FAIR is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing well-documented answers to criticisms of the doctrine, practice, and history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Gospel of Judas
Criticism
With the rediscovered Gospel of Judas, critics claimed that Christianity (including Latter-Day Saints) has missed a part which contradicts church doctrine of agency.
Source(s) of the criticism
- Internet
Response
The source for this claim would be a text called Gospel of Judas which was discovered in El Minya, Egypt, which in the 1970s, it was obtained by National Geographic. The Gospel of Judas is dated to about 150 A.D. Most scholars have link this text to the Gnostic movement and have concluded that this text was a late forgery.[1]
Conclusion
Their is no evidence that the Gnostic Gospel of Judas was the work of one of the apostels, nor an eye witness of the saviour, nor that it came from an earlier source.
Endnotes
- [note] Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, Eric D. Huntsman, and Thomas A. Wayment. Jesus Christ and the World of the New Testament: An Illustrated Reference for Latter-day Saints. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2006), 312
Further reading
FAIR wiki articles
FAIR web site
- FAIR Topical Guide:
- FairMormon Topical Guide: Agency vs. Predestination FairMormon link
Printed material
- Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, Andrew C. Skinner, and Thomas A. Wayment, What Da Vinci
Didn’t Know: An LDS Perspective. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2006. ISBN 1590386086
- Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, Eric D. Huntsman, and Thomas A. Wayment. Jesus Christ and the World of the New Testament: An Illustrated Reference for Latter-day Saints. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2006) ISBN 9781590384428
Audio Recordings
- Richard Neitzel Holzapfel, S. Kent Brown, Frank Judd, Gaye Strathearn, and Thomas A.
Wayment, “The Truth About the Gospel of Judas,” Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2006.