Jeffrey Gibson

Then you thought wrong.

Can you please point me to where it is in this op ed piece April DeConick described or classifies the Gospel of Judas as a paraody. So far as I can see, the word "parody" appears nowhere within it.

Is this another instance of your demonstrable tendency to see what is not there in the sources you cite?

*FWIW, the genre of the Gospel of Judas is not Acta.


Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

Pete has frequently appealed to April DeConick and what she has to say about the Gospel of Judas in support of his thesis that the works in what is now known as the NT apocrypha were composed by post Nicean "pagans" who were trying to undermine the authority of "new" Christian scriptures which, according to Pete, they knew were not in existence before 312 CE.

But in point of fact, as the excerpt below from an interview with DeConick that appears on pp. 178-182 in her The Thirteenth Apostle shows, DeConick does not in any way support this thesis. In fact, she would find it absolutely ridiculous. For she believes that the Gospel of Judas is a work that was composed in the middle of the second century by a professed Christian in response to the atonement doctrines that had by his time been long professed by an already long established different Christian group.

If it "parodies" anything, it is not the claim that Jesus and the apostles existed, or the Christianity is a relatively late Constantinian "fiction" composed by "wicked men". It is, as DeConick notes, the "proto orthodox" understanding of the atonement and the eucharist. (see p. 145 of Thirteenth Apostle).


Jeffrey

Quote:

Who do you think wrote the Gospel? Why do you think they wrote it? The Gospel of Judas was written by Gnostic Christians called Sethians in the mid-second century. They wrote it to criticize Apostolic or mainstream Christianity, which they understood to be a form of Christianity that needed to reassess its faith. Particularly troubling for these Gnostic Christians was the Apostolic belief in the atonement, because this meant that God would have had to commit infanticide by sacrificing the Son. They wrote the Gospel of Judas to prove that this could not be the case. Why? Because Judas was a demon who worked for another demon who rules this world and whose name is Ialdabaoth. How did they know this'? Because Jesus had revealed this to Judas before Judas betrayed him. That is the bottom line. That is what this gospel says. What do you think this manuscript tells us about early Christianity? Why is the Gospel of Judas important? This gospel's voice is different, It represents the opinions of Christians in the second century who came to be labeled as "heretical" by later bishops who wished to gain control of the religious landscape. Because this is a Gnostic Christian tradition that did not survive, the chance find of this gospel has let us tune into a second century discussion about theology. A ild the voice we are hearing is the voice of the guy who lost the debate. Not only is the recovery and integration of this voice into our history important, but also its contribution to Christian theology, which is enormous. The challenge against atonement theology as it is presented in the Gospel of Judas is a challenge that rocked the Apostolic Churches, forcing them to refine and recreate their position. The end result is a doctrine of atonement that became very popular in the Christian Church, a doctrine that understood the sacrifice of Jesus as a ransom paid to the Devil. This doctrine exists as a response to the Gnostic criticisms of' atonement that we find in the Gospel of Judas.

Toto

DeConick does describe the Gospel of Judas as a parody on her blog in the summary of her book, The Thirteenth Apostle (or via: amazon.co.uk). Chapter 8 of the book is "An Ancient Gnostic Parody." (Neil Godfrey has a highly rated review there.) She is, of course, going against the National Geographic group, and it will probably take decades for the scholarly community to sort this out.

This is the sole reed that Pete can cling to where parody is mentioned on the same page as gospel. But he has never showed how Deconick's analysis can apply to other non-canonical gospels.

Toto

As I wrote in the other thread: DeConick does describe this as a parody, but it is a 2nd century gnostic Christian parody of other Christians, not a 4th century subversive pagan parody of Christians. If DeConick is right, Pete is wrong.

patcleaver

This is ridiculous. How could you (MM) claim that
1) the canonical gospels were written after 325
2) the gJudas (that was written before around 290), is a parody of those gospels.

Simple addition disproves you hypotheses. The standard deviation of +- 30 years means there is only a 16% chance that the C14 dated gJudas was created 320 or later.

It is very likely that the copy we have of gJudas is not the original, but a copy made at least several years after the original was written. You have to subtract some reasonable margin (say 10 or 20 years) to the C14 date of 290, to estimate the original authoring date of gJudas.

Jeffrey Gibson

Yes, but she does not do so in the op ed piece as Pete claimed she did.

More importantly, note that DeConick states that GoJ is a parody written by a second century Christian specifically against another Christian group that had been long established established by his/her time and had been promoting its particular understandings of shared Christian doctrines (particularly the atonement and the eucharist and the question of authority) from at least the beginning of the first century.

Quote:

An Ancient Gnostic Parody What does the Gospel ot'Judas really say? If we follow the story-line from beginning to end, what it means is different depending oji your perspective. If you are Judas, it is a story of tragedy, of a human being who became entangled in the snares of the Archons who rule this world. If you are an apostolic Christian, it is a story of ridicule, a representation of your faith as based on faithless apostles and a demon-sponsored atonement. If you are a Sethian Christian, it is a story of humor, of laughter at the ignorance ol Christians not in the know. The Gospel qf Judas is an ancient Gnostic parody that begins on p. 33 of the Tchacos Codex with Jesus' criticism of the eucharist as it is offered by the twelve disciples. Jesus shows the disciples how ignorant they are, since they don't realize that the eucharist is a ceremony in which laidabaoth is worshiped, not the supreme God.... Much of the Gospel qfJudas is about authority. Where should we turn to for authority? To our traditions? To our institutional leaders? To our religious scriptures? To ourselves? What happens when our traditions, our leaders, or our scriptures do not agree with our consciences? What happens when they conflict? For the Sethian Gnostics, there was only one answer to this question. We must follow our consciences, that internal spirit, that piece of God within us. Why? Because that inner spirit is our truth. We are the fallen God embodied, they thought. There cannot be a higher authority than the internal one. The great worry for them was the external authorities who, like the Archons, wished to trap us and impose their ignorance and arrogance upon us by suppressing our ability to think for ourselves and to act out of our own consciences. So the Gospel of Judas objects to Christians blindly relying upon their church's teaching without reasoned reflection. Sethians especially questioned the doctrine of apostolic succession, which taught that the mainstream Christian faith with its creeds and rituals was passed down from the mouths of the twelve apostles to bishops like Irenaeus of Lyons and leaders like Tertullian of Carthage. Their critique of apostolic succession itself was quite clever, because it in turn questioned scripture and its interpretation as external authorities. They held the scriptures up to a mirror, asking the apostolic Christiaris, have you ever really looked at the Gospel of Mark, one of the scriptures and foundations of your faith? Have you ever really read it or heard it preached? If you had, the Sethians said, you would have seen that the twelve disciples are ignorant and faithless and that even when Jesus gives them special teaching they still don't get it. In fact, the twelve disciples are so blind and their hearts so hardened that even the demons are smarter than them, since at least the demons recognize Jesus for who he really is. Why would anyone, the Sethians asked, wish to claim their faith to be based on teachings passed down from ignorant men? Shouldn't we rely instead on our own reason and experience, our own inspiration and revelation, to unlock the truth? Even more troubling for the Sethians, however, was the apostolic teaching that Jesus' death was a sacrifice of atonement made by God to wash away the sins of humanity. The idea that God would commit infanticide was so morally reprehensible to the Sethian Christians that they almost could not fathom it. I think the writing of the Gospel ofJudas was a Sethian act of conscience. They felt that they could no longer stand by and watch Christians institutionalizing God's sacrifice of his Son in eucharistic ceremonies. So abhorrent was this practice to them that they turned to the Judas story and created a parody to expose the problems with the doctrine of atonement and to ridicule the eucharist. They did this by organizing the story of Judas around a nightmare sequence where the twelve disciples witness twelve priests committing horrific acts of sacrifice on an altar in Jesus' Name. Jesus tells thein that they are those priests, and that their horrific acts of sacrifice are committed on the altar of the rebellious god laldabaoth. Why laldabaoth's altar and not God's? Because, the Sethians reasoned, the person who committed the worst act of sacrifice, the killing of Jesus, was Judas, a demon himself. What demon was he? The "Thirteenth," the convenient nickname for laldabaoth in the Sethian stories! So the'sacrifice lie brought about must have been a sacrifice planned, caused, and committed on behalf of laldabaoth by laldabaoth. Judas was a demon working for a demon. This conclusion completely negated the efficacy of the eucharist and made the ritual so ridiculous that Jesus laughs.

Nothing she says supports or gives comfort to a thesis that says Christianity was created by Constantine in the fourth century CE, the writings of the NT are all 4th century forgeries, or that the NT apocrypha were written by "pagans", let alone in response to writings and a "canon" of them created at the behest of Constantine.

If the session on the GoJ at the alst SBL is any indication of things, it will be far less than that.

Indeed. And he has yet to show that he knows what the formal and stylistic and rhetorical characteristics of the genre of greco roman parody actually are, let alone that any NT apocryphal work conforms them -- which he must do not only to show that he knows what he's talking about when he speaks of the aprocrypha as being parodies, but if he wishes (as he says he does) anyone to take him seriously.

Jeffrey

mountainman

Dear Jeffrey,

There are two issues here. One is the recognition of parody in the gJudas and the other is the recognition of the chronology of the same text.

The Identification of Parody

(1) DeConnick's website on the gospel of Judas where she writes:

The following is written at this page:
Additionally here are two editoiral reviews from The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says (Hardcover) by April D. Deconick (Author)

and

Consequently I find that a number of people here are identifying the fact that DeConnick is characterising the narrative as a parody.



The Identification of the Chronology of gJudas

Mainstream, sweeping DeConnick along with its insiduous inertia, clings to the Eusebian chronology of the second or perhaps third century for this text. It has been carbon dated to the year 290 CE plus or minus 60 years, so again we have another case of a document which was published between 230 and 340 CE claimed to be a copy of a document authored perhaps in the first century.

However the position that I am here defending is that IMO the document was authored after the year 324 CE by the greek speaking academic (gnostic and ascetic) priests of Apollo and/or Asclepius and/or ETC in consequence of Constantine destroying their ancient heritage. When Constantine published the new testament canon, a number of the leading greek academic authors responded by writing what is now regarded as the new testament apochryphal literature. Arius of Alexandria IMO was the foremost of these authors.

My contention is that there is evidence of parody and/or satire and/or burlesque in every single one of the non canonical acts, and in many of the mon canonical gospels, especially the gospel of Nicodemus in which is embedded one of the more humorous Acts written by these clever seditionists, called the Acts of Pilate. Additionally I am prepared to debate that it also exists very markedly in the Nag Hammadi text 6.1, entitled "The Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles". In fact the very title of the tractate is satirical, since were there not 12 apostles altogether. To highlight the numerical satire, the author of TAOPATTA insists that there were only eleven apostles altogether in the posse which ran into Lithargoel.

Finally, the standard chronology of christian origins has no evidence whatsoever, so we all know that it is futile for me to either ask you to support the mainstream conjectural chronology with some miniscule item of evidence (rather than continuing the argument from Constantinian authority) or for you to attempt to cite anything. We have no evidence before the Boss.

My thesis has it that the entire phenomenom of christian origins, in the fabrication of the NT canon, and in the authorship of the majority of these seditious parodies and satires of the apochryphal NT which were written in response to the despotic Constantinian authority, was perhaps confined to only a few decades of the fourth century.

At that time, the greek civilisation went down bigtime. The Boss utterly trashed it, and his continuators became supreme in the end-game a century later, at which time the knowledge and literature and temples and shrines of perhaps thousands of years, was destroyed by the persecution and intolerance of the top-down Galilaean emperor-cult established by Constantine at his military supremacy councils of Antioch and Nicaea. Constantine thus poisoned the Hellenic civilisation just as had Arius of Alexandria poisoned. But before Arius' death, IMO I think he wrote all the so-called Leucian Acts, as well as TAPOATTA (NHC 6.1) and perhaps other texts within the corpus of the new testament non canonical (ie" not bound by Constantine) literature.

Constantine himself describes Arius' authorship as stinging and bitter. See this nasty "Dear Arius" letter in which we find Constantine using the same terms for Arius, that the above commentators use. That is above we find "used mockery and sarcasm, bitter voice", " sophisticated, ironic parody".

If my thesis is refuted in whole or in part, then I will be happy to bid the research farewell, make a few final posts for the fun of the entire chase, and then retire to the farm to grow very good cabbages, just like Diocletian. However if my thesis is true then Arius of Alexandria and the author Leutius Charinus are the one and the same person, and christian origins is confined to the fourth century

Best wishes,


Pete

mountainman

Dear Toto,

The converse also applies. I am sticking to the two C14 dates, since taken together the C14 is saying "fourth century publication". The mainstream conjecture, that these texts were authored multiple centuries before the C14 publication date, is an additional conjecture over and above the evidence, and one to which I am not compelled to subscribe (without evidence, and you have nothing that has so far convinced me otherwise).


Best wishes,


Pete

Jeffrey Gibson

How your constructing a web a page full of cribbed quotes that you found on the internet constitutes posting your thesis to academic discussion lists and asking experts in ancient history and literature on those lists to interact with your claims is beyond me.

The issue isn't appreciating the point of satire. The issue is the validity of your claim that the NT apocryphal writings are satire, that they have been specifically cast as such by their greco Roman authors, and would have been recognizable as such to their greco Roman audiences since these writings possess all the formal, stylistic, linguistic, and rhetorical features characteristic of greco roman satire. But one cannot possibly know this -- indeed, one cannot seriously make this claim -- unless one knows what the formal, stylistic, lingustic, rhetorical characteristics of greco-Roman satire actually are.

You don't.

Is that what makes this a "classic example" of Greco-Roman satire?

Well, perhaps you'll tell me where and how this text adheres to the classic definition and outlining of the criteria for constructing and/or recognizing, satire found in Quintillian's Institutes, or how it conforms formally and rhetorically and in tone with the satires of Lucilius, Juvenal, Horace, Marcus Terentius Varro, Menippus, Lucian, and Petronius.


OK, Pete, in the light of the "reasonable" amount (according to whom and by what criteria, one wonders) amount of groundwork you've done, it should then be very easy for you to list not only (a) what the formal and rhetorical features of greco roman satire are but (b) how and where each of the NT apocryphal Acts display them.

You say I am "unfair" in claiming that "you have never taken the time to discover, let alone lay out, what forms and themes and topoi and structure ancient satire, parodies, and burlesques actually took and what things the ancients knew a writing had to have in order to be recognized or taken as satire, burlesque, and/or parody and that you've not read widely either in our extant examples of such works, or in the scholarship on these literary forms, to know what the features of greco Roman satire are

Show me how I am unfair, let alone "excessively unfair", in these claims. Can you or can you not show me (us) that you actually know what specific features are the sine qua non of greco Roman satire? Can you or can't you point out to me (us), given, say, Quntillian's discussion (reproduced below) of the features common to and characteristic of satire, how and where NT apocryphal works such as Acts of Andrew, Acts of Peter, Acts of Paul and Thecla, etc. exhibit these characteristics.

If you cannot, then how have I been unfair (let alone "excessively" so)in what I said? The shoe fits.

Is this really why the NT apocrypha have been described as a "text critic's nightmare"? Can you quote me your source on this?

And what does identification of genre have to do with establishing which MS or which variant of a text represents the original wording of a text?


Jeffrey

mountainman

Dear Toto,

Do you recall the thread entitled Parody, The Acts of Philip" [merged again and again and again and again? It is not true that I have not attempted to identify the presence of parody in a large number of the apochryphal acts. I may not have been particularly successful at convincing anyone in that thread, but I tried.

Best wishes,


Pete