What has been the response to the Gospel of Judas?
It’s been enormously interesting. We haven’t had a new Gospel like this for 50 years, and certainly not one with material this strange and fascinating. And it raises important issues. One of them is about how we understand the death of Jesus, whether it was something that God actually required before he would forgive sins. The author of the Gospel of Judas thinks that’s a very brutal view of God. You brought that up earlier, but we didn’t really discuss it. Tell me more about that. The author says: “If you say Christ died for your sins, that this is evidence of God’s love, are you saying that God would not or could not forgive human sins without a bloody human sacrifice?” A friend of mine, who was a Christian missionary in an evangelical group, told me that she went to see Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ,” and when she did, she was moved to weeping because it made her feel that God loved humankind that much. Now, somebody could ask, and I think the author of the Gospel of Judas wou
