The Gospel of Judas Revisited

I saw this article today on MSN, and I caught the tail end of a television segment on it the other day. It's about the so-called "Gospel of Judas", which I discussed here, in relation to this article, which Bane linked to.

What people don't understand is that people tried to latch their own baggage and ideas onto Christianity when it was on its initial rise during the first and second centuries. The most infamous example of this was Gnosticism, a heretical movement derived from the same Eastern mystery religions that were embraced by Alexander long before the birth of Christ. The Bible canon was established for exactly this reason: to officially exclude heretesy from the Bible by preventing heretical "scripture" from being included.

As usual, the idiots at Newsweek put the truth about the Gospel of Judas in a quote at the bottom of the article:

Robinson, who tried to acquire the manuscript again in 1993, says the Gospel is a sensation—but only to scholars, not the public. His own book, "The Secrets of Judas," hardly oversells the translation. "It tells us nothing about the historical Jesus, nothing about the historical Judas," he told NEWSWEEK. "It only tells what, 100 years later, Gnostics were doing with the story they found in the canonical Gospels. I think purchasers are going to throw the book down in disgust."

You have to sift through all of the garbage to get to that point and find out that the actual scholars see this "gospel" for what it is: a truly apocryphal attempt to foist some heretical gnostic ideas and history into the story of Jesus. The fact that people are still stupid enough to buy into it two thousand years later is further proof that a passage from real scripture is true:

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
- Ecclesiastes 1:9

Thus saith the Fly... Who happens to have some academic background in early church history, including the gnostic heresy.