I also happened upon Laura Jane’s Weblog The Rhipidon Society, through Jeremy at Fantastic Planet. Another one for the Gnostic Blogosphere… Looking forward to follow your contribution to it, Jane.

I cannot seem to get beyond checking out the other blogs these days.

Perhaps its too sloppy of me, but I blame an exceptional warm and sunny Summer.

I was happy to see that Justin Courtier, who has commented on Jordan’s Posts over at EGiNA, has his own blog, Nascent Gnosis.

Things are looking up for “Gnostic Blogging”.

Welcome to the blogroll of this humble site, Justin.

Been perusing the gnostic blogosphere…. and found Zac’s blog Alchemical Braindamage, Kudos to Jesse and The Revd.Max.

I am not part of the conspiracy vibe, but the perspectives which Tim, Revd.Max,Jeremy &co has given on soem of the old spins really inspired me. Someday I will commit literature and all these weird and strange things will be floating there somewhere in my subconscious mind..

Wishing everyone a good holiday…

I found Arizona’s blog Alchemizade through Jeremy at fantastic planet, and felt like I had struck something like gold. As can be seen from some of my posts I have read quite a few books on Sufism, especially Henry Corbin‘s work on Ishraqism, Ibn al-Arabi , Najmoddin Kobra and Ismailian Gnosis – anyways, as quite a few of my readers know, I am bound to feel affinity to the illuminated poet and mystic, Jelaluddin Rumi – and to see such a passionate and direct reactions on his poetry and prose really moves me. I hope I will have time enough to read through Arizona’s Opus – and take the opportunity to welcome Arizona’s blog Alchemizade to my blogroll.

Soon quite a lot of people will get on the “Judas” bandwagon, as has happened to Mary Magdalene earlier on. This is only a hunch, of course, but things have a tendency to mature over time.

Anyways, I stumbled upon this entry on the Coptic Gnostic Gospel of Judas at the textcritical theological site www.tertullian.org (sic!) whose other contents should interest serious students of the history of Christianity and the developement of Dogma, anyways. What appears to be unique in that site is that the editor has preserved the english translations presented on Antiquities dealer Michael Van Rijn’s website which appeared to be offline at the time.

It now seems like he’s back on, and offered the 5th of June an article on the find from The Independent, featuring an interview with himself.

Michael Van Rijn – to the general public, was the whistleblower concerning the “hostage situation” for the Gospel of Judas – an hitherto unknown organization presenting itself as the guardians of poor countries cultural heritage, announced to the Academical community that they had goods which they wished to share, for a fee. A fee which were several millions of US Dollars and which would only buy a restricted access to the manuscript(s) in question. Lots of details got lost when he apparently pulled much of the materials and detailed allegations concerning the find.

Van Rijn makes the following assertion in the Dutch newspaper

Katholik Nieuws Blad

on April the 15th (source the www.tertullian.org feature on the Gospel of Judas):

“The owner of the text, who only wants to make money from it, has carefully timed the publicity surrounding what is called the Gospel of Judas. That is the opinion of Prof. Hans van Oort, who specialises in Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Nag Hammadi and Augustine. He called a press conference on his own initiative, to counter “all the nonsense” being written at the moment about the Gospel of Judas; for example that the Vatican has an interest in the document’s not being published. Van Oort is attached to the Faculty of Theology of the University of Utrecht and is Professor of Christianity and Gnosticism at the Radboud University.”

Also:”Van Oort does not rule out that it involves the missing codex from the Nag Hammadi codices. What he does rule out is that Judas himself wrote it. “There is no reason whatsoever to assume that he did this. Nothing points to that.”

Which is of course, nothing but extraordinary. There has been quite a few hands on the Nag Hammadi find and every single one of these asserts that the missing codex had been used as fuel to boil tea.

Think about the repercussions of someone squirreling away a perfectably readable and authentic document from an UNESCO funded joint operation to secure the documents for the world, and for the Coptic Museum in Cairo, Egypt!

Predictably, this “new” discovery has already caused some dust to whirl.. the Patriarchate of Moscow, for the Russian Orthodox Church found it earlier in this month necessary to let publish a press release on the official position of the Patriarch concerning the new archeological discovery. There he said that while the find might cast new light on historical matters (which I think he intends to mean new light concerning the heretical movement which produced the text in question, which is correct, we should expect), it has absolutely no value or relevance on the teachings and history of the Orthodox Church as well. That isn’t remarkable, such a quick reaction, however, is less common – it is usually the privilege of conservative scholars in the philological department and ask-me-a-question theologians by the dozen. Everyone thinks the Gospel of Judas is the product of the gnostic group which Ireneaus deigned to call the Cainites in his Adversus Haereses. It gives the manuscript in question a convenient category for the time being, which is good, I guess – and it also serves as a possible contrast to the already discovered and diagnosed Gnostic scriptures from Nag Hammadi.

What follows in the feature I cited earlier on, is an English translation of no less than nine fragments from the 62-page manuscript in Coptic.

The first is a version of the Gospel story of Jesus’ being tempted by Satan in the desert. Here Jesus is called Allogenes, the Stranger – and Satan is called Saklas, the “fool”. A brief comment on this: apart from Saturninus calling the leader of the archons (fallen angels), and chief demiurge, Satanael (later used by the Bogomils for the same) – there are no Gnostic scriptures which directly asserts that Satan and the Demiurge is identical. What is evident is that the author of the scripture does not side with Satan in the desert, which puts a question mark behind the allegation that the sect that produced the manuscript themselves were antinomians to the degree of turning the Old Testament hierarchy upside down. The 9 fragments does not mention one of the OT villains, so we have nothing to build a theory on its “Cainite” origin, apart from the positive role of Judas Iscarioth, who is described as being faithful to Jesus, in delivering him to the authorities.

I leave you with the link, I hope the web-editor keeps it up, since it appears to be the most comprehensive archive of the texts.

This is a brief little quotation from Paul Sedir (Yves Leloup), a mystic who for a while was oriented towards the Eglise Gnostique of Jules Doinel (he was one of the three young men, Tau Jules (Doinel) saw in a vision as those assigned to be his future presbyters; the other two were Lucien Mauchel (Chamuel/Tau Bardesane)and Gerard Anaclet Encausse (Papus/Tau Vincent). There are stories about Sedir to the effect that he never lost opportunity to speak with and teach new souls about the spiritual life and the great necessity for a turning around of our lives especially in this day and age, that he walked many miles during a strike in Paris to lecture for one single person, that he followed his conscience and inner intuition on basically every choice he made. Also, he left behind both the Martinist Order and the Eglise Gnostique in order to be consistent with his own spiritual path – a choice apparently his former confreres respected him for.

This is Sedir’s remark on the trends during the early 20th century, to rewrite, redirect and reconstruct basically the entire Gospel in order for it to fit with their Masonic,Spiritualist or Theosophical preconceptions of the Christ;

“Jesus was never an Essene; all that Jacolliot and Notovitch tell about travels and initiations in India is part of their fantasy; Jezeus Christna are impossible words in Sanskrit. Christ did not, as claimed in the Talmud, steal the Tetragram from the Temple in Jerusalem; He never needed lessons or training. In Egypt, when he was three years old, he made what we call miracles by

setting free enchained souls. He was a man, yes; but that man – perfect – contained the whole

of divine Light.”

Kudos to Elias Ibrahim for letting me know, it is from a collection of writings by Sedir only recently translated to English.

This is a post to follow up the past two posts on the discovery and publication (by Easter 2006) of the Coptic Gnostic writing The Gospel of Judas.

As I mentioned earlier, the question of the authorship is far from conclusive. Ireneaus identified the primary scripture used by the Cainites to be “The Gospel of Judas”, therefore the scholars might feel it is to be expected that the new gospel will reveal more about the Cainites than what Ireneaus told us in his Adversus Haereses.

In the already introduced summary, courtesy of Klaus Schilling at RadikalKritik, a site dedicated to the radical scholarship of among others, Herman A. Detering – Detering makes these observations viz. the actual authorship of the newly discovered text:

“The Gospel according to Jude explains the term itself: Satan is rebuked because the believer is not of the generation of Satan (i.e. the real world), but from a different race. The scene reminds of the temptation in the desert in the synoptics. Satan is also called Saclas (idiot), a term often found in gnostic literature for the demiurge, the god of the Tanakh : NHC II:1, III:2, XII:3, all deemed generally as Sethian writings. While this hints towards Sethianic authorship, it must be understood that the names of the sects and the distinction from others has usually been mentioned only, and even created by, later polemicists. They were hardly self-denomminations. Further progress in the publication of the manuscript is still to be awaited.”

Thus we find themes and specific names already discovered to be generic within the literature discovered at the Nag Hammadi find and identified by a joint scholarship (see Birger A.Pearson(ed):The Rediscovery of Gnosticism, Bd.1 The Sethian Gnostics, and John D.Turner:Gnosticism and Platonism, or even Alaistar B.Logan:Gnostic Truth and Christian Heresy.) as Sethian Gnostic. The role of Jesus in Sethian Gnosticism is of a specific, often considered to be the last – manifestation of the Saviour whose prototype is a heavenly being or Aeon who are generically called Geradamas, Pigeradamas, Adamas or even Seth. What is also typical of the Sethian Gnostic presentation of the Christian Christ (rather than Messiah) or Platonic Logos is that it, unlike most Judeo-Christian groups of the late antiquity, take explicit exception to all Jewish or Hebrew prefigurations of the Messiah itself. Therefore the “Cainite” doctrine associated by Henri-Charles Puech as familiar or similar to the Marcionite doctrine of the descent of Jesus in order to restore, redeem or save the fallen figures of the Old Testament. Akin also is a negative evaluation of a great part of the “Judeo-Christian” pantheon of angelic hierachies – to wit, an unknown angelic host corresponds to or is directly and intimately linked to a hitherto esoteric, unknown and unrevealed (underground, incognito) human family, whose close filiation is explained, in the Sethian myths – as the result of a union of the interior, hidden Adam with the interior,hidden Eve, in a Sanctuary (evocative of the Bridal Chamber) elevated above and outside of the Cosmic Order. As such, all morals and commandments are only accorded to be accessible to these elect individuals, the members of the Sethian or perhaps Cainite gnostic group – in an indirect and to the worldly, secular order of people, including the religious – way, directly through their filiation and sharing of consciousness with the higher and “invisible” hierarchy of celestial beings. That particular heresy may well sound like the Corinthian one that Paul writes against, at the very least on the surface.

Judas Iscarioth is not even mentioned in the Nag Hammadi gnostic materials. It is quite clear that the only Jude or Judas we hear about in the Nag Hammadi library scriptures is Didymos Judas Thomas, known to the world at large as Thomas the Apostle or even Thomas the doubter.It may well be that quite early in the developement of the different initatory schools of the Egyptian Gnostics a dissension over values and emphasis caused some of those most resilient from persecution among fellow Christians, caused the “Judas” symphatisers to be isolated from the rest of the movement.

Charles W. Hedrick wrote earlier in the Bible Review (“The 34 Gospels: Diversity and Division Among the Earliest Christians”):

In sum, in addition to the four canonical gospels, we have four complete noncanonicals, seven fragmentary, four known from quotations and two hypothetically recovered for a total of 21 gospels from the first two centuries, and we know that others existed in the early period. I am confident more of them will be found. For example, I have seen photos of several pages from a Coptic text entitled “The Gospel of Judas” that recently surfaced on the antiquities market.

Ireneaus on the Cainites and the Gospel of Judas(the Roberts-Donaldson translation)Book1, Chapter31:

“1. Others again declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to themselves. On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator, yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.”

“2. I have also made a collection of their writings in which they advocate the abolition of the doings of Hystera.Moreover, they call this Hystera the creator of heaven and earth. They also hold, like Carpocrates, that men cannot be saved until they have gone through all kinds of experience. An angel, they maintain, attends them in every one of their sinful and abominable actions, and urges them to venture on audacity and incur pollution. Whatever may be the nature of the action, they declare that they do it in the name of the angel, saying, “O thou angel, I use thy work; O thou power, I accomplish thy operation !” And they maintain that this is “perfect knowledge,” without shrinking to rush into such actions as it is not lawful even to name.”

This sounds like, to this Gnostic, really tedious work, repeating every action mechanically along the spectrum, just to rule out the possibility, perhaps, that one omits to do an action in a certain lifespan only to be forced to perform it in another. But it might well be that Ireneaus got it exactly wrong – to take an example, Ireneaus could not understand the Sabbatarian mysticism of Sabbatai Zevi or his disciple Yakhov Leib Frank with its transgressing against the commandments in order to fulfill the Law, revealing the true and most valuable tablet of all, of all laws – the human heart whereupon is written the fateful commandment, in a single sentence, by the hand of God itself. Tricking the mechanical hierarchies of cultural conditioning, while an art developed painstakingly throughout several centuries, were only known to a few real geniuses, and I do intend to say in addition that it was not accesible to all initiated into any system, myth or direction of the Christian Gnoses either, at that time – and could not then be explicated or discussed in a language known to Ireneaus. I mean – look at the impending mess of the myriad popular writers on Gnosticism, they know not the head or tail of it, nor that it even has any. I maintain that all this business with wombs, with idiot-fool-godlings, angels and so forth – while left for obvious reasons in the hands of philologian experts, historians and archeological technician geniuses, are not that very accessible to any mainstream, neither secular nor religious. I also maintain this: that it will end being what it is, and end up also, in addition, not being observed or registered in our minds as an actual phenomenon of thought and idea – if we for some reason elect to not bother with anything problematic, or incomprehensible, to our sensibilities.

Therefore, of course, I am among those who will sit up and listen and make notes from the discovery of a possible only exstant relic of the Cainite heretics.. or Sethians for that matter.

I forgot to mention that it is Ireneaus of Lyonswho identifies the Gospel according to Judas as the product of the Cainite heretics.

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913,no less) has this to contribute about the Cainite heresy:

They regarded all characters held up to retrobation in the Old Testament as worthy of veneration, as having suffered at the hands of the cruel God of the Jews; hence Cain, as the first man cursed by Hysteraa, the Demiurg, claimed their special admiration.

The author of the article also makes a point of mentioning that Hippolytus thought them of so little consequence and threat that he only mentions them.
Which is well and good, only that there are entire books missing from the only copy, a 14th century Greek transcription – of his Philosophumena,discovered at the middle of the 19th century. One may well argue, as one would, that the extant Summary would cast light on which heresies his missing books addressed; had it not been for that the aforementioned summary also are curiously fragmentary. With regards to the Naassenes, who nevertheless get an unaccountable large space in the Fifth Book, Mark L.Gaffney, in his The Gnostic Secrets of the Naassenes (I will review that particular book later, time permitting.) makes a lot out of this curious correlation between missing portions of the Summary and the books which those portions would cover, perhaps too much, given we are in no position to know anything about the contents of the missing parts of Hippolytus Philosophumena before a complete manuscript lands in our hands.

Nevermind all that. I messed up the prior post by not giving the cognitive link between the Cainites and the Gospel of Judas and explicating what all that Jazz was about.I should hope that has been cleared up now. An additional commentary viz. the name of the heretical sect and the “offspring” of the elder son of Adam, Cain – the conspiracy buffs of the far-further-furthest right wing oriented Christian fundamentalist kind have cherished the fact that an important character in Masonic lore is Tubal-Cain, i.e. he has an ancient semittic name which makes reference, at least superifically, to the Patriarch of the “wrong kind”. If we look at the various answers these conspiracists, you will find they are always barking up some genealogical tree which has a racial and etnic connotation attached. Perhaps more than anything, Hesse’s use of the concept of “Mark of Cain” upon certain human beings, whose destinies appears to be attached to be forever the travelling stranger, points towards the problematic of this very seed. Some Gnostic systems divided Humanity into three; A Hylic (material) or Sarkic(fleshly) humanity; a Psychic (soul’ish) humanity and a Pneumatic (spiritual) race – all these were usually associated with the three “sons” of the first nuclear family: Cain the elder, Abel the middle and Seth the youngest. There are many ways of reading and understanding this tripartition and apparently the three are sometimes viewed as present as potentionalities within each individual human being. Doubtless, with our “psychological sophistication”, being “Contemporaries” – modern Gnostics have a proclivity towards viewing humanity as such as unitary, while the characteristics of the true spiritual man are the product of some exertion, developement and divine assistance. My comment here is that the Nomadic peoples, since the “triumph” of agrarian civilization while forever travelling “strangers” to city-dwellers and rural peasants (or Pagans if you must) alike, with their usual lifestyle and means of sustaining themselves more properly correspond to the first martyr of the Old Testament, Abel – not Cain. The kingless (because each is accounted a King when they have become “men”, women and men alike), ummovable, individuated and never-fading “race of Man” – the Pneumatics, the offspring of Seth, forever the Stranger, Allogenes, however, is the Gnostics.
In a English language summary of the German scholar Herman D. Detering on the Gospel of Judas , courtesy of Klaus Schilling at RadikalKritik –

Detering observes that through the Patristic sources there are scant to go on with regards what the Gospel of Judas used by the Cainites

contained.The scripture is only named and called spurious by Ireneaus.

Henry-Charles Puech apparently viewed Ireneaus report on the Cainities as associated to the particular soteriology of Marcion of Sinope – wherein some Patristic sources on Marcion asserts that according to his heresy – Jesus descended into Hell explicitly to save the “villains” of the Old Testament, a flipside of the early Christian redaction of the Pseudepigraphic Ascension of Isaiah where the prophet is given a vision of the future death and descent into hell of the Saviour, in order to save the Old Testament heroes, who were damned to hell for not acknowledging the Messiah before his coming(sic!).

In the newly discovered Gospel of Judas, first chapter, a great deal is made out of the amount the priests pay Judas for the delivery of his teacher, and also that the priests think Judas is a true disciple of Jesus and fear he will deceive him. It also appears as if this is what Judas wants to do, i.e. not tell the truth to the priests, but he is encouraged to go continue his task by a vision of Jesus himself, whom he addresses as Allogenes.Since the first translated fragments of the manuscript in question deals with events before the crucifixion, we are left hanging with regards to the salvific ministry of Jesus, perhaps, to the villains of the Old Testament. The insinuation puts me in mind of the “universal salvation” brought by Jesus according to the Gospel of Philip – he came, from the beginning of time, to redeem and save, not only the good, but the evil with the good. And that, apparently, the Apokatastasis Panton, is the greatest stumbling block of all – anathema to the Hebrews and foolishness to the Greeks.

Hermann Detering’s current work “Judas und das Judasevangelium” available in German on http://www.radikalkritik.de/judev.pdf