Screaming for Vengeance !!!!!!

It's not every day that a new Christian gospel is found, especially one for a figure as maligned as Judas Iscariot. So it was with some interest when I read that just such a codex had been found. Apparently the Copts rather liked the guy and the manuscript, on papyrus and leather (aren't they all?), was itself of coptic origin. The manuscript describes Judas as a favored disciple who was bidden by Jesus to betrayal in order to free Christ from his earthly bond of mortality. I'm guessing that the other disciples didn't get the joke.

Although this gospel is referred to in other early Christian texts, this is the first time in modern days that anyone has seen it. Rumor has it that the early church suppressed the text as contradictory to the momentum building for the other 'official' gospels included in the bible today. By that time the malignment of Iscariot had taken root and a different perspective would have been inconvenient.

Some things never change

I'm going to resist the temptation to make a bad string of Judas Priest jokes. (scholars being hell bent for leather to read the new gospel, and all that) I just found this sort of interesting.