this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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If you're talking about the Gospel of Judas, that isn't from the Dead Sea scrolls, but was its own distinct finding.
The Dead Sea scrolls are a collection of texts of a cult based around a messianic figure, rooted in Judaism, but dated between the 3rd and 1st century BCE, discovered in the 1940s.
They do not mention Judas, but are interesting in that the actual messianic figure himself seems to have written some of the texts, that he uses some of the same verses and stories from the Torah to identify himself as the Messiah that would later be used by (attributed to being used by) Jesus, that some of the texts were written by others of the same cult after his death, and show how they theologically cope with their Messiah seemingly failing his own prophecies and claims.
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The Gospel of Judas, on the other hand, is dated to the 2nd century CE and was ....well, the story goes it was found in Egypt some point prior to the 1970s, then got traded around by black market antiquities dealers, spent about a decade in a safe deposit box, nearly totally disintegrated, and was eventually shown to a proper academic expert in greek and coptic, leading to it being painstakingly reassembled, radio carbon dated, linguistically verified as not being a much later forgery, and translated, first publicly widely available in English in 2006.
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The actual story in the Gospel of Judas is stunningly bizarre:
You start off with Jesus literally mocking and laughing at all his disciples other than Judas for seemingly not understanding anything he's ever said.
Later, privately, Judas confronts Jesus saying that he does understand Jesus... that Jesus is from the immortal realm of Barbelo.
Jesus then goes on to describe that yes, he was making fun of the other disciples because they think he is the Messiah of Yahweh / The God of Judaism, when in actuality Jesus is a human incarnation or avatar of a completely different divine entity, that Yahweh is actually Saklas / Yaldebaoth, a mad, malformed demiurge descended from a long line of other, superior, more wise and beneficent divine entities in an elaborate and historied pantheon (which Jesus admits his own knowledge of is not total and complete), that Saklas / Yaldebaoth falsely believes himself to be the supreme God of all reality when in fact he only has domain over the Earth, which is basically an innately evil realm, and that all humans were accidentally created with a tiny bit of the pure divine spark in them but are all here trapped and cursed to suffer as basically slaves and playthings of Saklas.
The fragment ends with Jesus explaining that basically his master plan for saving all of mankind involves sacrificing himself to help more people realize their true inner divinity, and that he only trusts Judas, his wisest disciple, to make that actually happen.
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To me, it reads like someone took acid or shrooms and wrote a fan fiction drawing from the 4 more mainstream gospels. Its truly wild.
The 'Judas was actually a good guy' part is basically a footnote compared to how totally out of left field everything else is.
IIRC, Saklas or Saklos basically transliterates to 'The Blind One', which is a name you'd expect a Lovecraftian entity to have.
https://www.gospels.net/judas
What sparked my "hmm" neurons the most in your comment is that there are canonical parts of the Bible that sound like someone was having a bad trip too - The book apocalypse or however it is properly called. It describes in detail a vision of death, destruction, animals morphing into animals, has a barely coherent plot, everything is soaking in mystic symbolism - it has all the parts of a bad trip, and yet it's always treated by religious people as at least a valid metaphor of things to come, and not ramblings of someone who ate the wrong cactus in the desert
why make a special exception for this bad trip, and not the other one with an evil yahwe? It really feels to me like the church is cherry picking things to suit their own narrative, instead of somehow dealing with all the apocryphal sources they just ignore them
They have very literally added, removed, and edited all of the major religious documents, and have been doing so since the very beginning. Its the ultimate game of telephone.
Its interesting too how many changes were made purely by mistake, in addition to those likely done on purpose.
If you look into the historical study of the changes to religious documents over time, there is a ton of stuff to read and lectures and such.
I don't agree. If anything right now we have the opposite problem where the English world for instance pretty exclusively uses a more than 500 year old translation of the Bible, despite much more modern-English versions being translated from some very early Greek versions of the texts (therefore being more readable and less telephone-y). The reasons for the KJV being preferred are many but none make any real theological or linguistic sense.
What really happens though is not so much a game of telephone than the fact that every culture gets to decide on its own (usually provably incorrect and inconsistent) interpretation of the texts, because the whole thing is so internally inconsistent it's basically a Rorschach test no matter which way you translate it. Progressive Christians will basically tell you that literally none of the Old Testament is to be taken literally which... okay? Extremists sects will do the opposite. Then there's the whole dogma around Lucifer and Hell, whose existence is clearly an inconsistent amalgamation of old polytheist religions and no matter which way you read or translate it doesn't translate to the Lucifer or Hell that most Christians ever think about when they say "Lucifer" and "Hell". That part was just straight up made up over the centuries because it was a convenient scarecrow, yet is is absolutely load-bearing to the dogma of almost every Christian sect. And let's not even get into the feminists and queer people who'd put Simone Biles to shame with their mental gymnastics justifying the Bible being an Ally, Actually™. That's not a game of telephone, that's just Weapons of Mass Denial.
I can't agree with this disagreement any harder.