Judas the martyr

Damn.... So, Judas Iscariot is a martyr? You want the ultimate martyr - how about the man whose act served to create the religion that condemned him as a traitor for over two milennia?

The National Geographic Society released yesterday the first modern translation of the ancient Gospel of Judas, which depicts the most reviled villain in Christian history as a devoted follower who was simply doing Jesus's bidding when he betrayed him.

The text's existence has been known since it was denounced as heresy by the bishop of Lyon in A.D. 180, but its contents had remained an almost total mystery. Unlike the four gospels of the New Testament, it describes conversations between Jesus and Judas Iscariot during the week before Passover in which Jesus tells Judas "secrets no other person has ever seen."

The other apostles pray to a lesser God, Jesus says, and he reveals to Judas the "mysteries of the kingdom" of the true God. He asks Judas to help him return to the kingdom, but to do so, Judas must help him abandon his mortal flesh: "You will sacrifice the man that clothes me," Jesus tells Judas, and acknowledges that Judas "will be cursed by the other generations."

Plus, Jesus didn't even walk on water. Ahh, I thought it was plexiglas.

Combining evidence of a cold snap 2,000 years ago with sophisticated mapping of the Sea of Galilee, Israeli and U.S. scientists have come up with a scientific explanation of how Jesus could have walked on water.

Their answer: It was actually floating ice.

This goes to show that Christianity has always been in need of a bit of scientific explanation and a wee bit of tolerance. Example: ice provides a hard surface for walking. But if you float on water you're a witch and should be tortured and burned at the stake?

You know how we rely on Jesus and Muhammed and the infallibility of the Founding Fathers and the Pope and other prophets and divine explanations of humanity. If we are so in need of a father figure, why not simply Aristotle? He at least tried. Or better, Buddha, who didn't try all that much.

Okay, okay, enough apostasy. We tell ourselves lovely mythical stories that help us explain human experience given various degrees of knowledge of the empirical world and the state of metaphysical flights of fancy. I happen to genuinely like these stories. What the hell, I'll read Thomas Aquinas. We continue to tell them. Look at Beckett, Kerouac, Pynchon, DeLillo, Sebald, Vollmann. How about Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger? Or for that matter, Keynes, Friedman, and Reagan? Interesting stories all with varying degrees of believability, and intellectual and entertainment value. I don't have a positivist science fetish - these stories help us make meaning out of the world. Science can't do that on positivist grounds. Yes, science provides facts, but facts always imbued with value.

I'll also freely entertain stories that make little sense and revel in the permeable boundaries of sense-making and meaning. Let's say, for example, Bataille, Dr. Seuss, Cioran, Fuentes, Kapuscinski. But I would like a story that makes a modicum of sense when it aspires to making systematic sense. Why not the Nietzschean slave so bound by his chains that he dooms himself to a history that transcends simple servitude? We can't even speak that language - we don't have the words - because it gives the lie to the wisdom of one of our pretty stories, which happened to invent the words, even in the moment of Nietzschean negation.