According to Michael White, director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins at the University of Texas Austin, “Scripture, like history, was codified by the winners, by those who emerged with the greatest numbers at the end of three centuries of Christianity.”[3] Manuscripts such as the Gospel of Judas did not make it into the Bible because they were out of line with the direction “winners” wanted to take their newly minted religious notions. As a result, dozens of credible gospels simply lost out and we ended up with the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Bart Ehrman, who chairs the department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, is so enamored with the Gospel of Judas that in his view, had we embraced its perspective on Judas, we might well have avoided the Holocaust.[4]

In short a new generation of scholars is disseminating the notion that the Bible is merely the product of historical winners who preferred the dark and anti-Semitic overtones of manuscripts such as the Gospel of John over the more racially sensitive texts such as the Gospel of Judas.

A new myth, a new day, we’re constantly being barraged by myths and we have to have discernment skills to separate wheat from chaff and heat from light. We’ve addressed this in two ways recently in my new resource The Bible Under Siege and in an article in the new issue of the Christian Research Journal about a new archeological find called “Gabriel’s Revelation.” I also spoke with the author of the article Dr. Craig Hazen on the June 6, 2009 Bible Answer Man broadcast. To obtain these resources or listen to my interview go to our Website at www.equip.org.

———————————————————————–

[1] See Dan Vergano and Cathy Lynn Grossman, “Long-Lost Gospel of Judas Recasts ‘Traitor,’” USA Today, April 6, 2006 (http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2006-04-06-judas_x.htm). All Websites accessed 6/9/09.

[2] The Gospel of Judas, National Geographic Channel, aired April 16, 2006, (http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel/).

[3] Ibid. Vergano and Grossman, “Long-Lost Gospel of Judas.”

[4] See Gospel of Judas, National Geographic Channel.

As this professor has managed to shake the faith of multitudes in the classroom, he’s now bent on shaking the faith of multitudes in the culture. He has systematically forwarded the notion that Bible is not only hopelessly contradictory, but from his perspective a dangerous book in which to believe. In fact, he’s gone as far as to intimate that had we embraced the Gospel of Judas, a Gnostic gospel, instead of the Gospel of John, a canonical gospel, we might well avoided, nothing less than the holocaust itself. [2]

So in light of this onslaught by Bart Ehrman and many others like him in the media, I’ve developed a booklet in order to expose the skin of the truth stuffed with a great big lie. In this new booklet entitled, The Bible Under Siege, you will encounter the memorable acronym L-E-G-A-C-Y as an apt means of remembering factors that credible historians consider in determining the historical reliability and meaning of the Bible. It’s also includes the acronym S-H-A-F-T as means of unearthing and undermining contentions of the Bart Ehrman’s of the world. The “shaft” of the archeologist’s spade is a method by which you can remember that contra Ehrman, what has been discovered in the soil corresponds to what is detailed in the Bible. In addition to exposing the sophistry and scriptorture of professors and pundits the booklet systematically demonstrates that the Bible is divine rather than merely human in origin.

To help equip you to counter the attacks, I encourage you to get a copy. You can do so either by going to our website at www.equip.org or by calling 1-888-700-0274.

——————————————————————————–

[1] Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York, Harper One, 2009), 6.

[2] Gospel of Judas, National Geographic Channel, aired April 16, 2006, see http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel  (accessed April 9.2009).