The Volokh Conspiracy - - Saturday, April 8, 2006 [David Kopel, April 8, 2006 at 1:29pm] Trackbacks The Judas Gospel: Suppose that sometime around the year 3,800 A.D., someone wrote a newspaper that began: "According to a recently-discovered document, which appears to have been written sometime before 1926, Benedict Arnold did not attempt to betray George Washington and the American cause, as is commonly believed. Rather, Benedict Arnold was acting at the request of George Washington, because Washington wanted Arnold to help him create a dictatorship of the proletariat and the abolition of private property." A reader who knew her ancient history would recognize that the newly-discovered "Arnold document" was almost certainly not a historically accurate account of the relationship between George Washington and Benedict Arnold. The reader would know that the terms "dictatorship of the proletariat" and "abolition of private property" come from a political philosophy, Marxism, which was created long after Washington and Arnold were dead. The reader would also know that the most reliable records from the 18th century provided no support for the theory that Washington or Arnold favored a dictatorship of the proletariat or the abolition of private property. This Friday's coverage of the so-called "Gospel of Judas" in much of the U.S. media was appallingly stupid. The Judas gospel is interesting in its own right, but the notion that it disproves, or casts into doubt, the traditional orthodox understanding of the betrayal of Jesus is preposterous. In the March 2 issue of USA Today, ancient Egyptian documents expert James Robinson correctly predicted that the owners of the Judas Gospel manuscript would attempt to release it to coincide with the publicity build-up for "The DaVinci Code" movie, but explained that the "gospel" was part of a genre of pseudo-gospels from the second century onward, in which the authors simply made up the stories. In contrast, virtually all serious scholarship about the canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) believes that they were written much closer to the events they describe--sometime in the first century a.d. The influential Christian bishop Ireneus, in his treatise Against Heresies, written in 180 a.d., denounced the Gospel of Judas as the product of a gnostic sect called the Cainites. (Book 1, ch. 31, para. 1.) The "Gospel of Judas" asserts that Jesus asked Judas to betray Jesus so that Jesus's spirit could be liberated from its earthly body. ("You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.") This statement is a classic expression of gnosticism, and for that reason is antithetical to Christianity. Unfortunately, the amazingly mendacious DaVinci Code presents a picture of gnosticism that is wildly false — so it is helpful to set the record straight about what gnostics really believed. The roots of the Gospel of Judas and of gnosticism go back to Marcion (approx. 100-160 a.d.). After he was excommunicated for heresy, he founded his own sect, the Marcionites. The Marcionites never grew as numerous as orthodox Christians, but for several centuries they were important rivals to the orthodox. The Marcionites believed that the physical world was created by the angry god of the Old Testament, and that Jesus had been sent by a different god, who had nothing to do with the created world. Marcionites strove to avoid all contact with the created world. They were celibate, and ultra-ascetic. They did not even allow the use of wine at communion, insisting only on bread. Consistent with this highly ascetic view, they rejected war in any form. The Marcionites also denied the authority of the Old Testament, and most of the Gospels. Their only scriptures were portions of Luke, and ten epistles from Paul. (The idea of expunging the Old Testament from the Christian Bible was reintroduced by Adolf von Harnack, a very influential late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century liberal Protestant theologian. The Nazis enthusiastically adopted Harnack’s proposal.) The great nineteenth-century Catholic theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman explained that gnostics such as the Marcionites believed in "the intrinsic malignity of matter." The rejection of the Old Testament was necessary because the Old Testament is replete with stories about the wonders of the created world. In the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, God looked at his newly-created natural world, "and God saw that it was good." Then, "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them....And so God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." The Song of Songs rejoices in a newly-married couple’s sensuous love. Ecclesiastes celebrates the natural cycle of life. The New Testament agreed that the God who was the father of Jesus was the same God who had made the material world. In Acts, the Apostles prayed "Lord, thou are God, which has made heaven, and earth, and the sea..." Newman also pointed out that "All the Gnostic sects seem to have condemned marriage for one or another reason." This is the opposite of the mainstream Christian view which, while recognizing that celibacy can be a special calling for some people, celebrates "holy matrimony." The Marcionites acknowledged that Jesus had been born of a woman, but claimed that the fetal Jesus never touched Mary’s body or received any nourishment from her womb. The Marcionite and other forms of Gnostic pacifism have a reasonable internal logic. If the entire world and every human body is repulsively unclean (if one looks on the whole creation the same way that the Old Testament regarded a leprous corpse), then it makes sense never to lift a finger to defend a human being who is being attacked. Why try to preserve the evil human body from destruction? And how sinful it would seem, in the Gnostic view, to involve oneself in the material world so greatly that one would actually use a physical weapon. The earliest Christians seem to have foreseen that something like gnosticism would attempt to substitute itself for Christianity. In the First Epistle to Timothy, Paul specifically warned about the false teaching that would arise from "doctrines of devils." The evil doctrines that would arise in "latter times" would be "Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving." Timothy’s instructions also drew an important parallel between the carnal eating of meat and the carnality of marriage. Both are gifts which God created for humanity. Gnosticism’s hatred of the created world sets it in direct opposition to Jewish and Christian doctrine from the first chapter of Genesis all the way through the New Testament. The Gospel of Judas adds no historical information to the biography of Jesus, but it does provide additional information about the gnostic heresy which thrived in the mid-second century, and which has attracted many adherents today as well. UPDATE: Fantastic Planet provides very interesting, thoughtful commentary about the Gospel of Judas, written by a modern Gnostic. Comments Friday, April 7, 2006 [Ilya Somin (guest-blogging), April 7, 2006 at 11:32pm] Trackbacks Pope Benedict Gets One Right: As both a libertarian and an atheist, I rarely find myself in agreement with Pope Benedict XVI, who tends to be socially conservative and economically statist. Benedict also suffers by comparison with his predecessor John Paul II, who played a key role in the fall of Communism and did much to combat anti-Semitism and improve Catholic-Jewish relations. As John Allen shows, however, Benedict seems to have gotten at least one important issue right that John Paul did not. An excerpt: There is, however, one intriguing area of contrast [between Benedict and John Paul]: Islam. To put it bluntly, Benedict is more of a hawk, pursuing a kind of interaction with Muslims one might call "tough love." ...... In his March 23 session with cardinals, much conversation turned on Islam, and there was general agreement with Benedict's policy of a more muscular challenge on what Catholics call "reciprocity." In essence, it means that if Muslim immigrants can claim the benefit of religious liberty in the West, then Christian minorities ought to get the same treatment in majority Muslim nations. To take the most notorious example, if the Saudis can spend $65 million to build the largest mosque in Europe in Rome, in the shadows of the Vatican, then Christians ought to be able to build churches in Saudi Arabia. Or, if that's not possible, Christians should at least be able to import Bibles, and the Capuchin priests who serve the Arabian peninsula ought to be able to set foot off the oil industry compounds or embassy grounds in Saudi Arabia without fear of harassment by the mutawa, the religious police. The bishop in charge of the Catholic church in that part of the world recently described the situation in Saudi Arabia as "reminiscent of the catacombs." It's the kind of imbalance that has long stuck in the craw of many senior figures in the Catholic Church, but these complaints were largely suppressed in the John Paul years as part of the pope's Islamic Ostpolitik. John Paul, who met with Muslims more than 60 times over the course of his papacy, and who during a 2001 trip to Damascus became the first pope to enter a mosque, believed in reaching out to Islamic moderates and avoiding confrontational talk. Benedict XVI clearly wants good relations with Islam, and chose to meet with a group of Muslim leaders during his August trip to Cologne, Germany. Yet he will not purse that relationship at the expense of what he considers to be the truth. The rest of the Allen article contains a lot of interesting information about Benedict's policies and a critique of the conventional wisdom that he is a heavy-handed conservative. I don't know enough about the issues involved to know if Allen is right or not, but it's certainly an interesting take on the Pope. UPDATE: I think that some commenters have been confused by the article's reference to "reciprocity," which they interpret as implying that the Pope believes that Muslims in Europe should only have freedom of religion contingent on the granting of similar rights to Christian minorities in the Muslim world. I highly doubt that this is Benedict's position. At least since Vatican II, the Catholic Church has consistently taken the view that adherents of all religions should have freedom of conscience (even if it has often failed to speak up actively against religious repression in the Muslim world). I am not aware that Benedict has done anything to change the Church's position on this, though I admit that I haven't followed his policies closely. Comments [Eugene Volokh, April 7, 2006 at 6:35pm] Trackbacks Danish Moslem Says, "My Religion Is Threatened in This Country," and Points to a New Inquisition: Agora reports: Feature article from Politiken, April 1st, 2006 By Ibrahim Ramadan My religion is threatened in this country. Not because I am a part of a Moslem minority in a Christian country. Not for lack of Mosques. And not by the Danish People’s Party and their stereotypical depiction of Moslems. My religion is threatened by people who claim to belong to the same faith as I do. Threatened by organisations such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir and by people such as Ahmed Akkari, Abu Laban and Raed Hlayhel who all claim to work to spread the word of God. In reality, they’re working towards another goal entirely -- to control what other Moslems should believe, think and do. Some Moslems in Denmark have accepted the Danish Imams’ words and take strong exception to Naser Khader. They think he has sold out the Arab cultural heritage and that he’s shed Moslem values to become accepted by the Danes. But what few Moslems in Denmark understand is that Naser Khader more than any other works to ensure that we qua Moslems are seen as assets and aren’t looked down upon as a problem in Denmark. Is it really so heretical when Naser Khader dares say that to achieve that, we Moslems must embrace Democracy and Freedom of Speech and that it must mean that we reconsider some things in our cultural and religious background. Lately this had some inhuman consequences for Naser Khader and his family. Some fanatical fellow Moslems have tried to threaten him into silence because they would rather not have other Moslems critically analyze the context in which our religion is seen. But it’s time that we -- the great silent majority of Moderate Moslems in Denmark -- let our voice be heard and take our watch as champions of Democracy. We can’t let Naser Khader carry that burden by himself. Because what we are witnessing at this moment in Denmark, of all things resembles most an inquisition, one which doesn’t leave out much from the horrors the unorthodox thinkers of the Christian world had to go through during the Middle Ages. In the year 2006, Moslems who don’t approve of authoritarian Islam are condemned as heretics with no right to call themselves Moslems.... Read the whole thing, as they say. Comments [David Bernstein, April 7, 2006 at 6:24pm] Trackbacks Election Day in Israel Yeah, I know the election is way over, but I never got around to blogging this heartwarming picture of Israeli democracy in action. (The photo was captioned someting like "Israeli soldier casts his vote.") UPDATE: My Israeli wife asked, "What's the big deal about this picture?" I responded to the effect that the fact that you don't think it's a big deal explains why it's a big deal. In the U.S., it took hundreds of years and much violence to win black Americans full civil rights, including the right to vote. With much public support, Israel over the past two decades welcomed poor, uneducated black Jews from Ethiopia, and provided them with full civil rights. The picture above appeared in an Israeli newspaper, as an unremarkable election-related scene. [Eugene Volokh, April 7, 2006 at 6:08pm] Trackbacks Alan Dershowitz Passes Along His Criticism of Mearsheimer & Walt's "Lobby" Paper: It's available here. Comments [Eugene Volokh, April 7, 2006 at 4:56pm] Trackbacks Study of Journalism and Blogging: Alastair Chivers is a Scottish university student (Robert Gordon University) who is doing a dissertation on journalism and blogging; as part of the study, he's put up some questionnaires that he's hoping users and bloggers might answer: The intention of this project is to look at what role weblogs of a journalistic nature play in a user's consumption of news online. Are journalistic weblogs used as a sole news source by internet users? Is the popularity of these sites increasing like blogging in general? What inclines people to find and regularly read journalistic weblogs? If anyone would like to take the questionnaire for this study then please click on the appropriate link below, you would be greatly helping me in my study. There is a seperate questionnaire for users of journalistic weblogs and the bloggers of such sites. User questionnaire. Blogger questionnaire. Comments [David Post, April 7, 2006 at 5:00am] Trackbacks Italian election, continued: Davide Berretta, in today's International Herald Tribune, has a very smart piece about Silvio Berlusconi ("Il Cavaliere," as the press sometimes refers to him here in Italy) and the current national election campaign. Things have been getting a bit weird during this final week (voting is Sunday and Monday) of the campaign. First, in Monday night's debate, Berlusconi, during his final summation, announces that he will abolish the property tax on residences if he wins the election. It came completely out of the blue, and would mean about a 30% loss of revenue for local governments ... and then, after the debate, he was asked by a reporter how he thinks the vote will go; he replied: The Left can't win; I have too much respect for the Italian electorate to think "che ci siano cosi tanti coglioni" -- that they would have the balls -- to vote against their own interests. It is (apparently) a very vulgar expression, not the sort of thing Italians expect their PM to say -- although, as Berretta points out, maybe Berlusconi gets to play by new rules. Comments Thursday, April 6, 2006 [Ilya Somin (guest-blogging), April 6, 2006 at 9:33pm] Trackbacks Public School Curricular Decisions and the Constitution: This is a post I sent to a con-law e-mail list about Eugene's analysis of the Miami school's decision to exclude a pro-Castro book from the school library. I thought it might be of interest to some VC readers as well: It seems to me that running a public school necessarily involves choosing between different ideas on the merits, and excluding at least some of them. We cannot teach all conceivable viewpoints in, say, a public school history class. Therefore, schools will probably teach the Holocaust without much (if any) consideration of the views of Holocaust deniers. Similarly, they will teach science courses without including the views of the Flat Earth Society. To say that this is unconstitutional is to say that public schooling itself is unconstitutional. The same goes for school libraries. They cannot stock copies of every book ever published. Therefore, they have to make choices based in part on the quality of the book's content and how it fits in with the school's curriculum. The perceived accuracy of the ideas in the book is going to be a part of any evaluation of quality. Holocaust denial books, pro-flat earth books, and others will inevitably get short shrift. Although I agree with the Miami school's decision in this particular case, I do not like the general idea of giving government such power. Obviously, they will sometimes use it to indoctrinate children in ideas that are wrong and exclude ideas I think are right; and even the exclusion of mistaken ideas can also cause harm for Millean reasons. Worse, the indoctrination - if adopted as policy by a state or federal government - could spread to millions of children across a wide area, not just to those who attend any one school. To my mind, the best solution would be to get government out of the business of supplying education (though it could still fund it through vouchers or tax credits). That would reduce, if not eliminate, the state's ability to engage in large-scale indoctrination of children. Individual private schools might still make bad decisions on these issues, but there would be no centralized authority capable of enforcing a dangerous orthodoxy throughout the whole of the nation or an entire state. But I do not think that this approach is required by the Constitution. So long as we have public schools, we must also give the state the power to determine which ideas will be represented in the curriculum and which will not. UPDATE: This is not essential to the more general argument I am making in the post. But it may interest readers to know that my parents (like nearly all children in the Soviet Union) were members of the Soviet Pioneers, the youth organization group on which the Cuban Young Pioneers were explicity modeled (even the name is virtually identical). The main purpose of both organizations was to indoctrinate children in communist ideology and teach them to hate the regime's enemies (both domestic dissidents and foreign opponents, especially the US). Most if not all the children were well aware of this for the good reason that it was constantly drummed into them. An elementary school textbook that discusses the Pioneers without mentioning their main function is inexcusably misleading. It would be like a textbook that portrayed the Hitler Youth (which had many similarities to the Pioneers) as an organization focused on sports and camping wit… truncated (97,228 more characters in archive)