Friday, April 07, 2006

Scot McKnight on the Gospel of Judas

I hoped Scot McKnight would weigh in on the Gospl of Judas and I wasn't disappointed. In the first in a series of posts, he suggests how Christians should respond to the hype:

Now, I’d like to make a suggestion: apologetically speaking, we can only do two things — compare these texts to the canonical Gospels and say “they are really different” (no one denies this). And in saying that some will be done because “really different” means “really wrong.” If you’re honest, this proves nothing: we might be dead wrong in believing those canonical Gospels as the ones that tell the truth. So, second, what do we do? I suggest this: the only substantial argument against the alternative Gospels is a confidence that God’s Spirit directed the Church (inspired the texts and preserved the texts and led the Church to recognize the texts) to the canonical Gospels.

But, along with this we can say this: the text is late, the orthodox Christians said The Gospel of Judas was nonsense, and the theology (which is clearly gnostic) is not 1st Century Jewish/Galilean. No one can dispute any of these three points.

Monday: I’ll sum up Scene I in the text.

This should be good!

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2 comments:

shawne said...

As a christian and life long church goer, I have seen many movements take people away from, the Church body. Gnosticism is one of the oldest. This same spirit took a group out of my church 2 years ago. Gnosticism can disguise it’s self in many forms. Paul spoke about it a lot. I take this new finding as a reminder. I hope christians will educate themselves so they can recognize it.

ChosenRebel said...

Keith, thanks for your post. I have put it on my blog along with a few minor comments of my own.