It is the 4th century AD…Jesus has been dead for at least 300 years but the stories and ideas about him have not. After having been persecuted for decades, and fed to lions in the Coliseum, the Christians are now becoming the dominant religion under the new emperor Constantine. But they aren’t the only Christians, and they aren’t the only ones with ideas about who Jesus was, and who Judas was. They are becoming the institution that would later start the inquisition, and torture and suppress every other form of thought.
We aren’t there yet, but non-catholic ideas about Jesus are being actively suppressed.
In upper Egypt, on the west banks of the Nile, there is a true believer in Gnosticism. The gnostics have their own writings, their own theology, and even their own gospels. And one of those Gospels is the gospel according to Judas. And books like this are exactly the sort that Rome is seeking out to destroy.
To protect these ideas, these books, and this knowledge, the gnostic believer takes his manuscripts, stores them in a clay container, and hides them away in a cave. There they will sit for 15 centuries and when they are final discovered in the 1980s, and finally published in 2006, they will have the exact same approach to understanding the crucifixion that the musical JCS superstar launched only decades earlier. What are we to make of that? Let’s excavate together on this episode of THM.
[Footnotes in episode 24]
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