The Gospel According to Judas

Taken from the Skeptic Dictionary - check it out here...
The gospel according to Judas

I gave up reading the gospels long ago and I don't plan to read The Gospel of Judas, but I did watch the hour-long National Geographic special that tried to convince the viewer just how special this disintegrating bunch of fragments really is. The show and the gospel are a reminder that, as Adam Gopnik put it: "religions actually have no fundament ... inerrant texts and unchallenged holies of any faith are the work of men and time. Any orthodoxy is the snapshot of a moment." Christianity's gospels are a snapshot taken by Bishop Irenaeus in the second century. That Irenaeus and other church fathers dumped more than two dozen other gospels means that groups like the gnostics were the losers and declared heretical by the winners. It doesn't mean that the "truth," if there is any in these gospels, can be found only in the four gospels deemed orthodox. Those who accept the four canonical gospels have faith that Irenaeus was guided by God. Nobody knows for sure what criteria he used to choose which gospels stayed in and which were thrown out, except that he considered anything related to gnosticism to be wrong. In any case, many people will probably be amused or annoyed by two messages in the gospel according to Judas: Jesus laughed at his disciples a lot and he chose Judas to betray him so a prophecy could be fulfilled. Yes, the man who has come to symbolize betrayal was actually doing the Lord's work when he turned in his master. Maybe Germany will have to change its laws. It remains illegal to name a child Judas in Germany.*