Letters to the Editor
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The Gospel of Judas
I suppose what I mean by an anthropological object lesson is that many of our most treasured religious ideas may have begun with a very clever person who understood how to cloak wisdom in magic. And that this does not, as one might suppose, represent a betrayal. It is how spiritual symbols are born. Sometimes, out of a sense of great responsibility (or audacity), wise men have stood behind the curtain & pretended to speak for God. Jesus taught in parables. Can there be any doubt that ancient peoples did not believe in the mythic world of Homer? Religious texts are full of miracles, but the literal is always a veneer for a deeper symbolic world of ideas. I'm fascinated by the recent discovery of the Gnostic Gospel of Judas. It describes a version of Christ who needed an assistant to help him pull off his grand finale. He needed a Judas to appear to betray him, so that he could fulfill prophesy and be sacrificed like a lamb. It was all planned. Now, Carlos Castaneda was no Jesus. And to extend the analogy, Carlos botched his finale. But for all his faults, Castaneda may have been, like many of us, just another human being trying to make of his time on earth something that would have power and meaning.