06-03-2008, 09:09 PM
N S Rajaram's review of Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->To give an idea of how diverse early Christianity was, some said that Jesus never died, while some others claimed he was never born, meaning Jesus was a fictional character. This is also the view of several modern scholars who have studied the Dead Sea Scrolls. John Allegro, a very famous Biblical scholar, wrote: "I would suggest that many incidents (in the Gospels) are merely projections into Jesus's own history of what was expected of the Messiah."
Allegro was persecuted and hounded out by church authorities for expressing such views. It was no different nearly 2,000 years ago. The key figure in suppressing texts which "encourage believers to seek God within themselves with no mention of churches, let alone clergy" was Irenaeus, a Syrian theologian who was the bishop of Lyon. He is particularly harsh on Judas with his claim of having received secret knowledge (gnosis) as the favoured disciple of Jesus. (It was the claim also of Mary Magdalene in her Gospel.)
Irenaeus's programme was to suppress diversity and impose total uniformity of belief and practices. According to Pagels, "The teachings Irenaeus labelled as 'orthodox' tend to be those that helped him and other bishops consolidate scattered groups of Jesus's followers into what he and other bishops envisioned as a single, united organisation they called the 'catholic (universal) church'. The diverse range... they denounced as 'heresy'... could be antithetical to the consolidation of the church under the bishops' authority."
One can see that the overriding concern of the early church fathers was exercising political control over the followers. Irenaeus's agenda was taken a major step forward in the fourth century by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria. He fixed the New Testament substantially in the form we have it today by selecting four gospels out of more than 40 then known, and assigning them to Mark, Luke, Matthew and John.
Athanasius's theological consolidation of Christianity was soon followed by political consolidation. At the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, persuaded Emperor Constantine to extend protection to this version of Christianity or Nicene Christianity. Armed with this power, it was relatively easy for Eusebius, Athanasius and others to suppress the Gnostics and other competing versions of Christianity. Church dominance became complete when Theodosius in 391 AD declared Nicene Christianity the only legitimate religion in the Roman Empire.
Why are these momentous findings little discussed in India when the media is willing to give space to discredited 'Jesus lived in India' stories and proven fakes like the Shroud of Turin? Is it because the English language media is dominated by a convent educated elite that doesn't want to report controversial findings? Or, do Indian churches and their leaders still see themselves as serving colonial masters and have no tradition of critical Biblical scholarship? If so they have yielded the space to politico-religious entrepreneurs like John Dayal and outright charlatans like Valson Thampu.
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->To give an idea of how diverse early Christianity was, some said that Jesus never died, while some others claimed he was never born, meaning Jesus was a fictional character. This is also the view of several modern scholars who have studied the Dead Sea Scrolls. John Allegro, a very famous Biblical scholar, wrote: "I would suggest that many incidents (in the Gospels) are merely projections into Jesus's own history of what was expected of the Messiah."
Allegro was persecuted and hounded out by church authorities for expressing such views. It was no different nearly 2,000 years ago. The key figure in suppressing texts which "encourage believers to seek God within themselves with no mention of churches, let alone clergy" was Irenaeus, a Syrian theologian who was the bishop of Lyon. He is particularly harsh on Judas with his claim of having received secret knowledge (gnosis) as the favoured disciple of Jesus. (It was the claim also of Mary Magdalene in her Gospel.)
Irenaeus's programme was to suppress diversity and impose total uniformity of belief and practices. According to Pagels, "The teachings Irenaeus labelled as 'orthodox' tend to be those that helped him and other bishops consolidate scattered groups of Jesus's followers into what he and other bishops envisioned as a single, united organisation they called the 'catholic (universal) church'. The diverse range... they denounced as 'heresy'... could be antithetical to the consolidation of the church under the bishops' authority."
One can see that the overriding concern of the early church fathers was exercising political control over the followers. Irenaeus's agenda was taken a major step forward in the fourth century by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria. He fixed the New Testament substantially in the form we have it today by selecting four gospels out of more than 40 then known, and assigning them to Mark, Luke, Matthew and John.
Athanasius's theological consolidation of Christianity was soon followed by political consolidation. At the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, persuaded Emperor Constantine to extend protection to this version of Christianity or Nicene Christianity. Armed with this power, it was relatively easy for Eusebius, Athanasius and others to suppress the Gnostics and other competing versions of Christianity. Church dominance became complete when Theodosius in 391 AD declared Nicene Christianity the only legitimate religion in the Roman Empire.
Why are these momentous findings little discussed in India when the media is willing to give space to discredited 'Jesus lived in India' stories and proven fakes like the Shroud of Turin? Is it because the English language media is dominated by a convent educated elite that doesn't want to report controversial findings? Or, do Indian churches and their leaders still see themselves as serving colonial masters and have no tradition of critical Biblical scholarship? If so they have yielded the space to politico-religious entrepreneurs like John Dayal and outright charlatans like Valson Thampu.
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