Was the Gospel or Mary and Gospel of Judas were hidden away?”
Near Eastern Archaeology, September 2007 by David Frankfurter Summary: The article discusses the Gospel of Judas, in the context of the many discussions in the early Christian church over the nature of Jesus Christ and the meaning of his crucifixion and resurrection. Topics discussed include the doctrine of docetism, which holds that God only assumed human form in Jesus and did not become human in essence; the place of the other disciples in relation to Judas; and the Judas gospel in relation to other non-canonical texts such as the Nag Hammadi Library and other New Testament apocrypha from the gnostic and other traditions. Excerpt from Article: An Historian^s View of the Gospel of Judas T he general public may be forgiven for thinking that the newly released Gospel of ]udas has meaning only for the historical discussion of Jesus’s betrayer, the range and depth of early Christian diversity from manuscript discoveties like the Nag Hammadi Library, an extensive cache of ancient revelator
The Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic gospel purported to document conversations between the apostle Judas Iscariot and Jesus Christ. The document is not claimed to have been written by Judas himself, but rather by Gnostic followers of Jesus. It exists in an early fourth-century Coptic text, though it has been proposed, but not proven, that the text is a translation of an earlier Greek version. The Gospel of Judas is probably from no earlier than the second century, since it contains theology that is not represented before the second half of the second century, and since its introduction and epilogue assume the reader is familiar with the canonical Gospels. The oldest Coptic document has been carbon dated to AD 280, plus or minus 50 years. According to the canonical Gospels of the New Testament, (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), Judas betrayed Jesus to Jerusalem’s Temple authorities, which handed Jesus over to the prefect Pontius Pilate, representative of the occupying Roman Empire, for cruc
