In April, the Gospel of Judas was unveiled to the world’s press at a ‘launch’ in Washington. The crumbling papyrus document was found in an Egyptian cave in the 1970s and is said to be at least 1,600 years old. It purports to record conversations of Jesus which teach things very different from the New Testament and vindicates Judas Iscariot.
This follows hard on the heels of the success of Dan Brown’s fictional thriller The Da Vinci Code, the film of which is soon to hit cinema screens now that he has won his court battle against the charge of plagiarism. Again, one of the central accusations in Brown’s novel is that the NT does not represent the true teaching of Jesus. Instead of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John we should all be reading the Gnostic Gospels (discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945), like The Gospel of Thomas and The Testimony of Truth.
Naturally, the world receives such ideas with delight. ‘We knew all along those Christians were gullible fools and that we were always right to be sceptical.’
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
What would you think if you received a letter from your church leaders that read like this? ‘Are church members …