Adam Gopnik and Ross Douthat take apart the Gospel of Judas. I have to say, though, that the prickly, dramatic, know-it-all Christ that the Judas Gospels describes and Gopnik/Douthat deride does have something going for him, namely, a recognition that the fearsome God of the Old Testament may be something less than humanity's homey. From Gopnik's piece:
The true mystery, as Jesus unveils it, is that, out beyond the stars, there exists a divine, blessed realm, free of the materiality of this earthly one. This is the realm of Barbelo, a name that gnostics gave the celestial Mother, who lives there with, among others, her progeny, a good God awkwardly called the Self-Generated One. Jesus, it turns out, is not the son of the Old Testament God, whose retinue includes a rebellious creator known as Yaldabaoth, but an avatar of Adam's third son, Seth. His mission is to show those lucky members of mankind who still have a “Sethian” spark the way back to the blessed realm. Jesus, we learn, was laughing at the disciples' prayer because it was directed at their God, the Old Testament God, who is really no friend of mankind but, rather, the cause of its suffering.
Much of that is silly, but, in a banal observation, I've always been struck by the willingness of folks to engage and love an omnipotent being who appears totally unwilling to lift indiscriminate suffering or pain. An imperfect, powerful-but-not-omnipotent being always seemed a lot likelier to me (though I don't actually believe in an intelligible God, so my opinion here is suspect), and if you excise the gnosticism out of that passage, Jesus chuckling at the naivete of his disciples who are happily praying to a God who will, for starters, demand Christ's horrific death is a fairly compelling image.
