Coming soon.
Reading the Gospel of Judas, the writing reminded me more of a manifesto written by a cult leader than something that belonged in the Bible. The talk of lower gods and characters whose names included the Self-Generated, Adamas, Nebro, Saklas, Yaldabaoth, the seventy-two luminaries who made themselves into three hundred and sixty luminaries, and many others hardly sounded like a work influenced by God. It made sense to me that a gospel written by Judas would paint him in a fashionable light and say that his betrayal was not a betrayal at all, as he was following Jesus’s orders. Judas has been the villain in Jesus’s story for centuries now and one has to wonder why that would change based on one gospel, written by the antagonist himself. Is there any way that this could be deemed credible?
I also question the writing style of this gospel. It talks of the cosmos, chaos, and the underworld in a way that is not seen anywhere in the Bible. It is also difficult to discern any real meaning from this work, as words and sentences are missing throughout it. There are barely any places in which there is a complete, coherent thought. So much of this has been destroyed or marred by the passing of time that it is challenging to understand its real meaning.
Another issue of this work is its translation. We, as readers, don’t know if it was translated without bias or if the person who translated it did so correctly. They could have chosen meaning for words that could have had an entirely dissimilar connotation. I guess that is the case for many, if not all, translated works but it is perhaps more pertinent in the case of this gospel, as its meaning is so sensitive. This gospel didn’t really seem to be the work of a sane mind and I had difficulty understanding the basic tenets of the work. In my opinion, one would be better off simply reading a summary of this gospel.