Thursday, April 13, 2006

Speculation concerning the gospel of Judas and early Christianity

Here is a post I made for my Stumbleupon blog, that was too large to not split up there. I'm inclined to think this gospel earlier than the canonical gospels, and very revealing:

Why read the hype when you can read the (short) book [the gospel of Judas] for yourself? I'm a little impressed, actually. The purveyors of "secret knowledge" (apparently a translation of gnosis) are easy to be paranoid about, rather like those who will take young people aside by way of encouraging their corruption and give them the "secret" knowledge that drugs and sodomy can feel plesant, so I was pessimistic. But in contradistinction to the official gospels, here's a book that actually explicitly condemns [men] "sleeping with men"; indeed, in the same breath as it condemns those who are involved in slaughter, those who in praise and humility with each other sacrifice their own children and wives, and those who commit a multitude of sins and deeds of lawlessness. This book actually doesn't make gnostics seem very harmful, though if they really believe the material world is evil, that does seem sort of likely to arise from a ridiculously prudish view, which might explain the battiness (more enumeration about angel cosmogony than one could want). Kind of reminds me of mathematicians who consciously avoid physics or highly romantic men who consciously avoid thoughts of sex.

Hmm. Let me be more bold about just how inappropriate prudishness is here. The central theme can perhaps best be expressed by these lines:

And then the image of the great generation of Adam will be exalted, for prior to heaven, the earth, and the angels, that generation, which is from the eternal realms, exists. Look, you have been told everything. 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.

This to me is an obvious metaphor for sex with a young girl. Indeed, the whole significance of female age during sex in my opinion is that young females when properly in love encourage an intraejaculate sperm selection that when the sex is with a morally virtuous male does select for traits had by previously exalted generations (i.e., by those males of previous generations so worthy as to have had appeal especially to young females). Earlier the book describes the Great Angel as "the enlightened Divine self-generated", another obvious metaphor for the capacity of sex with young females to ennable virtuous males to want to be true to themselves (associated with likely epigenetic effects of female lust chemicals absorbed by the penis during sex, whose effects over the generations is probably what is mainly responsible for people wanting to be true to themselves). The whole mysteriousness of gnosticism, and likely why enlightenment is given a mysterious secret aspect, is that the effects of female lust can not be fantasized about by males, and indeed self-generated male lust is ruinous to attracting females; female lust in a male can only be experienced by a male during sex. The story reads as though Jesus knew female lust and the disciples didn't; probably Jesus was just a virtuous male who gained a certain amount of enlightenment by having sex with a young girl or girls, but if this Gospel is true, unfortunately never quite abandoned prudishness enough to sufficiently value his survival or material self. Going through a cloud to find one's own star and participate in the image of the exalted generation--it's like the special feeling I have experienced, say, when I behold an old or abandoned amusement park or when I went to the P.T. Barnum museum at Bridgeport, Connecticut, and beheld the pastel faded-looking colors of the clothes men wore in his circuses as they entertained the kids. (I rather suspected the clothes weren't faded, that they were essentially their original color, but my parents disagreed.) As one might gather, the significance of sex with girls is extremely complicated (certainly it is the most complicated part of my book concerning moral philosophy), another reason enveloping sex-with-girl ideas with mystery has a kind of reasonable appeal.

Here's another thought, though. Sex with girls can also be (and often is) very corrupt and defiled. Girls, being young and impressionable, are especially susceptible to abuse, of course. Taking into account the other gospels' accounts of Judas, it would be easy (and perhaps accurate?) to view Judas (alone among the disciples at Jesus) as someone who had a certain understanding of what Jesus knew merely because Judas had profane (involving sodomy) sex with a girl, and difficult to see why Gnostics wouldn't have seen him thus. But the Gospel of Judas, or what is left of it anyway, seems innocuosness enough, which contradiction it is difficult to explain if in fact it really exalts Judas.

But then upon further thought, there is an explanation, actually. My guess is the book of Judas is more authentic than the other gospels. It was probably written by an actual disciple of Christ, or at least someone who had very fresh knowledge of Christ's views. Christ was a virtuous male who had great appeal to young females and by having sex with at least one had gained great wisdom. It’s a bad thing to be fearful or nervous when having sex with a young female, because nervousness is contagious, and if a girl is nervous during sex, that rather ruins a good part of the effect. For this and similar reasons, Christ, unfortunately, doubtless influenced by girls, came to underestimate the importance of anti-sodomy defenses, something that for a long while has irritated me about Christianity—it’s just not anti-sodomy enough. Partly because, like most child molesters, Judas Iscariot had a certain amount of skill at faking the virtuous characteristics that people such as Christ attract girls with, Christ didn’t recognize Judas’ wickedness, and gave him too much the benefit of the doubt. Not long before the last supper, Judas forcibly sodomized Christ, probably telling him in the meanwhile that he’d kill him if he didn’t help him get sex with girls or do whatever it was he selfishly wanted to force Christ to do. Christ didn’t succumb emotionally as much as Judas had hoped, not going along much with whatever Judas wanted, and so Judas decided to have him killed. The emotionally addictive effects of sodomy, though they didn’t make Jesus succumb completely, yet in all likelihood they kept him from hating Judas sufficiently to cause him to forcibly resist Judas’ betrayal or to cause him to tell the other disciples about Judas’ villainy. Foolishly, Jesus didn’t have Judas killed or try at all hard to resist death or the masochistic tendencies being abused so often cause in the abused. Like Socrates, he went all too willing to his own destruction. (Probably the Athenians got it wrong, it wasn’t Socrates who through sodomy corrupted some Athenian youth, it was some Athenian youth who through sodomy corrupted Socrates.) Christ, under the influence of sodomy, probably told his disciples not to blame Judas much for killing him, that Judas had certain special qualities, blah, blah, blah, and that explains why the gospel of Judas is such as it is, because it was written before the insight of history had much time to see Judas in his true light rather than the screwed-up light Christ shined upon him. It was also written before the proselytizing Church fathers, etc., had had much time to throw off from Christianity the part that makes Christ seem less powerful. Christ never quite had the nerve to tell the disciples Judas Iscariot was a sodomizer (the gospel, as mentioned, decries male homosexuality), but the signs in the gospels are clear metaphors, as I should have seen earlier. Pointing out Judas by dipping his bread in Judas’s wine, that is a clear metaphor--the bread is Christ’s body, the wine is Judas Iscariot’s addicting semen. And Judas betraying Christ by kissing him, that is a metaphor for Judas killing through physical intimacy, i.e., sodomy, which in a way, as it caused Jesus not to resist his own destruction much, is what happened.