 to a very special episode of We Are Being Transformed. I am extremely excited for today's guest. And in case you didn't know, this is a Contrary to Rumor, Not a Transformers podcast. So I will not be doing any Optimus Prime unboxings, I'm sad to say, but here we do, nevertheless explore the liminal spaces and contours of reality. The myriad of ways people interact with their world through the vehicles of ritual, cult, and lore. And our guest today is Dr. David Brackie, a person who knows a thing or two about Gnosticism, the Sethians, the Gospel of Judas, which are all topics for today. He's the author of the Gnostics, Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. And also on the aforementioned commentary on the Gospel of Judas. So Dr. Brackie, thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really glad to be here. I am super excited. I am a big fan of your work. So normally I would just want to jump right into the Gospel of Judas. But I realized that there are certain preconceptions that we have to kind of get rid of and kind of explore. So ordinarily we just jump right in, like I say, but Gospel of Judas is a text that requires a necessarily prologue meant on for understanding who wrote the text and why. So just in my basic understanding, as a monolithic term in academia, Gnosticism is to say the least problematic. But you, using evidence found in Aranaus and Porphyry and his life of Plotinus, you've noted in your book, The Gnostics, that a good argument could be made for calling what scholars usually term Sethianism or Sethian Gnosticism, simply Gnosticism. So if you could explain this briefly. Sure, like many, many scholars today, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of Gnosticism as a kind of all embracing category for all sorts of people, ideas and texts that don't conform to what the scholar who's using the term thinks is normative Christianity. So you just throw in everything that looks kind of heretical or interested in Gnosis or knowledge or whatever. However, and a lot of this goes back to this guy, Irenaeus, who wrote in the late second century who kind of lumped all the people he thought were not proper Christians into the category of Gnosis or knowledge, falsely so-called, right? So on the other hand, there is a good case to be made and I've tried to make it along with other people that there was a group of Christians who identified themselves as Gnostics or the Gnostic School of Thought and that they correspond to the people that other scholars have traditionally called traditionally only for the last like 50 years who have called Sathians. So I'm willing to use the term in a very limited fashion but not in the kind of expansive way that some people might or that has been the case for a lot of the period of modern scholarship. So, but I do think that there were people who thought that they were Gnostics. So there you go. Yes. Thank you for that answer. Yeah, I found it very compelling. I myself use Sathianism, but I mean, you're correct. I mean, Irenaeus does it. Porphyry Plotina says it in the Enneads, right, book two. So I mean, sometimes it'd be simpler for that because Sathianism like very much is like, like you say, going back all the way to shanky, like it's just a combination of myth and ritual but we'll get to that. So the Gospel of Judas itself was found in a codex called the Codex Chakos, I believe. That's what we call it now, yes. Codex Chakos. It was discovered much earlier but the story of how it got to us is a podcast in itself but I didn't know if you could just briefly talk about those circumstances. The brief story is that sometime in the mid to late 1970s we believe this codex of Coptic text was found with three other books. One was a Greek mathematical text, so a text about math in Greek. Another was a copy of the letters of Paul in Coptic and then another was a copy of the book of Exodus in Greek and then there's this codex which has had multiple treatises in it in Coptic, right? And so discovered in the mid 1970s and we don't really know by whom or precisely where we're told that it was in the region of Almenia which is south of Cairo but not as far south as Nakamadi where the famous Nakamadi codices were found but it's very hard to validate any of this, right? So in any event, what happened? Why was it found in the 1970s and then it wasn't published until 2006 and part of this is the fault of the Nakamadi codices because based on that the people in Egypt who found stuff like this realized these were valuable things of great interest to Western scholars. And so the people who possessed the codex tried to get as much money as they could for it. On the other hand, the institutions that would be interested in it which tended to be like universities and libraries didn't have the kind of money that they were interested in and moreover were reluctant to buy something whose provenance, its origin and so forth was not clear and which was probably removed from Egypt illegally. So it just went through a kind of torturous existence until finally its contents were published in 2006. So its origins or its discovery is kind of shady and but this is not unusual in the world of discovering ancient texts. Absolutely and thank you for that concise answer. Yeah, it's a very interesting situation which it was found also. I believe just like in the Nakamadi codices this codex in particular also had more hermetic texts. I think it was Corpus hermetic in 13. Yes, there's a hermetic text in it. Yeah, which is that's a fascinating topic just the contours of the people who have these books commissioned and what their interests were. Yeah, it had in it not only the Gospel of Judas but a book called The Apocalypse or Revelation of James which we also have from Nakamadi. So we now have a second copy which is really great. And then there was another work that we don't, whose name we don't have but people have called Alleghenes or the stranger or foreigner because that's what a major character is. And then there was this hermetic treatise in there but we only have a very small part of that. So yes, and so it's very difficult to say who might have wanted this and why. We know that it was Christians because the codex is decorated with Christian symbols like crosses and it uses what we call Nomina sacra, sacred names in which certain sacred names like Jerusalem and Jesus are written in a special abbreviated form that kind of is meant to convey their sacred nature. And this is something Christians did. So we know these were Christians. Yeah, and this is the thing about ancient codices is that you would have to get one from someone who had the wherewithal to copy stuff and had available to them the texts you wanted. And sometimes you could say, oh, I want this, that and that and the other thing. And the guy would be like, well, I don't have that but I can get it from somewhere else, you know or I can't add it. And we know sometimes, you know, the copyist would put in the four or five texts or works that the customer ordered and then still have room left. And he would say, okay, so I added this thing because I figured you might like this too. So, you know, it's, yeah, it would be like just taking a bunch of things to a coffee shop and saying, I want these things and please bind them together for me, but. Yeah, absolutely. It'd be kind of like be like kind of an analogy would be like the Greek magical papyri, like what kind of spells and likewise you would like copy down for you. And this was not a, let's just, the audience needs to realize this was not like some short shrift like codex. This was a very expensive book to put together. So whoever put it together had some means and that makes it all the more interesting that it winds up in fourth century Egypt. Yeah, no, it's, you know, it would have been, you know, the most codices were, you know as we would put it kind of luxury goods. I mean that only people with a certain amount of wherewithal could afford and of course could profit from because they could read which was a very small number of people. And yes, it's also remarkable just for its dating. It's, I mean, virtually certain that it's from the fourth century because there has been radiocarbon dating of it which places it somewhere between the mid to late third century and the early fifth. But, you know, it's script and everything just, you know, and that itself is actually pretty good for a codex to say it's within this like 150 or 200 year range. But, you know, we can be absolutely certain it's from the fourth century. And, you know, that's, there's not a lot of that. So it's extremely exciting. The disappointing point of course is during the period between when it was discovered and when it was published, it just suffered a lot of damage. And so... Somebody put it in a fridge. Oh, that's the worst part. You know, they said, oh, we'll keep this like really well cared for. We'll put it in a freezer. Well, you know, it's papyrus. So it's organic matter. So the small amounts of water within it froze. And then when it was taken out and it thawed, it became wet, right? And that's not good for paper, you know? Anything, so the whole thing, and then it sat in a safe deposit box in a bank. I mean, these are not the ways that these things should be treated. So it's disappointing. Absolutely not. I mean, there you go. Yeah, absolutely. It almost merits like a comedy, like a comedy like TV made for Netflix or TV movie. Oh, someone's gotta make a movie. I mean, they, you know, they, National Geographic did their best to like make some kind of dramatic scenes at times. But eventually there's gotta be some sort of kind of like, you know, interesting movie. I mean, Gospel of Thomas had, you know, someone made a movie that's kind of like about that. So, you know, this should get one. Yeah, absolutely. Listen up, Hollywood. So moving on to, yeah, yeah, the makers of the chosen make the Gospel of Judas. Yes, you need to make the Judas movie. So getting to the text itself, the Gospel of Judas, it's a very wild text. I mean, it's kind of the beginning and at the end, it's very part of the course for Gospel literature, but in between it gets pretty crazy. So I didn't know if you could kind of give a brief summary of what it entails. Yeah, so, you know, it announces itself as a secret report of judgment, which records conversations between Judas and Jesus. And then it has a brief introduction, which just kind of summarizes what Jesus's ministry was like. He came to save people and perform miracles and he called disciples and he taught them and so forth and so on. And then it kind of moves into some alternative, you know, the word multiverse would really work for this thing, right? So it moves into kind of an alternative timeframe that is kind of out of any known timeframe. And it just has these, then it narrates these series of appearances of Jesus to either the disciples as a group or to Judas alone and the conversations that Jesus has with them during these conversations. So this goes along for, you know, pages and then Jesus announces, he said what he has to say and he kind of enters a cloud. And- The clulae, right? The clulae. Yes, yes, off he goes into a cloud. And Judas is kind of left there standing there. And then the next thing we know, we're back in Gospel world and Jesus is in the upper room having a last supper with his disciples and Judas is outside the building in which this upper room is and he is talking with Jewish leaders about handing Jesus over and they offer him money and he takes it and hands Jesus over and then it ends. So it's a very odd text that as you say at the beginning of the end, you're like in, oh yes, I recognize all this. This is what happens in the Gospels. And then, but it frames a very strange kind of surreal, isn't quite the word, but just an alternative time and place where Jesus kind of just talks to people and they talk to him and you're not quite sure what time you're in or where you are, any of these things. Yeah, he's always laughing at everybody and I like my Jesus to laugh, this is a very... A laugh, his laugh isn't, you know, that was a good joke and we're all friends kind of laugh. It tends to be a kind of mocking laugh. He kind of is like the God who laughs at his enemies because they are foolish. So yeah, he's, you know, this is not a very happy Gospel and Jesus, even when he laughs, isn't a very congenial person. Absolutely, it's very interesting. There are, as we shall see my dear listeners and viewers, there are no good guys, despite what some people want to say about the Gospel of Judas and this. Well, well, same Jesus, that's good, other than that. Yeah, I mean, yeah, Jesus, but I mean, it really is like, you were mentioning the multiverse, like if you see Dr. Strange and the different types of Dr. Strange, this really is like a Jesus you've never seen before. It's really amazing and just getting over, getting to some of the preoccupations and the text itself, Gospel of Judas is really heavy, heavily focused on liturgy on a ritual, specifically sacrifice baptism. So why the preoccupation with baptism in particular in the Gospel of Judas? What is this saying about the polemical content? Well, you know, the Christians argued about a lot of things in the second century and texts from that period kind of choose what different things they're going to focus on. And the Gospel of Judas has just, you know, is kind of tackling the issue of ritual. And baptism is obviously a key ritual for Christians then and now in which someone is essentially made a Christian, right? It's the ritual of initiation and it's the place where you receive your identity, right? As a new person. And in the early church, we have different forms of baptism that are attested and one of them is baptism in the name of Jesus. And that's clearly the kind, the form of baptism that our author, the author of Judas is aware of. But this ritual is being practiced by Christians whom this author, the author of Judas, thinks are completely mistaken about who Jesus is and what he means and what is the God that he worships. And so this author seems to think that the people who put their trust in their baptism all be fine at the end of time when this world is destroyed, which all Christians believed was gonna happen. I will be fine because I've been baptized. And he wants to say, no, no, no, no, no, you have not, you know, because you're not being baptized into the right faith, you haven't been baptized in a ritual that honors the correct God. It may be in the name of Jesus, but people do bad things in the name of Jesus. So it's, you know, taking on and, you know, in the ancient world, we like often think of religion as mainly about believing things. But in the ancient world, ritual was absolutely central to what religion was all about, right? Sacrifice above all, I mean, everybody sacrificed. That's just what you did. And so this is what it focuses on as a point of, in the end, I don't think that the gospel is anti-ritual. It's anti how certain Christians are performing their rituals and what they think happens there. What we don't really know, or it's hard to kind of tell from the gospels we have it, whether the author and his community practice their own form of baptism, different from this in the name of Jesus baptism that other Christians do that he does not like. And there are hints that they do because there's like a long passage that talks about water and how great water is and stuff like this. But he never says that our baptism is the real one, you know, so he never says that. But he definitely is not happy with the baptism that other Christians do in Jesus' name, which he considers false, right? Right, I mean, this is something we see time and time again, even in the non-commodi texts, but we'll get to that. You were just speaking about, yeah, that it's very concerned with ritual baptism, but yeah, sacrifice itself as a big part of what the polemical content and Judah seems to be railing against, you know, within this gospel, the disciples have visions of themselves as high priests making sacrifices in the temple. And this is paralleled by Judas's, you know, Judas is like this kind of like final boss high priest. He's like making the final offering to sackless. So it's the significance of this. Well, you know, the disciples have what they call a dream, but I mean, we would probably call it a nightmare, actually, in which they see themselves. They don't say that at first, that it's revealed during the conversation that it was they who were there, in which there are 12 priests making sacrifices in a temple like setting and an altar and it's intense, like there are lots of victims and there is a lot of fire because of course you burn these sacrifices. And, but not only this, these, and then there are lots of people they're devoting themselves to the altar, right? So, you know, it's a scene of basic sacrifice from the ancient world with kind of clearly reminiscences of Jewish sacrifice in the temple and Jerusalem, you know, 12 priests and they're honoring a name, there's a name and of course the name of God. So not only are, but it's like hyped up, like it's a lot, there's lots of people, there are lots of animals, there's lots of fire, right? And then these priests as, you know, priestly as they appear are actually horrible people. They do all sorts of sins, you know, they actually murder their wives and children and they engage in sex with each other and with, you know, and so forth. So they are not well-behaved priests, they're corrupt priests. And so the disciples, of course, are very disturbed by this dream and they, which they recount to Jesus and Jesus offers two interpretations of it. One we might kind of think of as kind of present day, present day to the author living in the second century, right? And he says, well, you guys are the priests, you disciples are the priests. The altar is the God that you worship, which is kind of interesting. And then the beasts that you are sacrificing are the people that you lead astray, the Christians who unfortunately follow you. So, and so that's, you know, not a good thing and it's basically saying what you're doing is wrong, blah, blah, blah. But yes, then Jesus offers like interpretation number two, which is kind of, which is in the future. So it's all on the future tense. And he says, well, there's going to be these days that are going to come and these 12 men now represent kind of star powers. Think Zodiac, right? Who are presenting. Yeah, this is where it gets wild. It does, it's totally strange where they are presenting sinners to their God. But then, you know, it's announced by these star powers that the, that a kind of single priest is offering kind of a final sacrifice that is acceptable to this God. And that brings the world to kind of to an end. Then the star powers are put under judgment and they are destroyed and so forth and so on. So it's clearly what we would call when fancy Christians speak eschatological that is having to do with the end of time and some events that will happen then. And yeah, the question becomes who is that final priest and the sacrifice, the single sacrifice that he offers? And here's the thing, the text doesn't say it. So this is my interpretation that it, though many people agree with me, but not all that the final sacrifice is Judas sacrificing Jesus. And that is supposed to kind of somehow bring to an end the reign of the ruler of this world and all the other kind of powers in the heavens that are hostile to humans and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, I mean, it's crazy stuff because it's both criticizing contemporary somehow Christian ritual and this nightmare vision and also looking forward to what's gonna happen at the end of time, which involves the death of Jesus which is very typical for Christians to believe. Right, and thank you for that answer, by the way. It's just, it's really crazy. It's almost like reading a Doctor of Strange from the sixties or something like Judas will become the thirteenth. He basically becomes Dromammu at the end of all of this. Like he's, he basically, there's like an order that ends but then like in the new order he's like you almost kind of feel bad for him because he's like part of this new situation in the heavens but he's like he's separated from everything and he is like you're gonna be the biggest and baddest of them all, you know, Jesus is kind of saying. Yes, it's, you know, as you may be aware when the Gospels first published everyone was like, oh, yay, Judas a hero or, you know, and this is all, you know, he's all sympathetic but you know, he's kind of made, if you can put it this way, a little more understandable than he is in the New Testament Gospels but still, you know, not someone that you necessarily like or feel okay about. I mean, Jesus reveals all this stuff to him, right? He, you know, Jesus takes him apart and tells him all this stuff that the other disciples don't know and so forth but this is to equip him to do the task which he must do, which is to sacrifice Jesus to betray him, which is an absolutely necessary thing to do apparently, to bring to an end all this stuff but Jesus kept saying to him, you will not go to the heavenly realms wherever all the saved people get to go and you will groan and moan about all that happens. You will not be happy and it looks like, indeed, as you say that he's at the end going to be kind of put in charge of whatever remains of this decimated cosmos as it's kind of governor or something. Right, as everything's remade, he's kind of like the architect of insanity or whatever. I like to think about it, it's like, you know, if some empire destroys some other country and they're just in ruin, probably not the job you want is to be the guy who's put in charge of this ruined country and that's kind of the job that it looks like Judas is going to get. Right, yeah, if this is a gospel, it's not good news for Judas to say the least. Yes, and yet that's what it's called. So you kind of, you know, it's called the gospel of Judas. So yeah. So let's touch upon that real quick. I mean, of course, that's what's at the end of it, right? But you mentioned that the insipid, it would be different possibly, you know. Also like this is usually termed a dialogue gospel for lack of a better term. We don't have these genres in antiquity, but like just for lack of a better term, like a term like Gnosticism or Neoplatonism, we have to use genre. Like they didn't have a novel back then, right? But we still use Greek novels. So I didn't know if you could just touch upon the dialogue gospel and why would the author or authors present Judas in this way? Okay, yeah. So the question of the title is a real question. I mean, is it a gospel, right? And as you said at the end, the gospel title appears at the end of the text, but this is totally common in ancient manuscripts. You put the title at the end, right? But this raises the question of whether it was the author who assigned this title in favor of that idea because he does seem to have an announcement at the beginning, a secret report of judgment and so forth. In favor of thinking that this is the title is the fact that this Irenaeus guy who wrote in 180 knows a text with the title of the gospel of Judas. So that kind of lends credence to the idea that it had that title from the get-go rather than that people added it later. It's like, let's give this a title, it doesn't have one or we don't like secret report of judgment, you know? So anyway, yeah, a dialogue that Christians wrote several gospels in the ancient world, especially in the second century that consist basically of just Jesus talking with one or more disciples. And often these have a kind of frame story as Judas does. Like, you know, you set some narrative, then there are these long conversations and then a kind of narrative closure. And we have other examples of this. So why would you write something like this? It's a great question, right? Probably the origin of it, the origin of, you know, there must be something like this we could write is in the gospel of Luke of all places where the author tells us that after Jesus rose from the dead, after that, and before his ascension into heaven, right? Which Luke says is 40 days, right? That Jesus talked with the disciples and taught them about himself and how to understand the scriptures properly. So according to Luke, there were all these conversations Jesus had with his disciples between his resurrection and ascension that Luke does not care to narrate for us, right? He doesn't tell us what did they talk about, you know? So, you know, he gives the basic contents but he doesn't give the words. So this provided a great opportunity for inventive Christians to supply that information. What did they talk about during this period? And so most dialogue gospels are indeed set after the resurrection. That is the resurrected Jesus is having conversations with one, two or the entire group of disciples. And he explains a lot of stuff. Usually he talks about things like the end of the world, what's coming up, about his body and their bodies, kind of these kinds of kind of metaphysical questions. Judas is unique among them in that these conversations are set even before the crucifixion. Right. And, you know, in a way that's rather confusing because he, like as I said, at the end of the conversations goes up into this cloud and then the next thing you know, he's back in the, you know, in the upper room having his last supper. So it's a little kind of not clear exactly. But anyway, you know, but this also enables the author to present certain teachings about Jesus that are not in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John without really rejecting Matthew, Mark, Luke and John because what you're saying is, yeah, what Matthew, Mark, Luke and John say happened, really happened. But then Jesus after his resurrection had all these more conversations with the disciples and taught them these new additional things which I'm now sharing with you. So it's a kind of clever strategy if you wanna think about it that way. It's a gospel that in some ways accepts the what we call canonical gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and their basic kind of frame. But then adds more to them and even adds teachings that kind of subvert what they taught and does it in a way that doesn't say, oh, it wasn't really like how they say but I have more information to give you. Right, yeah, it's like, oh, I have the secret info. It's like Zostrianos with his wooden tablets, bury them on the mountain or whatever. Well, yes, very nice device. I mean, Christians produced a lot of this kind of literature right of different kinds about apostles, about Jesus and everything. And it's a little bit like what we call fan fiction or stuff where people build off existing canonical narratives, the Harry Potter novels and then they write additional things that don't really say those aren't true but they add new interesting stuff, which sometimes a little bit subverts the original story. Yeah, I was talking about Dr. Tony Burke. I don't know if you know who Dr. Tony Burke is. Of course I do, yes. Dr. Burke is awesome. He's the apocrypha king. Yeah, we were talking about Judas and we were talking about the way that people took these ideas, these canonical ideas and they kind of added to them. And to me, I think he didn't like the fan fiction idea but what we did come up with was kind of like thinking about Batman in a way. Batman has a cannon, right? Batman has a cannon during the first 20 years. But if you read Batman now, like you read something like Batman, White Knight or the Dark Knight Returns, they can use that lore but they're subverting everything that came before maybe adding their own and that in turn becomes more canon strangely enough in some universes. So it's very interesting what they're doing here with Judas as an old Nakamati text, especially a text that Judas shares cosmogony with. Of course, I'm talking about the apocrypha king of John. Right. And this will lead us back to just kind of the concept of communities. So getting back to the first question, since of Walter Bauer, we've kind of stuck to that idea whether we realize it or not that there was no such thing as Christianity but rather in the early days, the Jesus movements were Christianity's multiple things. So would we do something, would we do better to understand Gnosticism similarly? If we use Gnosticism in a monolithic sense, are we doing into service to these early Jesus followers and the diversity contained within them? Do we lose something in translation if we don't read apocrypha of John Strictly as Sethian or a book of Thomas the Contender as Thomasine, Gospel of Truth as Valentinian, et cetera? Right. Well, of course, I think with all these early Christian texts, you should start by just reading them as Christian. And, you know, thinking, yeah, Christians were diverse and some of the literature that we have is really just the vision of a single person. You know, I am sitting in my, oh, I don't know, do they had studies? I don't know. I'm sitting somewhere and I'm writing or dictating this work and this is just kind of my interesting idea. Right? And there's not anybody with me. However, what we can do and, you know, and it's just this person just writing this thing. And, you know, something like the Gospel Judas could be that. But as a historian, you're always interested in more than just single authors sitting and making up stuff, right? You're kind of interested in ordinary people, the people that didn't write, you know, what were they doing? What kind of groups were there? What kind of rituals did they perform and so forth and so on? And that's when you start looking to see whether you have signs in some of this early Christian literature that the author was part of a community, that he spoke for more than just himself, right? And that he considered himself part of a kind of brand if you want to put it that way kind of Christianity that differed from others. And there are signs of that in, for example, the Gospel of Judas in that the author clearly has other Christians that he's disagreeing with, right? Now he could just be an alone crank, but I have a feeling that he's part of a group that see themselves as the true Christians as opposed to those ones over there. Or you look at something like the Apocryphal of John and, you know, you start to see references to a ritual like baptism. I mean, once you have ritual, you have to have more than one person, right? So you have some sort of groupness to you, right? So that's one thing you look for. You start to think, is there a group here and so forth and so on? And then the other thing that kind of is helpful is to see if you can see signs that some pieces of literature are interacting with each other, share the same ideas, and perhaps show signs of coming from the same group of people. And, you know, the danger of doing this, obviously, is you could be totally mistaken. But, you know, there you are, we're historians. We make mistakes all the time. But, you know, the value of it is that, you know, you can start seeing things in a text. You'd be like, why is it like this? But if you read this other text that seems to come from the same tradition or group, that explains why it is in this text and you understand it better. So, you know, what we're trying to do is kind of, you know, so traditions, so to speak, in literature, like say the Thomas tradition, it's not impossible that that's purely literary, right? That, like, someone wrote the Gospel of Thomas and then some person read that and was very inspired and wrote the Book of Thomas the Contender, right? And then someone else read both of those and read a whole lot of other things instead and then wrote the Acts of Thomas. So it's not necessarily that there was a community, but there was like a literary tradition of kind of the same ideas and motifs and borrowing and so forth. When we talk about the so-called Sethians or as I just say, Gnostics, right, where we're talking about the Gospel of Judas and I think also the Apocryphon of John, Revelation of Adam and some other works, I am inclined to think there was an actual group. I would agree with that as well. Yeah, I mean, not all scholars do and you have to argue for it, right? You have to say, here's signs of group activity, right? Right, absolutely. And I think you make a great point in your commentary, Ganea, the whole concept of this holy race set apart is used many times in this text. It's used, like, what, 48 times? Yes, which is remarkable. Anordinate amount of times, you know, I mean, these people are the seed of a race set apart. I mean, it's pretty obvious and you can see that in Apocryphon of John and then, you know, what's the other one? Reality of the rulers, I believe. Revelation of Adam, Apocalypse of Adam, even Zostrionis and, you know, ones like that, yeah. Right, I love Zostrionis, by the way. Yeah, you see a group consciousness and you see sectarian terminology. We are the descendants of Seth, whatever, right? You know, that makes us different from other people. And you see references to ritual. I mean, the, you know, this very smart French guy years ago, Jean-Michel Savant wrote this whole book on baptism in the Sethian texts and he, you know, could show that a lot of these seem to be referring to the same ritual with the same characters, the same actions and so forth. Once you have something like that, it seems as though you have a group unless you have someone just sitting around making stuff up in their, you know, monastic cell or whatever. But, you know, and this is the kind of things we argue about, right? But the virtue of saying this is a Valentinian text and this is a Thomacian text and this is a Sethian text, is the attempt to break up the idea that all Gnostics thought the same way and that you can just read into them what we think Gnosticism is, right? It's to show they were just as diverse. We like to say Christians were diverse. Well, so where are the people that we've put in the basket of Gnosticism? Yes. Well said, thank you for that answer. That's gonna actually lead us into my next point, which I can't remember what the text was from Nag Hammadi, but it was a Valentinian text. And I believe that the person who wrote the, the scholar who wrote the introduction said that this was probably written by, oh, what was his name? He was the guy who Valentinianism wasn't deep enough. Like he just wasn't hardcore enough. So we wanted to go further. Julius Cassianus, like he's probably written by Julius Cassianus because it's like, yeah, it's like Valentinianism, but it's also at the same time, like it's like going, these guys aren't going far enough. You know, I need a deeper cut for my record collection. You know, so to speak. This isn't a deep enough B side for me. So same thing with Judas, right? I mean, Judas seems to cast some light on this diversity that you're talking about within not just Gnostics, but the different groups of Christians at this time. When we say like these people were Gnostics or these people were Christians. Yeah, they share certain mythology, but at the same time, not everybody's agreeing if at all most of the time, right? There's always somebody who's got something going on. Yeah, I mean, that's what Judas is saying about this. If you're gonna do this kind of work, like, you know, and I should say that there are many scholars, especially younger ones than me who say we shouldn't be doing this at all. You should just really just read each text on its own and not put it any box of any kind, not a Sethian box or a Valentinian box or whatever. You have to decide what kinds of stuff hold together a religious group. Like what is the kind of stuff where you can say, yes, this is a group that holds together. And I think essentially it's ritual and mythology, the sacred story that you tell, right? Beyond that, I mean, what does this ritual mean? What does this mythology mean? These are the kinds of things that people in the group disagree about, right? So, you know, pretty much, I mean, all Christians, nearly not all, in the world do practice baptism. And it looks somewhat the same. I mean, there are differences throughout the world, but if you start asking them, what does baptism mean? What does it accomplish? That's when they start like totally disagreeing. But you can at least say they're all Christians because they all do the baptism thing, right? And they all have this basic story about, you know, God, the Father creating the world and then there was sin and then Jesus comes. But how this all happens, that's where you start getting the disagreement. So when you look at a group like the Sethians, for example, if you agree, I mean, what we look for that holds them together is essentially a myth, presumably a ritual of baptism and some language about themselves. We are the descendants of Seth, for example. But beyond that, we shouldn't expect that even they agree about everything. Yeah, absolutely. It would be looking at it, when you look at it macro-cosmically versus micro-cosmically, your mother's, we need to look at it kind of on that ground level. I mean, I really like John Kloppenberg's book Christ's Associations because he talks about how these early Jesus movements, they would look pretty much the same if you were looking at them from the outside. They're having the same meals, they're having the same kind of ritual liturgy, like you're watching them, you're maybe walking down the agorah and they're in their shops and they're having their little meal. But you know, this person, these could be Martianites. And then the next one over, the proto-Orthodox for lack of a better term. So yeah, I mean, they're not all agreeing on this at all. Right, and you know. It's a beautiful prison. Yes, the Christian texts we read make a big deal about their differences. Ironius writes about Martian. I mean, it's just a different blah, blah, blah. But I mean, what separates Ironius and Martian is like infinitesimal compared to what separates the two of them from the rest of the Greek and Roman world in which they lived, right? And it's very easy in studying early Christianity to kind of lose sight of that and think that, you know, as you said, that you know, they're so diverse that nothing holds them together. Well, there is something that holds them together. They're quite different from everybody else. And everybody else probably doesn't see a whole lot of difference between Martian and Ironius and Valentinas really. Right, I mean, how do you argue with, you know, the immovable race versus everybody else? Yes, I mean, that's a great example of a term that, you know, suggests to me that the person does think of what he's doing as involving a community of humans through time. And, but, you know, yeah. I mean, that's a good example. And yeah. No, go ahead. I didn't mean to. No, no, no, I'll stop. No, I love that. It's just, it was like, yeah. I mean, we could tend to like, like I think it's good, you know, in a sense, you know, to not always jump to the conclusion of a community there. Like when we look at something, I'm talking to Robin Faith Walsh tomorrow and I've been reading her books about, you know, just elite cultural producers and how these texts aren't necessarily reflective of a community in this romanticized notion of like a literate scribe bringing the voice of the people out. You know, it's sometimes it's just a dude in a study like Philo, right? We don't read Philo and go Philo as an example of a phylonic movement in Judaism. Philo is very much just looking at the text and exegetically going through them in a middle platonic stoic sense. So, but I think you're right with these quote unquote Sethian or Gnostic texts. There does seem to be an emphasis, especially with putting so much focus on ritual and, you know, baptism and sacrifice and just the concept of them being a seed set apart. Very interesting that there is a community there. So, I guess you just- Yeah, and I mean, you know, the other thing that you kind of notice sometimes about texts that suggests it's not just, you know, a person all by him or herself, doubtless himself in the ancient world is plenics. You know, the idea that, you know, these other people are wrong. You know, they're doing something wrong and we are right, right? Yeah. And that might actually be part of the reason why he framed whoever wrote Judas, frames it within those canonical texts that everybody would kind of get comfortable and go, okay, I know where this is going. Oh, I really don't. I really don't know where this is going now. But, you know, he's using Mark, Luke, you know, these things and he's like lolling you into like, okay, I know where this is going. Okay, no, I really don't see what this goes to. Right, and this is actually one of the areas of controversy among people like me who work on the Gospel of Judas. That is a lot of people would argue that the Gospel of Judas thinks that other Christians cannot be saved at all. That is that it has a very deterministic view of things. That is, you know, if you're not in the Judas guys, you know, the author's group, you have no hope of salvation because you've just been determined by the stars to be this way. But the literary strategy you were just talking about, you know, ah, here's stuff that you know, but now let me tell you what you don't know, suggest to me differently that the person really does want to persuade others to hold his views, which suggests that he doesn't think in necessarily such a deterministic fashion. Right, it reminds me of a discussion I was having with Dylan Burns the other day about his book, Did God Care? It's about providence and free will and Greco-Roman thought and also in early Christianity. And it's very much, yeah, very much the same, like these aren't as deterministic, you know, as we would like to think, you know, people weren't, you know, there's always a chance to be redeemed even through, yes, reincarnation people. You know, these texts sometimes, so. Sure, I mean, yeah, I mean, no one in the ancient world thought that you have, let's say, unlimited free will. You can just, in every moment, do what you want, right? They understood, we have circumstances and very importantly, you know, there are powers in the universe that determine the options for us and your previous decisions have formed your character in such a way that it's hard for you to do X or Y and easier for you to do T or Z, right? And on the other hand, so no one thought, you know, you just are a blank slate at every moment and you can just do what you want. On the other hand, none of them seemed to think there's nothing you can do about becoming a more virtuous person or whatever. I mean, they're constantly saying, be better. Yeah, for lack of a better script, better. Yes, they're like, you know, improve your life, be a better person, be virtuous, you can do it. So none of them were, you know, we tend to want, this is very similar to this issue of putting people in boxes of groups and, you know, and so forth, we would like everything to be clear, you know, either they're terministic or they believe in free will. Well, you know, it's complicated, is the gist of it, they all realize that. Absolutely, yeah, I think, I don't think anybody's figured it out. Dr. Bracky, this has been amazing. I know we're running short on time, so I'm just gonna give you one more question. And this is more about, this is more about Judas, just as a figure, it'll kind of get back to your introduction to when this text was first published and how he was initially interpreted within the text. And this is actually something I was talking about with Dr. Burke, because we were talking about Judas traditions and, you know, why is Judas so, you know, interesting? And we were talking about how you and I were just talking about how strange to have these very normal book ends to the story, right? Then it goes into this really strange apparitions of Jesus and he's telling Judas all these things and then Jesus walks into the clule, the cloud, right? And he disappears and then you're back. And it almost reminds me strangely enough of the movie The Last Temptation of Christ where Jesus is having his final vision, right? He's, you know, he's on the cross and he's like, I don't want this. He gets married, he imagines like he's having children and he's living a normal life. He meets Harry Dean Stanton as Paul, most of the best Paul I think in all of film history. But then like, at the end, like Judas has to be the one to set him straight. And then, you know, it's kind of like in the gospel of Judas itself, like Jesus kind of snaps into it and he's back to the story we all know whereas he was just going through this really weird situation. So it's kind of- Great analogy. Yeah, it really did remind me of that. So I just wanted to ask you, do you think the author of Judas intended to make him sympathetic? Do you also think that perhaps when these texts were first being translated that there was a tendency just within us to understand Judas and kind of view him in sympathetic terms, maybe we're seeing things that aren't there but we want to as people who wanna understand this lore, you know, see maybe Judas is the hero in a weird way where the Joker is the hero of a Batman white knight in a way and Batman is the bad guy. So very interesting. So I just wanted to know your thoughts on that. Well, you know, I think the thing about Judas is that he kind of captures the problem we were just talking about, about determinism and free will, right? Jesus says at one point in the gospel, Mark, you know, the son of man goes as it is written for him but woe to the one by whom it happens or something of that ilk, right? So on the one hand, what Judas does must happen. I mean, is absolutely essential to salvation. All Christians believe this, right? If Jesus had to die on the cross and somehow that had to happen and you know, they figure someone had to have turned it in. It just has to happen. On the other hand, so Judas had to do what he had to do. I mean, it's absolutely essential that he do that, right? On the other hand, what he did was bad. You should not betray your friend and turn him into the authorities that they will arrest him and almost certainly execute him. So, and he is, Christians believe, to be blamed for making that decision to do that, right? So he is not to be applauded for doing that. And yet, he had to do it. So I, you know, this is a huge paradox that gets at the heart of, you know, who we are as people even, you know, the combination of, you know, can we buck fate but yet we are held responsible for our choices. If you're into Jesus literature, one of the best Jesus novels I believe in the modern era is Jose Saramagos, the gospel according to Jesus Christ. Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature is Portuguese author, amazing guy. And the whole book is based, is around this, although focused less on Judas and more on Jesus. Like can Jesus, could Jesus have made a different decision in the way to the last temptation of Christ to ask the question, but Saramago asks it in a kind of different way. And yeah, I mean, and so the title gospel according to Jesus Christ is really to ask the question, could Jesus have written in his own gospel or was Jesus's story already written for him and he could do nothing about it? And we probably don't like to think about that in terms of Jesus, God, but Judas, however, is a good place to think about these problems, right? And you wanna know why would someone be so treacherous? And the gospels provide really, you know, dull answers. He wanted money, Satan entered him, I mean, boring. So, you know, last temptation of Christ, way more, way better. And I think the gospel of Judas, way better. It doesn't exonerate Judas. It still says what you did was a bad thing. Sacrificing a human life is bad, but he knew why he had to do it. Yes, it's definitely a much more fulfilling end to his tale than say, Pauli Karp or the book of Acts gives him where he just burst open and... Although that's totally fun, you have to admit. It is, he kind of, he blows up like a cabbage patch dollar. Yes, yeah, no, he burst open and yeah, this later thing that you find in Papias, like he's so become so expansive, he can't get through doorways and stuff like that. I mean, you know, it's crazy stuff and thank goodness it is because it gives us stuff to study and talk about. Yeah, in a way, gospel of Judas really, in a very strange way, and maybe it's, that was kind of the point that we could relate to somebody like Judas because in a way, he sees what's gonna happen to him. I don't think he's thrilled that he's gonna be the 13th, but he still does it and people can go, okay, well, if Judas can do this cosmically significant thing, maybe I can make a small change and, you know, accept the gospel or whatever the author was intending to do there. Yeah, fascinating food for thought. Dr. Brecky, this has been an absolute pleasure. This has been like being a fly on the wall when Robert Johnson was recording his 39 tracks. Very awesome and a privilege to watch you work. This is your chance to plug anything you wanna plug before we go. No, you know, gospel of Judas, second edition of Gnostic Scriptures by Bentley Leighton Nostra did that. And that's, you know, if you want your whole Gnostics in one big package, that's probably your place to go. But now I'm in my study trying to come up with new stuff. Oh, I look forward to it. I hope to have you back to talk about monasticism. I know you're really into that. Oh, yes, I'm. I'm at the outside of things. I love my other life as a monasticism scholar. Yes, there you are. Maybe for season two, but Dr. Brecky, thank you so much. This has been a pleasure. Thank everyone for watching. Totally fun. Yes, I'm glad I was totally fanboying out right now. Thank everyone for watching. Thank you for watching last week with Dylan Burns. I was really worried that this would end up like Plato's first and only public lecture on the good where people just started walking out after he started talking about mathematics and things, but you guys enjoyed it. And I really hope you enjoyed this because we certainly did. And Dr. Brecky, this has been a pleasure and honor. And you have a wonderful evening. I will. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Have a good one. Bye.