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April 08, 2006

Fundamentalists Respond to Judas’s Gospel

One of my favorite sites to visit on a Saturday morning is the Cutting Edge Ministries weekly newsletter. If you want to know what fundamentalist Bible-believing, anti-neocon conspiracy theorists are thinking, this is the place to find it.

This week’s newsletter has a segment entitled, “Startling End of the Age prophecy was fulfilled this week, as the incredible ‘Gospel of Judas’ is published to the world.” Of course, having just written on the subject, I wanted to hear this group’s take.

Obviously, these nefarious writings were penned in order to destroy people's faith in the Biblical account. Furthermore, New Age writers had written that the New Age Christ could not appear until and unless a "significant proportion" of the peoples of the world had been preconditioned to accept him. Obviously, the first step in conditioning people to accept the occult New Age Christ is to discredit the genuine Jesus Christ. That is the reason we have such publicity about the "DaVinci Code", a Gnostic account of the human Jesus … The DaVinci Code was written to discredit the true Biblical account and smear the real Jesus. Ditto for this terrible "Gospel of Judas". Since "Gospel" means "Good News", what good new could possibly come from Judas? … It was Jesus' fault!! Can you believe it?

As I wrote in my earlier post, the Gospel of Judas appears to be a Gnostic gospel. Cutting Edge Ministries is not too keen on Gnosticism, calling it “horribly apostate.” Cutting Edge explains why the Gnostic view of Christ is dangerous:

In the key passage Jesus tells Judas, ''you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me'." "Kasser, the translation-project leader, offers an interpretation: 'Jesus says it is necessary for someone to free him finally from his human body, and he prefers that this liberation be done by a friend rather than by an enemy. So he asks Judas, who is his friend, to sell him out, to betray him. It's treason to the general public, but between Jesus and Judas it's not treachery." If this is the case, Jesus is shown to be liar, for He foretold who would betray Him, and was fully aware of Judas' true nature. … Matt 26:20-25 … tells us that there was no pact between Jesus and Judas, for then Judas could not be held accountable for his actions; Judas would have suffered, and would not have been better off if he had never been born.

The group also puts its own spin on the reason Gnosticism was all but wiped out:

This time period in Church history is precisely the time period in which the Gnostic doctrines were threatening to overwhelm the infant Christian Church. Paul and the other Apostles spoke and wrote heavily against the heresy of the Gnostic Gospels. Thus, it is not surprising that Bishop Irenaeus has spoken out against the Gospel of Judas all the way back to 180 A.D.

Calling the Gospel of Judas pure “Antichrist,” Cutting Edge explains:

The doctrine of Antichrist is that the "Christ Consciousness" spirit fell upon Jesus at the Baptism in the River Jordan and left Him at the cross. Until the Christ Consciousness spirit fell upon Him, Jesus had no idea He was the Messiah. For the next 3 1/2 years, Jesus the man realized that he was the Jewish Messiah and he acted like the Messiah should act. But, on the cross, the Christ Consciousness released from Jesus' body the moment He died. With this in mind, the following statement from the Gospel of Judas makes a whole lot of sense. "For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me'. By helping Jesus get rid of his flesh, Judas will help liberate the divine being within." You see, the Christ Conscious spirit was the "divine being within" which was begging Judas to help liberate from the fleshly body of Jesus! Thus, the Christ Consciousness Spirit is supposedly begging Judas to turn him in so the Romans will arrest him, thus setting up the string of events which would inevitably culminate in Jesus' death on the cross. At the moment Jesus took his last breath -- according to this heresy -- the Christ Consciousness Spirit was "liberated".

Another of the Gospels, the book of John, portrays the same view of Gnostic thought that Cutting Edge holds:

"By this you may know (perceive and recognize) the Spirit of God: every spirit which acknowledges and confesses the fact that Jesus Christ actually has become man and has come in the flesh is of God has God for its source; And every spirit which does not acknowledge and confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, but would annul, destroy, sever, disunite Him, is not of God [does not proceed from Him]. This nonconfession is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is already in the world." [1 John 4:2-3; Parallel Bible, KJV/Amplified Bible Commentary)

Hence:

Since this Gnostic "Gospel of Judas" separates the fleshly Jesus from His Spirit, it fulfills this definition of Antichrist. Doubt it not!

This, of course, leads us to the real crux of the matter for any Christian:

But, of course, if you believe the Bible, you will not believe the Gospel of Judas; conversely, if you believe in the Gospel of Judas, you will be suspicious of the inerrancy of the Bible. You cannot believe in both, because the Gospel of Judas contradicts the Bible, and the Bible shows the Gospel of Jude to be a fake!

Posted by Becky at April 8, 2006 11:11 AM