Reading Judas
The Controversial Message of the Ancient Gospel of Judas
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Discover the true meaning of the lost Gospel of Judas …
Lost for 1,600 years, the Gospel of Judas has only now had its meaning unlocked for readers today. Its startling text included the claim that not only was Judas the favoured disciple of Jesus, but also that Judas was killed by the other disciples.
Was Judas a betrayer or a loyal disciple? Did he write this shocking document? And what does it mean for us today? In Reading Judas Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King, world-renowned experts in religious texts, explore the meanings of this contentious gospel in detail. Here they reveal a gospel that, far from seeing Jesus’ death as a sacrifice for humanity’s sins, opposes the idea that God desires martyrdom and instead points towards a faith that is based on inner spiritual life.
Containing a new translation of the Gospel of Judas from the original Coptic, Reading Judas radically challenges our notions of the Christian faith.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This accessible, engaging book has Princeton religion professor Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels; Beyond Belief) in a dream team pairing with King (The Gospel of Mary of Magdala), who teaches ecclesiastical history at Harvard Divinity School. Together they take on the controversial Gospel of Judas, published in April 2006 after some years of languishing in a safety deposit box after its initial discovery in the 1970s. In their hundred-page introductory essay, Pagels and King date the gospel to the middle of the second century and situate it amidst the deadly persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. Such persecution, they say, drove the author of the Gospel of Judas, who could not reconcile his belief in a deeply loving, good God with a particular idea other Christians held at the time: that God desired the bloody sacrificial death of Jesus and his followers. The key to understanding this gospel, they argue, is its relentless unmasking of the triumphant rhetoric of martyrdom. Though the gospel text appears angry and polarizing, Pagels and King have come to realize that they cannot easily dismiss this author as either a madman or a lunatic. Instead, they delve deeply into his theological view that a pure, spiritual realm exists beyond the physical world that we seea Gnostic chestnut that recurs in other second-century texts. Alive to irony and historical nuance, this remarkably concise primer opens readers to a plausible and often persuasive interpretation of the disquieting Gospel of Judas.
