Toto

Gospel of Judas, revisited

mountainman

In my notes on April Deconick's comments I have the following:

The commonality which is admitted although not advertised widely conerning the apocryphal corpus as a whole and each of its constituent elements as a microscosm in the macrocosm is that they all mimic the canon. They are later than the canon. They exemplar great analytical gnosis of the new testament canon. They add to it. They mimic it. They recombine bits of this and that from the canon. They create permutations of canonical references. They provide the author with a platform for gnostic Hellenistic issues and philosophy. They exaggerate and romanicize Hellenistically. The Gospel of Judas is no exception.

What are the NT apocryphal tractates

"insipid and puerile amplifications" [Ernest Renan]

"excluded by their later and radical light" [John Dominic Crossan]

"severely conditoned responses to Jesus ... usually these authors deny his humanity" [Robert M. Grant]

"they exclude themselves" [M.R. James]

"The practice of Christian forgery has a long and distinguished history" [Bart Ehrman]

"The Leucian Acts are Hellenistic romances, which were written to appeal to the masses" [Watson E. Mills, Roger Aubrey Bullard]

"The key point ... [NT Apocrypha] have all been long ago considered and rejected by the Church.

"The names of apostles ... were used by obscure writers to palm off their productions; partly to embellish and add to ... partly to invent ... partly to support false doctrines; decidedly pernicious, ... nevertheless contain much that is interesting and curious ... they were given a place which they did not deserve." [Tischendorf]

Sources

Note that the concept of "christian ownership" is inherent in all the above wrt the apocrypha.
The fact that the apocrypha were authored by a non-christian mimic of the canon has not yet been examined.
The christian glasses need to be taken off the head and placed on the table with the evidence.
The "Gospel of Judas" and the rest of the apocrypha were not authored by a christian hand.

The tractates have been retained due to the tumultuous historical epoch in which they were written coincided with the official implementation of the christian religion under the rule of Constantine. At the basis of a prenicene origin for the NT apocrypha we have a small number of Eusebian preserved clues, the main being a paragraph in Tertullian concerning "what people do for the Love of Paulo and what they should not do for the Love of Paul". The literary evidence in the document tradition of Tertullian is a sham.

Th tractates have been retained because they were widespread and very popular as the Hellenistic resistance against the new and strange christian religion for which imperial support appeared in Alexandria along with Constantine c.324 CE. Generations passed and the canon remained supreme, but the "heretical writings" were either hidden (apocrypha = "hidden") or burnt or preserved out of curiousity by the historians of the fifth and subsequent centuries.

Authorship and chronology of the apocrypha were purposefully obscured by the orthodox.

The non-orthodox preservers preserved in non-orthodox locations and scripts - Nag Hammadi, Syria (coptic and syriac).
The sources of all document traditions for the apocrypha appear strongly and independently demarked by the fourth century.
The C14 suggests fourth century, and many of the apocryphal tractates (perhaps 75% or more) are recognised as being fourth century or later. Eusebius provides a very few very poor scattered textual clues. However Eusebius himself is the source of the bulk of all reports in respect of the appearance of the nt apocrypha. The suspicion that the entire apocryphal corpus is post-nicaean is strengthened by the logic of the situation.

When would one objective expect "unauthorised" resistance literature to have been authored?
When christianity was an unknown underground atom in the milieu of the Hellenistic cults, or
when it was miraculously raised up as the official monotheistic Roman state religion over and
above all others which may have happened to exist at that time, and there were many.

IMO the massive preservation of the apocryphal tractates in many languages, all sourced to the chronology of the 4th century imply that we are dealing with a 4th century reaction to the canon, a 4th century resistence to the state and imperial desire. One might also conjecture that there was in place since the time of Eusebius a list and index of "forbidden books" which became the Index Librorum Prohibitorum which was decommissioned as late as 1966 by the Vatican state.

None of this adds to our knowledge of the chronology of the authorship of the canon.
I would like to make it clear these arguments are not limiting the new testament canon.
For the purposes of these comments regarding the NT apocrypha, the canon could
have been authored as early as the first century, or perhaps second.

Surely the apocrypha deserve a Special Interest Group?
The Dead Sea Scrolls were not authored by "christians".
In a parallel sense the apocrypha may not be authored by "christians".