Today, the news brings us two interesting articles on religion.
- In the first, it is reported that an ancient “Gospel of Judas” has been found (and carbon dated). In this “gospel”, Jesus reportedly asks Judas to help him commit assisted suicide. More specifically, the second century text, denounced as heresy 1,700 years ago by orthodox Christian clergy, describes conversations between Jesus and Judas Iscariot during the week before Passover in which Jesus asks Judas to help him return to the kingdom of the true God, but to do so, Judas must help him abandon his mortal flesh: “You will sacrifice the man that clothes me,” Jesus tells Judas, and acknowledges that Judas “will be cursed by the other generations.”
To me, this raises a number of interesting questions. First, look at the parallel between Judas and Dr. Kevorkian. Helping with assisted suicide, cursed by the other generations. Separated at birth perhaps? Next, if true, it makes me wonder about Jesus’ mental state. After all, Deut. tells us to choose life, and here he is telling someone to kill him. There is no evidence of a debilitating lingering disease. So (again if true), it goes against what make sense. But this is religion, it doesn’t have to make sense.
- But some do try to make sense of it. It is also being reported that a team of researchers now believe that Jesus wasn’t walking on water, he was walking on frozen ice. The scientists acknowledge that the Sea of Galilee, in what is now northern Israel, has never frozen in modern times. But they say geological core samples suggest that average temperatures were lower in Jesus’s day, and that there were at least two protracted cold spells in the region 1,500 to 2,500 years ago. In addition to chilly weather, their explanation depends on a rare physical property of the Sea of Galilee, known to modern-day Israelis as Lake Kinneret. It is fed by salty springs along its western shore that produce plumes of dense water, thermally isolating areas that could freeze even if the entire lake did not, they assert.
These are the same folks that have figured out how Moses crossed the Red Sea. In 1992, he and Nathan Paldor, an atmospheric scientist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wrote a scientific article proposing that strong winds across the narrow, shallow Gulf of Suez could have lowered the Red Sea by 10 feet, allowing the Israelites to cross to safety and then swallowing up an Egyptian army within a few minutes when the wind stopped, just as the book of Exodus says.
What’s most interesting to this is the reaction of people, reminding me of some lines from “Inherit the Wind”. Stanley M. Burgess, professor of Christian history at Regent University, an evangelical Christian school founded by Pat Robertson in Virginia Beach, reacted by saying, “When I look at those verses, I don’t need a scientific explanation. I’m a religious man, and I believe that God can do whatever he wants to do, that Jesus could do whatever he wanted to do.”
I wonder if Jesus could make me a cheese sandwich?
