Dr Paul Allen

Postmodern ideas about history challenge any authoritative version of the past given by the Bible as suspicious and founded in power play. Yet interestingly, the Bible is then compared to flimsy challenges of whacky alternative theories. For instance, the Gospel of Judas has been heralded by the Western media as a serious challenge to the Bible. Upon reading it, the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, noted, “It’s actually a fairly conventional book of its kind—and there were dozens like it around in the early centuries of the Church. People who weren’t satisfied with the sort of thing the New Testament had to say spent quite a lot of energy trying to produce something which suited them better. They wanted Christian teaching to be a matter of exotic and mystical information, shared only with an in-group.” According to The Da Vinci Code, the church suppressed the real version of events that can be found in so-called gnostic gospels like the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Thom...

Aceldama - Gate of the Monastery Aceldama, Aramaic name for a place in Jerusalem associated with Judas Iscariot, one of the followers of Jesus. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) “And it was known unto all the dwellers at Jerusalem ; insomuch as that field is called in their proper tongue, Aceldama , that is to say, The field of blood.” ( Acts 1:19 ) Never was a tract of land more fittingly named than Aceldama, an Aramaic word meaning “field of blood,” for it had been purchased with blood money, “the price of blood” ( Matthew 27:6 ). The purchaser had been Judas (through the “executors” of his estate, as it were, following his suicide), but the blood he sold, to acquire the price of the field, he had deemed “innocent blood.” The miserable thirty shekels of silver which consummated this transaction was the price of a slave in ancient Israel ( Exodus 21:32 ), butthis slave was none other than God incarnate, so the thirty pieces of silver —the price set by the religious leaders of Israel —...