Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity

Judas Iscariot has played the role of Christianity's ultimate traitor for centuries. Tradition, as portrayed in the synoptic gospels, claims that he handed Jesus over to the Romans for thirty silver pieces. This vile act led to Jesus' crucifixion and death. So repugnant was this that his name has become synonymous with deceit and betrayal. For example, when Bob Dylan abandoned folk music for electric rock in 1966, an appalled... Read Full Review

Ms Pagels and King's Reading Judas is an excellent, accessible read on the recently restored Gospel of Judas. After 2000 years, the theory that Judas was Jesus' closest disciple while the other apostles were deemed clueless as to Jesus' true message, parallels some facits of the current religious climate in this country. King and Pagels' writing style is entertaining and insightful. A thought provoking read for believers... Read Full Review

In April 2006, the National Geographic Society published an ancient text, the "Gospel of Judas" that had been discovered in the mid-1970s in Egypt. The original Greek text dates from about 150 A.D., although the version recovered was a Coptic translation written several hundred years thereafter. The publication of the "Gospel of Judas" excited a great deal of scholarly and popular interest due, in part, to the light it might... Read Full Review

Taking off where she has left off in her other books about the origins of Christianity, Pagels, with co-author King, has written a terse 150-page analysis accompanied by Judas' Gospel to argue that there are other books, gnostic included, that offer a diverse unorthodox view of the Christian faith. Her main point is that those in political power were motivated to assert control and unity over the land and that the Bible as... Read Full Review

Jesus taught a message of acceptance so it should come as no surprise that Pagels and King present here: 1) inclusive concerns that cuts across the "liberal" versus "conservative" divide that is used to to steer readers away in advance from reading works from a presumably "other camp". 2) a Christian teaching that is neither strictly orthodox nor Gnostic, that does not depend on any argument for an earlier dating of the... Read Full Review