JUDAS' TESTIMONIAL

As expected -it has been always the same- the Catholic Church has launched a hard attack on the Gospel of Judas, which has been recently delivered to humanity by the National Geographic Society. The Vatican has held this position since the Council of Nicaea in the third century. From that time onwards, all the primitive Christian communities -which had been in truth the cofounders of Christianity as a doctrine -were considered as heretics. Undoubtedly, most of those communities were Gnostic by that time, and around A.D. 180, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, in what was then Roman Gaul, “wrote a massive treatise called Against Heresies. The book was a fierce denunciation of all those whose views about Jesus and his message differed from those of the mainstream church”.

History knows very well that those groups -attacked by the bishop of Lyon- were really Gnostics, and they knew very well that Jesus had not come to found a Church, but in order to deliver a doctrine which could clarify

the indispensable knowledge needed to attain the Kingdom of Heaven. Andrew Cockburn writes the following paragraphs in his recent article titled "The Gospel of Judas", and published by the prestigious magazine National Geographic in its issue on May 2006:

Irenaeus -bishop of Lyon- had plenty of heresies to contend with. In the early centuries of Christianity, what we call the church, operating through a top-down hierarchy of priests and bishops, was only one of the many groups inspired by Jesus. Biblical scholar Marvin Meyer of Chapman, who worked with Kasser to translate the gospel, sums up the situation as “Christianity trying to find its style”. Many of these groups were Gnostics, followers of the same strain of early Christianity reflected in the Judas Gospel.

It is interesting for our reader to know some details related to the Gnostic contribution to the figure of Jesus and his creed:

1/6