READING JUDAS: Gospel of Judas & the Shaping of Christianity

Viking, 2007. 1st Edition 1st Printing. Hardcover. New/New. No illustrations. CONDITION: NEW 2007 Viking hardcover (blue boards) & dust jacket, first edition, first printing. No illustrations. CONTENT: When the Gospel of Judas was published by the National Geographic Society in April 2006, it received extraordinary media attention and was immediately heralded as a major biblical discovery that rocked the world of scholars and laypeople alike. Elaine Pagels and Karen King are the first to reflect on this newfound text and its ramifications for telling the story of early Christianity. In Reading Judas, the two celebrated scholars illustrate how the newly discovered text provides a window onto understanding how Jesus followers understood his death, why Judas betrayed Jesus, and why God allowed it. This accessible, engaging book has Princeton religion professor Pagels in a dream team pairing with King, who teaches ecclesiastical history at Harvard Divinity School. Together they take on the controversial Gospel of Judas, published in April 2006 after some years of languishing in a safety deposit box after its initial discovery in the 1970s. In their hundred-page introductory essay, Pagels and King date the gospel to the middle of the second century and situate it amidst the deadly persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. Such persecution, they say, drove the author of the Gospel of Judas, who "could not reconcile his belief in a deeply loving, good God with a particular idea other Christians held at the time: that God desired the bloody sacrificial death of Jesus and his followers." The key to understanding this gospel, they argue, is its relentless unmasking of the triumphant rhetoric of martyrdom. Though the gospel text appears angry and polarizing, Pagels and King have come to realize that they "cannot easily dismiss this author as either a madman or a lunatic." Instead, they delve deeply into his theological view that a pure, spiritual realm exists beyond the physical world that we see —a Gnostic chestnut that recurs in other second-century texts. Alive to irony and historical nuance, this remarkably concise primer opens readers to a plausible and often persuasive interpretation of the disquieting Gospel of Judas.