... could they actually believe it?

Reading through the latest article from the AP on the "Gospel of Judas" it finally hit me: they might actually believe it - I mean, the reporters themselves.

That whole Dan Brown "truth about Jesus" speel really has made some headway in the MSM (or maybe it just brought into the "mainstream" a wide collection of previous misconceptions).

Sentences like this, for instance, sound awfully familiar:

"The bishop denounced the manuscript as heresy because it differed from mainstream Christianity."

Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University, said, "The people who loved, circulated and wrote down these gospels did not think they were heretics."

Christianity in the ancient world was much more diverse than it is now...

Eventually, one point of view prevailed and the others were declared heresy, he said, including the Gnostics who believed that salvation depended on secret knowledge that Jesus imparted, particularly to Judas...

Read the full article.

Here is National Geographic's official page on the "gospel of Judas" and here is my roundup of St. Blogs coverage.

Finally, read this post if you want a short three paragraph summary about why all these gnostic "gospels" aren't going to get you one tad closer to the "historical Jesus".

Update: A good quote from an interview with the same author (Dr. Jenkins) mentioned as a good source for debunking the gnostic gospel fallacy:

DOOR: Hidden Gospels picked a fight with many historical Jesus scholars. Any bruises?

JENKINS: No. The topics that I deal with I honestly can't afford to show bruises. I still think that I was pointing out a lot of bad arguments that people were making and are still making about the origins of Christianity. I think some of the standard, oh, Jesus Seminar views loosely, just are insupportable and illogical, although they seem to have become a kind of media orthodoxy. Not too long ago, PBS did a show about Saints Peter and Paul. It had the major problem that it just used the standard Jesus Seminar view and you really had to be awake to notice it. It's almost become a kind of alternative orthodoxy.

I would (of course) agree completely.