Look folks, any of you who may have seen this crap, don’t mistake it for historical fact. The authors of the Gospel of Judas were cainites, gnostics who believe that The Lord of the OT was evil, and actually worshipped Cain (as in cain of Cain and Abel)and who threw together a bunch of sayings of Jesus to create another “gospel” which some nutbag wants to use in some bizzarre effort to cast unwholesome aspersions on the Church, in the way Dan Brown does.

Here’s the thing: The Church had a bucketload of documents in it’s hands. They had to settle on documents that were coherent and wove together, and they decided on the canonical gospels of mathew, Mark, Luke, and John. Why?

You are a teacher. You have fifteen or so students in your class.

You come into the class one morning at the normal time and there is a dead groundhog on your desk.

One by one, you interview the students in the class, and each tells the story of how it got there. Esther jane Newberry can’t remember. Ralph wiggins says it was there when he got here. Billy Pilgrim says it time travelled here, but the time travel killed it, just as it materialized into space above your desk. There are several stories, some very entertaining. Of the entire class, four stories are almost identical one to another: Mathew, Mark, Luke and John all tell pretty much exactly the same story about how Jim Duggan found it on the road, put it in his school bag, and brought it to school to place on your desk.

Matthew is the son of a working man. He’s an honest kid. You were ready to believe his story anyway. Mark is also middle class, does average work, has a plodding methodical method of writing, does no editorializing. Luke is the son of a doctor and values science and truth above all. John is the True Believer: When he sees something with his own eyes, he never wavers from his impression of it.

So while some of the stories agree in part with the stories of mathew Mark Luke and John, you dismiss them as incomplete or lacking, and take what the four boys said as gospel. You don’t accuse the other kids of lying, you don’t intend to demonstrate that their versions are incorrect, you just have four corroborating stories about the incident, and you need no more to prove your point. The same is true of the Canonical gospels. The gnostic gospels (“Gnostic” means ‘to know” or “knowledge”, in other words the words of Jesus by people who “knew” Jesus) are informative, but incomplete, have never been banned or suppressed (to my knowledge) and are readily available anywhere. I have a copy on my desk, on top of my bible. At no point was there a huge conspiracy developed to prevent these from falling into the “wrong” hands, yadda yadda yadda. A lot of tinfoil hat folks, Dan Brown included, would LIKE it to be some kind of huge conspiracy to prevent the world from knowing the truth- but it’s not anything nearly so melodramatic as that.