Having cried in the presence of H. H. the Dalai Lama, while reading Kahlil Gibran, and listening to my PHIL287 Prof's readings of the Tao Te Ching, I'll admit to being inspired and moved by enlightened earthlings who have generously shared their insights.
As an extension of this, I'm also a fan of Jesus. My understanding of his message has been cobbled together from sources as diverse as Andrew Lloyd Webber to Father Desmond McGoldrick --but the historical/contemporary politics shaping organised Christianity were close to turning me off him permanently until I realised that the man can't be held responsible for 2000 years worth of power trips in his name.
So, I'm really behind the times and have just learned about the discovery of the Gospel of Judas and publication of some of its details in National Geographic. You may or may not know about the Gnostic texts, which are some of the more controversial Christian writings that didn't make the cut when the Bible was being assembled. You can find much more information here, but in a nutshell, the newly-deciphered gospel belongs to this "series", and says that Jesus specifically asked Judas to give him up to the Romans who eventually crucified him.
I find this discovery very exciting because it mainstreams a critical analysis of the politics that were swirling around at the time the Bible was being produced; among other concerns, the elaborate hierarchy and privilege of clergy (being self-professed direct hotlines to a rules-oriented God) would dissolve if the Gnostic message that "all of us carry divine power" became standard thinking...and so the dominant patriarchy, class system and cultural imperialism of that time became enshrined in a book that continues to govern and/or advise the conduct of hundreds of millions of people.
Not only does this gospel further align pre-pubescent Christianity with more ancient world religions, but its allegory of Judas being the brightest student also parallels modern philosophies including: integrative spirituality (see Dr. Wayne Dyer --thanks Julie), systems theory/deep ecology (see Fritjof Capra, especially his latest book: the hidden connections) and even metaphysics (see Stephen Hawking --thanks again, Julie!).
I don't expect everyone to share my take on this, so am pasting below some quotes from the National Geographic article available online, and would love to hear what you think.
...In 313 the Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity. But his tolerance extended only to the organized church, which he showered with riches and privileges, not to mention tax breaks. "Heretics", Christians who disagreed with the official doctrines, got no support, were hit with penalties, and were eventually ordered to stop meeting.
[influential Bishop in 180 A.D.] Irenaeus had already nominated the familiar four Gospels as the only ones that Christians should read. His list ultimately became church policy. In 367 Athanasius, the powerful Bishop of Alexandria and a keen admirer of Irenaeus, issued an order to every Christian in Egypt listing 27 texts, including today’s Gospels, as the only New Testament books that could be regarded as sacred. That list endures to this day [as the Christian Bible].
...“Gnosis means ‘knowledge’ in Greek,” Biblical scholar Marvin Meyer of Chapman University explains. The Gnostics “believed that there is an ultimate source of goodness, which they thought of as the divine mind, outside the physical universe. Humans carry a spark of that divine power, but they are cut off by the material world all around them”—a flawed world, as the Gnostics saw it, the work of an inferior creator rather than the ultimate God.
While Christians like Irenaeus stressed that only Jesus, the son of God, was simultaneously human and divine, the Gnostics proposed that ordinary people could be connected to God. Salvation lay in awakening that divine spark within the human spirit and reconnecting with the divine mind. Doing so required the guidance of a teacher, and that, according to the Gnostics, was Christ’s role. Those who grasped his message could become as divine as Christ himself.
Until recent decades, such doctrines were glimpsed mainly through the denunciations of antagonists like Irenaeus, but in 1945 Egyptian peasants found a set of long-lost Gnostic texts buried in an earthenware jar near the town of Nag Hammadi. Among them were over a dozen entirely new versions of Christ’s teachings, including Gospels of Thomas and Philip and a Gospel of Truth. Now we have the Gospel of Judas.
The Judas gospel vividly reflects the struggle waged long ago between the Gnostics and the hierarchical church. In the very first scene Jesus laughs at the disciples for praying to “your god,” meaning the disastrous god who created the world. He compares the disciples to a priest in the temple (almost certainly a reference to the mainstream church), whom he calls “a minister of error” planting “trees without fruit, in my name, in a shameful manner.” He challenges the disciples to look at him and understand what he really is, but they turn away.
The key passage comes when Jesus tells Judas: “You will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” In plain English, or Coptic, Judas is going to kill Jesus—and thus do him a favor. “That really isn’t Jesus at all,” says Meyer. “He will at last get rid of his material, physical flesh, thereby liberating the real Christ, the divine being inside.”
This is really exciting,” [Meyer] exclaimed. “This explains why Judas is singled out by Jesus as the best of the disciples. The others didn’t get it.”