"The Gospel of Judas" is just an old, stupid heresy...

… and yet, my local newscast jumped on the hype bandwagon tonight, heralding it as “the discovery that is rocking the Christian world.”

Right.

Rocking so quietly as to be almost imperceptible.

Rocking so ineffectively that most of the Christian blogs addressing the subject today found the whole affair somewhere between amusing, ludicrous, and sad.

Rocking us to sleep with its dull drone of inanity.

Folks, it’s not shaking up any Christians with brains in their heads.

Here’s Mark Shea on the subject.

And here’s Christianity Today writing it off as the nonsense that it is.

Don’t get confused by mentions of Jesus and Judas. This is no Christian text. The Gospel of Judas did not circulate until about 150 years after Jesus died. Let’s put it this way: This new text tells us nothing more about Jesus’s relationship with Judas than does Jesus Christ Superstar.

… some claim the Gospel of Judas and other Gnostic texts throw orthodox Christianity into doubt. “As the findings have trickled down to churches and universities,” New York Times reporters John Noble Wilford and Laurie Goodstein wrote, “they have produced a new generation of Christians who now regard the Bible not as the literal word of God, but as a product of historical and political forces that determined which texts should be included in the canon, and which edited out. For that reason, the discoveries have proved deeply troubling for many believers.”

Who are those troubled believers? We’re not sure, because Wilford and Goodstein apparently didn’t talk to any of them. Karen King and Elaine Pagels revive their Gnosticism act. We also meet James Robinson, a jilted scholar who wrote a book on the Gospel of Judas without having access to the text. The Times doesn’t mention that Robinson believes the Gospel of Judas tells us nothing about the historical Jesus or Judas.

Gee, “the Christian world” suddenly doesn’t look so rocked, but these participating mainstream media lunkheads just might be stoned!