Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>But if Judas didn't betray Jesus, there would be no real conflict and
>no human drama!
>
Sure there is, it's just situated differently.
>Also, the idea of secret teaching in gnostic gospels makes the story
>less democratic than the story in the four gospels in the New
>Testament.
>
I'm thin on biblical history, but I have some faint notion that there
were lots of "gospels" -- some got to be official, some not. I suspect
"Life of Brian" came closest to the truth -- there were prophets on
every corner; Jesus was one of them; certain narratives were chosen
over the others for all sorts of arbitrary and circumstantial reason.
From reading the life of Augustine, it seems to me there was nothing democratic about the constitution of the Xtian church. On the contrary; it was founded and defined by a group of would-be Roman administrators who had to stake out a different terrain because the empire was crumbling.
Joanna
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