As for anti-Semitism in Christianity: the fact that those who killed Jesus were Rabbinic Jews is largely incidental. According to orthodox Christian dogma, Jesus was ’sent’ to Earth to be killed. Had he been sent to the Britons, they would have killed him and there would likely have been a great degree of animosity toward the Britons.

In fact, if we were to use Christ’s martyrdom as a reason to hate Jews, we may as well hate Italians while we are at it.

The question of whether there is ethnic anti-Semitism in early Christianity is a controversial one, but I for one am extremely skeptical of claims that it existed before the third century C.E. (I certainly don’t see it in the gospel of John).

As for anti-Judaism, yes, there are varying degrees of anti-Judaism in early Christianity, and it grows rapidly in intensity over the first few centuries. Some Christian authors were very anti-Jewish. Note especially an author like pseudo-Barnabas who claimed in the second century that J ews had completely misunderstood the Hebrew Bible, and holding that the commands of the Torah should have been understood metaphorically.

Christian anti-Judaism, however, pales in comparision with the anti-Judaism we find in Gnostic texts (the gospel of Judas being a representative example of a much larger corpus).

Gnostics taught and wrote that the God that Jews worship was one and the same as the Jewish Satan — that the creation of the world was an evil act, and that the God of the Hebrew bible was not only the weakest of all the divine beings, but also deluded and malicious.
This is a major theme in the gospel of Judas if you read it in its context, as it stresses that Judas is alone among the (Jewish) disciples of Jesus in correctly ascertaining:
A). that the physical (and Jewish) Jesus is different from the spiritual and exalted “Christ”
B). that the physical Jesus must die, to liberate the spiritual Christ from its prison
C). that “Christ” was not sent by the low and evil Jewish God “Yaldaboath”, but rather by the much higher and holier “Barbelo”
Note also that “Christ” himself is seen laughing at the stupidity of the other (more traditionally Jewish-Christian) disciples who worship Yaldaboath (the God of the Hebrew Bible), and believe in the goodness of Yaldaboath’s creation.

J.S.

On a preceding work on the subject by the French scholar:

Marcel Simon’s “Verus Israel� has dominated that era until quite recently…. Suffice it so say that he has covered every facet of nascent Christianity and it’s interactions with Judaism in the Roman Empire. In his treatment of Christian anti-Jewish polemic, Simon insists on the importance of distinguishing between (1) “anti-Jewish polemic� which represents an ideological conflict in which Christianity seeks to define it’s originality and to defend it’s legitimacy against the claims of Judaism; and (2) “Christian anti-Semitism�, which is born of the Jewish refusal of Christian claims and expresses itself increasingly as hostility towards Jews in general. Though Christian anti-Semitism draws in part on pagan traditions, it is finally to be distinguished from them by virtue of it’s religious and theological basis. Christian anti-Semitism goes back as the Gospel of John- but not to the letters of Paul-and attains it’s fullest expression in the fourth century. From that time forward, within the context of the Christian Empire, anti-Semitism ceased to be merely a matter of popular resentment and theological-exegetical debate. It became the ideological justification for anti-Jewish legislation and for the destruction of synagogues.

I think I will go with this and say that I am not convinced at all that
there was a cohesive system of thought call Gnosticism in which the Jewish God was considered evil, but rather many Gnosticisms: Jewish, Judeo- Christian, and Christian. There was a lot of competition during the first centuries of the common era between these and Rabbinic Judaism on other one end and early Christianity on the other, and consequently there was much argument and probably name calling. To invoke the cry anti-Semitism gets my attention every time. This term has been so abused that people just turn a deaf ear and roll their eyes. It’s important to use this term with discrimination if it is to have any meaning at all.

Fiddlesticks: With regard to the Gospel of Judas , when you said:

try reading the gospel before you post. The gospel of Judas is as anti-Semitic as the gospel of John.

Thanks for all the links and the odyssey.

http://www.fritzwagner.com/ev/eric_voegelin_table_of_contents.html

http://home.salamander.com/~wmcclain/ev-index.html

http://www.artsci.lsu.edu/voegelin/

Voegelin is one of the 20C leading philosophers and one need not be a follower ( I am certainly not one) to see that his work is worth knowing.

Personally I am more partial to Schutz and Arendt:

http://www.questia.com/library/sociology-and-anthropology/sociologists-and-anthropologists/alfred-schutz.jsp

For Arendt:

http://library.wustl.edu/~listmgr/imagelib/Jun2001/0018.html

“The papers contain correspondence, articles, lectures, speeches, book manuscripts, transcripts of the Adolf Eichmann trial proceedings, notes, and printed matter pertaining to Arendt’s writings and academic career. Among these are correspondence with many of the leading literary and political figures of the twentieth century, including W. H. Auden, Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Thomas Mann, Dwight Macdonald, Eric Voegelin, and Norman Podhoretz. The collection also contains various drafts of Arendt’s published work, in particular The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and the controversial and groundbreaking Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).”

“What is Gnosticsim?

It comes from the word “gnosis� meaning to know. Gnosticism was a philosophical system built on Greek philosophy. It added a Christian flavor when Christ impacted the world. Promoters of this ancient view were Simon Magus, Marcion, Saturninus, Cerinthus and Basilides. The Gnostics are traced to Carpocrates, and were supported by Valentius, Theodotus, and Artemas.

Gnosticism was built on Greek philosophy that taught matter was evil and the Spirit was good. They taught docetism, a dualism which promoted a clear separation between the material and spiritual world. Christian Gnostics said since matter was evil, God could not really incarnate in a human body, He only appeared in human form and only appeared to suffer, it was an illusion. It was stated when Jesus walked on the sand you could know by seeing his footprints that were left. In this Jesus could be a pure spiritual being in an evil world and not be contaminated by it.”

http://www.letusreason.org/Current48.htm

Jewish gnosticism deals in esoteric knowledge too but does not make Jesus Christ the center of their gnosis.

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=280&letter=G

I do not find one “Christian Gnostic” doctrine. I am not even sure where the “Christian” gnosticisms begin and Jewish gnosticisms end. Anything on that?

Regarding your Voegelin–read a little further in the Wiki:

To some extent, Voegelin’s use of the term ‘gnosticism’ might be unfortunate as it suggests some pseudo-continuity between religious movements. However, the prime feature which he uses to label something as gnostic is the idea of human perfectibility, and some kind of special knowledge. Thus Marxism becomes ‘gnostic’ because it suggests that we can have a perfect society when capitalism is overthrown. And thus Nazism becomes ‘gnostic’ because it suggests we can have a ‘pure’ race when the racially inferior are exterminated. and so on….

and this:

It is possible to think that Voegelin made every political and philosophical movement he did not like, some kind of offshoot of gnosticism, and thus joins many movements which would otherwise appear to have little in common (what would not be ‘gnostic’?), and there is very little exploration of what causes gnostic approaches in the first place.

Gee, and I thought you were all excited about the topic. Silly me.

They more certainly were political, although you right that Gnosticism is not one coherent group, but then neither was fascism or national socialism, or Marxism, of Communism, or even bourgeois democracy.

Still, we are talking about Christian Gnostics which did have a doctrine which was presupposed by its adherents.

As to my choice of National Socialist as a comparative program I believe it offers a plausible comparison. Nazism wasn’t merely a political ideology it had its own ethos, and its own metaphysics. It was in other words a social movement as well as a political one.

Some German philosophers who fled Hitler identified the two world views:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Voegelin

“Voegelin identified a number of similarities between ancient Gnosticism and those held by a number of modernist political theories, particularly communism and nazism.”

National socialism ( Nazism) is an interesting choice for your analogy but the differences are more telling than the similarities. Nazizm was a political ideology, genuinely anti-Semitic. Gnostics were not one cohesive group, and not political. There is a huge question as to whether they were anti-semitic as well. Anti-Semitism is a relatively modern term. What is called anti-semitism by you and others with regard to these ancient sects is often not against a people called Jews but a response to and an agrument against their beliefs, their God.

Fiddlesticks, your argument lumps all gnosticisims together and crumbles for me further with “it does not matter if the Gospel of Judas mentions the Jewish god as evil or not [as]it is still a part of a system of thought which held such views as primary notions about the universe”

This is unacademic and unscientific ( not to mention unfair) inclining me still to feeling that the system of thought that needs to be examined is the one that needs to accumulate such evidence to the exclusion of other possibilities in the absense of anything that conclusive.

http://volokh.com/posts/1144517340.shtml

“The influential Christian bishop Ireneus, in his treatise Against Heresies, written in 180 a.d., denounced the Gospel of Judas as the product of a gnostic sect called the Cainites. (Book 1, ch. 31, para. 1.)

The “Gospel of Judas” asserts that Jesus asked Judas to betray Jesus so that Jesus’s spirit could be liberated from its earthly body. (“You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.”) This statement is a classic expression of gnosticism, and for that reason is antithetical to Christianity.

Unfortunately, the amazingly mendacious DaVinci Code presents a picture of gnosticism that is wildly false — so it is helpful to set the record straight about what gnostics really believed.

The roots of the Gospel of Judas and of gnosticism go back to Marcion (approx. 100-160 a.d.). After he was excommunicated for heresy, he founded his own sect, the Marcionites. The Marcionites never grew as numerous as orthodox Christians, but for several centuries they were important rivals to the orthodox.

The Marcionites believed that the physical world was created by the angry god of the Old Testament, and that Jesus had been sent by a different god, who had nothing to do with the created world. Marcionites strove to avoid all contact with the created world. They were celibate, and ultra-ascetic. They did not even allow the use of wine at communion, insisting only on bread. Consistent with this highly ascetic view, they rejected war in any form. The Marcionites also denied the authority of the Old Testament, and most of the Gospels. Their only scriptures were portions of Luke, and ten epistles from Paul. (The idea of expunging the Old Testament from the Christian Bible was reintroduced by Adolf von Harnack, a very influential late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century liberal Protestant theologian. The Nazis enthusiastically adopted Harnack’s proposal.)

The great nineteenth-century Catholic theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman explained that gnostics such as the Marcionites believed in “the intrinsic malignity of matter.” The rejection of the Old Testament was necessary because the Old Testament is replete with stories about the wonders of the created world. In the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, God looked at his newly-created natural world, “and God saw that it was good.” Then, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them….And so God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” The Song of Songs rejoices in a newly-married couple’s sensuous love. Ecclesiastes celebrates the natural cycle of life.”

Finally, I’d like to say to Potter that it doesn’t matter if the Gospel of Judas mentions the Jewish god as evil or not it is still part of a system of thought which
held such views as primary notions about the universe.

It’s as if one were to discover a document by a National Socialist which talks about modern science being evil without mentioning the Jews. It would still be an anti-Semitic document since it is well known that to the Nazis modern science meant Einsteinian science which another term they used for “Jewish science.”

Potter, I had no trouble accessing the Halkin article in the NY Sun:

http://www.nysun.com/article/30806

perhaps other readers won’t either.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/705676.html

Gospel or manipulation?

By Benny Ziffer

These systems typically recommend the pursuit of mysticism or “special knowledge” (gnosis) as the central goal of life. They also commonly depict creation as a mythological struggle between competing forces of light and dark, and posit a marked division between the material realm, typically depicted as under the governance of malign forces (such as the demiurge), and the higher spiritual realm from which it is divided, governed by God (the Monad) and the Aeons.
As a result of these common traits, allegations of dualism, anticosmism and body-hatred are often raised against Gnosticism as a whole; this, however, fails to acknowledge the variety, subtlety and complexity of the traditions involved.

(my bold)

Fiddlesticks: Maybe this is difficult for you but my point was that you and the Greek Bishop are both interpreting fragments as evidence of your way of thinking. From your posts, I would say you are generally defensive and on the attack. So I am not surprised that you would read the Judas gospel that way and lump that together, you admit, with other “Gnostic philosophical world views” as you interpret them.

There is, as far as I can determine, no basis for the charge of anti-Semitism. Not yet. Halkin, who you quote agrees though he is very skeptical and inclined to judging prior to any evidence based on the other Gnostic texts and their interpretation.But he stops short of that. You don’t.

Halkin starts off with this:

On the one hand, it represents an early Christian attempt to exonerate the figure of Judas Iscariot – a figure that, more than any other in the whole vile history of anti-Semitism, has come to stand in Christian tradition for the deicidal Jew and his evil ways. The very idea that there were some second-century Christians, however sectarian, who considered Judas not Jesus’s betrayer, but rather, his most loyal and understanding disciple, the only one to whom could be entrusted the excruciating but necessary task of turning the Savior over to the authorities so that his crucifixion and death could take place, is enough to fill many Jews with a sense of gratitude. In rehabilitating Judas, it might seem as if “The Gospel of Judas” is a Christian rehabilitation of the Jewish people, too.

So Halkin at least leaves it open for more positive interpretation:

The irony of “The Gospel of Judas,” which will no doubt become clearer as we can read more of it, is that it defends Judas Iscariot by attacking Judaism. Far from being the arch-Jew of Christian stereotype, its Judas is the Jew who has freed himself of all Jewish delusions – a freedom that, according to Gnostic beliefs, conventional Christianity never managed to achieve.

After all, it is possible to read the New Testament story non-Gnostically, too, with the understanding that Jesus knows all along that he must die a terrible death, and that he needs the help of a disciple – his dearest and best one! – to facilitate this. Greater even than the sacrifice on the Cross would be, then, the sacrifice of he who let himself be vilified by the ages in order to make this sacrifice possible. It’s an intriguing thought.

“freed himself of all Jewish delusions” is the interpretation that intimates anti-Semitism. On the other side, and referring to my second question above -if that is the case, that Judas did indeed “free himself” of Jewish “delusions” (Halkin’s words) that would define him as a Christ follower, not a Jew. Indeed!

Would it be “beyond youâ€? (as you have used this phrase on me) or a stretch to allow that this “good news” HAD to sell itself as being a better brand than the old by putting the old way down?

Fiddlesticks, you yourself say: Not all forms of Gnosticism is anti-Semitic but an important strand is. In fact early Christian anti-Semitism was encouraged by its need to counter the gnostic challenge. You can see this when you read Augustine’s writings and other early Church writers.

So there was competition.

Finally when you quote Hillel Halkin’s article which is no longer available at the link you provide but now available here:

http://www.jewishledger.com/articles/2006/04/12/opinions/edit03.txt

You should be careful not to put your exposition as though it were Halkin’s.

This might have been a simple mistake but it’s misleading:

This is what Hillel Halkin a respected Jewish writer wrote about the so called gospel of Judas:
“And yet once the text of “The Gospel of Judas” is released, this is highly unlikely to prove to be the case. Too much is known about Gnosticism, and about Christian varieties of it, to encourage us to think that we are dealing with a “pro-Jewish” book. On the contrary: Of all the many varieties of Christianity that were in competition with one another in the centuries before Catholicism won out, Gnosticism was the most philosophically hostile to Judaism and the most radically at odds with it.

This was because Christian Gnosticism, in all its forms, was a dualistic system of thought that believed in the existence not of one God, but of two – an “inferior” God, the God of the Old Testament, who created the fallen world we live in and rules over it, and a “superior” God, the God of the New Testament, who has nothing to do with the created universe known to man and exists transcendentally apart from it – from where He sent Jesus to bring salvation to humanity. The first God is the God of matter, of Old Testament law and retaliatory justice; the second, the God of the spirit that is imprisoned in matter, of New Testament love and mercy. The two have nothing in common and one must choose between them; One can worship one or the other, the God of the material world or the God of the spiritual world, but one cannot worship both.”

That last paragraph was not in the Halkin article. I assume it’s yours BTW I am familiar with Halkin’s writing; some of what he writes I agree with others not.

This is because Khomeini too held a dualistic vision of creation with the actual living body as something lesser and transitory and perhaps evil.

There is an interesting article in the current issue of the New Republic which details the influence of this ideology on recent Iranian history.

A CHILD OF THE REVOLUTION TAKES OVER.
Ahmadinejad’s Demons

by Matthias Küntzel

the New Repuclic

Issue date 04.24.06

For those of you who have subscription here is a link:

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060424&s=kuntzel042406

April 15th, 2006 at 2:11 am

“fs: Did you mean ‘Three Musketeers‘?
(Not that it matters: I don’t know any of their names.)”

Sure did.

The three are:
Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, and their apprentice and the hero of the novel, d’Artagnan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Musketeers

I often wondered were their names came from.

Coupling me with the Greek Bishop is your way of being fair. OK, I understand that. Some people’s notion of fairness doesn’t go much beyond a “plague on both your houses.” Got it!

Thanks for sharing.

Now, this may be beyond you, but the anti-Semitism of the gnostic gospel and their philosophical world view in general is in their notion that the Jewish God was evil.

This may be beyond you, but a clear knowledge of gnosticism is a pre-requisite for understanding any of their writings.

Not all forms of Gnosticism is anti-Semitic but an important strand is. In fact early Christian anti-Semitism was encouraged by its need to counter the gnostic challenge. You can see this when you read Augustine’s writings and other early Church writers.

This is what Hillel Halkin a respected Jewish writer wrote about the so called gospel of Judas:

“And yet once the text of “The Gospel of Judas” is released, this is highly unlikely to prove to be the case. Too much is known about Gnosticism, and about Christian varieties of it, to encourage us to think that we are dealing with a “pro-Jewish” book. On the contrary: Of all the many varieties of Christianity that were in competition with one another in the centuries before Catholicism won out, Gnosticism was the most philosophically hostile to Judaism and the most radically at odds with it.

This was because Christian Gnosticism, in all its forms, was a dualistic system of thought that believed in the existence not of one God, but of two – an “inferior” God, the God of the Old Testament, who created the fallen world we live in and rules over it, and a “superior” God, the God of the New Testament, who has nothing to do with the created universe known to man and exists transcendentally apart from it – from where He sent Jesus to bring salvation to humanity. The first God is the God of matter, of Old Testament law and retaliatory justice; the second, the God of the spirit that is imprisoned in matter, of New Testament love and mercy. The two have nothing in common and one must choose between them; One can worship one or the other, the God of the material world or the God of the spiritual world, but one cannot worship both.”

http://www.nysun.com/article/30806

This is a complicated subject and I hope the radio program brings out some of these complexities in its upcoming broadcast.

The anti-Semitism is where in this gospel fragment? Isn’t it all in the interpretation, yours specifically, and on the opposite end Greek Bishop’s and others who look for support of their beliefs and arguments? Or is it clear and unequivocal pray tell? So again where Fiddlesticks?

It seems to me that one can be so stuck in defensive posture that other possibilities cannot be considered.

“Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. The star that leads the way is your star.�

quote from Judas Gospel vis Adam Gopnik’s article in the New Yorker- thanks Peggysue:

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/060417crbo_books

Also, don’t you have to believe in afterlives in a way if you believe in memes?

Now here’s the 1,000 yen question for you.
Can an atheist get insurance against acts of God?

Otsukaresama

Right, and I didn’t take it that way — I was only offering what I know about the execrable lunatics of Mount Athos. I’m not responsible for them, only ashamed that they share and desecrate a common ethnic heritage with my father (and therefore with ‘half’ of me). I allow myself this one little fantasy: that after they die, and the welcoming Bright Light meets their disembodied consciousnesses, and the warm feeling of their saviour coming to fetch them to God overcomes them…they wake next under the withering gaze of Hera Herself, who says: “What have you boys got against women? Come, I have some barnyard and quarry chores to assign you — for the remainder of your eternal afterlives.”
Fun, huh? ‘Course, I don’t believe in afterlives, but it’s a fun little fantasy all the same.

“is Athos of the Three Mosqueteers fame named after Mount Athos?”
Beats me! Never heard of ‘em. (I’m kinda culturally retarded. Is it a movie?)

Every faith has its kooks.

Being Jewish I take pride in our kooks, of course, we even had a Rabbi name Kook. I don’t think that even the kooks on Mount Athos could top that.

btw: is Athos of the Three Mosqueteers fame named after Mount Athos?

And in the illustration Jesus looks like Willie Nelson.