Christ's Resurrection in Early Christianity by Vinzent Markus

Author:Vinzent, Markus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2016-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ridiculing All Apostles Together

Probably the most radical testimony against any apostolic authority560 is the Gospel of Judas, a witness that only surfaced as recently as 2007, this time not directly from the Egyptian desert sand but ‘reassembled from a box of papyrus fragments’.561

As in Marcion (and Apelles), according to this gospel that ‘again and again … seems to echo Luke (and only in some cases a Markan parallel)’ and Acts,562 Jesus was not born, but ‘appeared’.563 Jesus conveyed his message ‘on eight days, (ending) three days before he (allegedly) suffered [or: celebrated Passover]’,564 while the spiritual Jesus had already left this world before his mortal counterpart with whom he clothed himself was handed over. ‘Though the ensuing dialogue between Jesus and the disciples takes place before Easter, he is able to disappear and reappear among his disciples like the canonical Jesus in his post-resurrection appearances, not needing anyone to free him from his mortal body.’565 Even more, he leads a double life: he shows himself as the master of the disciples on earth, while he belongs to the transcendent world of ‘another great and holy Generation’.566 Each time he comes to earth he traverses, step by step, the regions superior and inferior to heaven.567

The Jesus we find in the Gospel of Judas is not the son of the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, but the son of the supreme God – in the platonic sense. He also stands on the other side of almost every issue the disciples hold dear, for instance rejecting the Eucharist and orthodox Baptism, as well as every form of sacrifice, since sacrifice benefits only the inferior God, not Jesus’ true Father, who does not need any sacrifice. The notion of a divine salvation plan that requires Jesus’ death is completely foreign [to this thought. Hence] Judas could not have played a role in such an event one way or another. … it is Gnosis that saves: knowing where you came from, how it happened that you are here, and what it will take to enable you to return to your true origin and not have to endure the apocalyptic blow of the end time – a message the Gnostic Jesus came down to reveal. … The text is full of irony, plays on words, insinuations, allusions and hidden coded words that the original audience would readily have understood, but that we can easily miss … the stars stand for destiny, the kingdom for the evil realm of the archons, and the twelve disciples for the misinformed leaders of the pre-orthodox church. Jesus mocks them and laughs a great deal about their lack of understanding. For them, the gospel offers little hope, since nobody seems to be able to escape from the clutches of this world. The stars control everybody’s fate, but they are in error themselves, so that Jesus laughs about them, too. As the Incipit of the gospel already seems to express, Jesus will render a devastating eschatological verdict over the entire cosmos, which will be destroyed in the final dissolution.

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