Word: gospelling
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Somewhere (assuming his theology allows for it) the author of the Judas Gospel must be smiling. Faith's sentries may never cede his man a title credit. But when his treatise finally gets its red-carpet moment, the biggest news may be that even orthodoxy's defenders can have some sympathy for the betrayer...
...first mention of a Gospel of Judas was a critical pan. In A.D. 180 the church father Irenaeus ascribed a work of that title to a group of contrarian believers who were called Cainites because they admired the first murderer, whom they saw as cursed by a cruel God. The 4th century bishop Epiphanius also attacked the text--after which it disappeared from record. "Because it was naughty," says James Robinson, an early-Christianity expert writing a book called The Secrets of Judas, "the orthodox church suppressed it, and it was buried somewhere...
...years ago to Charles Hedrick, a scholar with Missouri State University who has attempted to translate and analyze them. But Roberty claims Hedrick's efforts are flawed in that the first four pages actually hail from a different tract bound in the same leather cover. He volunteers that the Gospel's tone is not pugnacious--"whoever wrote it had no intention of provoking"--but "it will prove those people right who feel that there is more to the Judas story than is obvious from the texts of the canonical Gospels." Its very title suggests a positive or even heroic role...
...time," a comment that both titillates and advises caution. A.D. 150 was a heyday for Christians who postulated a higher God above the God of the Old Testament. The prospect of melding the Judas-Jesus story into this scheme is intriguing. Yet by 150, most experts agree, a "Gospel" said more about the group that produced it than about the facts of Jesus' life and death or even the understandings of his earliest followers. Beyond marveling at the variety of Christian belief prior to doctrinal housecleaning by the early church, an average believer should not find Judas faith shaking...
...that Bush can seem measured in comparison, even as together they haul the entire debate further and further toward their shared vision. Cheney came into office talking about treaties that deserved to be broken, like the ABM Treaty, and powers that needed to be restored. In Cheneyland, it is gospel that Congress took far too much authority from the presidency in the wake of Watergate, particularly with the War Powers Resolution and congressional oversight of foreign policy and the CIA. He fought successfully all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to keep the 2001 deliberations...