the core gospels were instead replaced with the Gospels of Thomas, Mary, Phillip, and Judas, leading to Christianity developing as a wildly more mystical sort of religion, and possibly even less tolerant of old faiths since Gnostic doctrines, of which all four of those gospels are apparently heavily steeped in, believes everything material and old testament related is literally made by satan, would need to actually research that one lol.
Gnosticism, to me, honestly feels like the true story of Christianity. Like, in the gospel of Mary I believe it's basically stated that Mary was the favorite apostle of Jesus and that Peter was jealous. So while all the other apostles seem to have encountered Jesus after his death in a more spiritual fashion rather than a literal resurrection, Peter was the only one to have explicitly met Jesus and seen him physically resurrect after his death. Convenient that Jesus would also tell him, and only him, that he would carry on as the head of the faith.
I just love how much the whole thing feels like the church covering up what really happened, even if it's basically impossible to know for sure.
St. Peter's account of being labelled head of the faith is mostly just Catholic doctrine. Whichever of the apostles ended up in Constantinople, then Byzantion, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Alexandria could theoretically have claimed similar visions and been taken just as seriously because before power was consolidated Christianity was "run" by a Pentarchy of Patriarchs, one in each of the five holy cities of the faith, and each of whom technically equalled the pope in rome in rank, just in the sense that pope's descend from St. Peter while other patriarchs descended from different apostles or early converts.
Had Christianity spread in India you'd probably hear about a Christian Hexarchy with one of the patriarchates based in Chennai.
Which makes sense in the context of the story and its religious implications because Jesus could not be the savior of humanity if he wasn’t crucified.
In what way does the last part make sense? Just asking because it only really does if you buy the whole inherited sin idea and the idea that sins can somehow be transferred to another and the idea that death somehow absolves someone of their sins even without the eternal punishment part that comes after in the rest of the belief system. The term fractally wrong comes to mind, no matter how many of the ideas you exclude from scrutiny and treat as a given, the rest still doesn't make sense.
For one, it was part of the prophecy that's referenced a few times in the New Testament.
For two, martyrs maker good PR. My favorite example is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_of_Antioch
Who near as I can tell arranged his own arrest and execution in Rome, and preached the entire way there to the crowds that came to see a Christian (novel in those days)
I just want to say that this has been the most thoroughly enjoyable conversation I've come across in a long time. Nearly every comment and response has been really interesting. I spent a lot of time upvoting.
Apothrical books of the Bible are a fun rabbit hole! Was it this video?
https://youtu.be/fryITDxUyHA?si=-ROuyoiDy0g_VXJU
5:20 is when they discuss it.
There was also a deleted verse where Judas shouted "IT WAS A PRANK BRO" to Jesus after he came back from the dead.
Let me get this straight. You think that your client, one of the holiest, most powerful men in the world, is secretly the son of God, who spends his nights beating sinners to a pulp with his bare hands, and your plan is to betray this person? Good luck.
Claims to be the highest level Cleric in the game
Dies to a single hit from a level 1 spearman
Judas was correct to take the money. Those apostles would have been TPK'd at Masada anyway.
Yeah but in the lore he chose to let himself get killed so he could flex his resurrection spell.
You're either the most powerful man in the room or you're nothing.
-Judas
Betrayal grindset and Judas-pilled
I mean, he got away with it, technically, didn't he? He only stopped himself.
Depends on which story you believe. Matthew says he hung himself. Acts says he fell and busted his head open in a more accidental way. And then there's a few other accounts that aren't in the biblical canon.
I love the Islam version where he was made to look like Jesus as punishment by God and actually the one who was crucified.
Judas just kissed somebody else that looked like Jesus, it was all a just a conspiracy to take heat off Jesus ass.
3 days later he made an apparition to give some last goodbyes and goes off to to live the rest of his life with Mary Magdalene.
He ended up dying in Japan.
Seeing how Judas is a bit "jewy" in this image, it just occurred to me that it'd be funny to troll christians by portraying Jesus as a stereotypical (racist) Jew (because he was Jewish). I wouldn't do that because fuck racism, but the MAGAts would flip their shit.
Thirty pieces of silver though, man. When your leader's a dirty hippie you kind of miss the finer things in life, you know?
Besides, Big J said he already knew the betrayal would happen, so who is Judas to change what's meant to be?
"Off chance", no, I'd say the off chance was that he was a demigod as claimed
You don't get it. It was written in prophecies - it just must have happened because (supposedly) some guy years before wrote a story about it.
yfw jesus was a schizotypal homeless man cult guy or something. very easy to betray or kill him
Meanwhile, I'm dealing with parents that believe in God, Jesus and the holy trinity while claiming they're not religious.
Here's how that works: First, you get preachers to redefine "religion" to mean "following the Biblical laws", then you get them to talk about how Jesus did not come to "abolish Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.", which somehow means the old laws (don't eat shellfish, don't wear clothes made of mixed materials, etc) don't apply anymore???? Anyway, Jesus said "until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.", but ye olde laws don't apply, and my parents are not-religious Christians.
Oh well, at least they're some of the most loving human beings that ever walked this earth, so if this is the worst I've got to complain about, then my life isn't that bad 😂
They're not "religious" by their own definition, but it's not the definition the rest of the world uses, so it's meaningless. But as long as they're not assholes they can believe what they want!