The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, by Bart D.Ehrman (review)

I've just posted my review of Bart D.Ehrman's The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot. This is a Gnostic text dating from the mid-second century. It is of great importance to New Testament scholars, but the most interesting part of Ehrman's book for me is found in the concluding chapters where he puts forward his view of Jesus as an apocalypticist. I've ordered his earlier book, "Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium" to explore his ideas further, because they seem to me to make a lot of sense of the beginning of Christianity.

Ehrman has quite a lot to say about Gnosticism here. In my on-line book, The Assassins of Alamut, I write about the extraordinary beliefs of this mediaeval Islamic sect. These have obvious resemblances to Gnosticism and it is difficult not to believe that that is where they got some of their ideas from. Gnosticism was also at the root of the Cathars' religious ideas and, as others have noted, Scientology has a number of Gnostic features in its belief system.