Comments on: Borges & Judas

By: Stranger than Ficciones « false messiah

Stranger than Ficciones « false messiah — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 13:26:55 +0000

[...] I novellen La Secta de los Treinta (De trettios sekt) skriver Borges om en heretisk sekt som ser Judas som frälsare: hans förräderi var nödvändigt för att Jesus skulle korsfästas och därigenom bli martyr. [...]

By: Ralph Mens

Ralph Mens — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 10:59:42 +0000

Fiction often precedes reality. In the case of Judas as the most trusted of the apostels, who makes the ultimate sacrifice, this idea circulated in esoteric circles already for some time.
But Borges would certainly have appreciated this confirmation of his story, and in fact he could have wrote the story of the manuscript of the Judas Gospel. Although Borges would never go through the trouble of actually writing the gospel itself; in his world a footnote to a fictional manuscript would suffice:

“The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary… More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.”

By: John Flower

John Flower — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 08:27:30 +0000

I read Fictions some 20 or so years ago.
Then the other day I read an article, The comfort of a lie (IHT), about the Da Vinci trial, and how the novel’s fictional discovery in the Bibliotheque Nationale harks back to Dumas, and Three Musketeers, also said to be based on a discovery in the Royal Library, and which resulted in a similar legal case for plagiarism, and then Gide’s hoax novel, the Vatican Cellars, where he wrote: “Fiction there is – and history. We are indeed, forced to acknowledge that the novelist’s art often compels belief, just as reality sometimes defies it.”
Then came the news of the Gospel of Judas. It was a story I immediately found fascinating, the reversal of all we think we know, and all of a sudden the two articles made me think of Borges, and I bought another copy of Fictions.
Talking to people about the Judas discovery, even yesterday when both the Catholic and Anglican churches attacked it (and the Da Vinci Code) in terms that were remarkable for their vehemence in restating the Christian canon, – seemingly denying the gospel’s authenticity when in fact the 3rd century bishop who helped establish the canon explicitly describes what can only be the same text – I kept saying to people that the whole incident reminded me of a parallel universe in an (imaginary) Borges story where instead of being the bad guy, Judas is the good guy.
Imagine then my suprise when I downloaded some material to read about the Judas gospel, and, sleepless early this morning, started to read through it only to find a casual reference to an actual Borges story — in Fictions.
And now I’m reading the story for real.
National Geographic reports that the papyrus codex of the gospel has so deteriorated since 1945 when it was discovered that some parts are lost.
Thus: That Judas is entrusted with this task is a sign of his special status. “Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it,” Jesus tells him encouragingly. “The star that leads the way is your star.” Ultimately, Judas has a revelation in which he enters a “luminous cloud.” People on the ground hear a voice from the cloud, though what it says may be forever unknown due to a tear in the papyrus.
We are left with a hiatus.
Except that a National Geographic commentator speculates that since the Catholic church proscribed the Gospel of Judas, it must still have a copy of the text somewhere in the Vatican Library, or even (perhaps) in the Vatican Cellars.

By: Brandán Buenosayres

Brandán Buenosayres — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 22:10:23 +0000

A terrific post – it reminds us that sometimes it seems that Borges imagined most of our reality before it ocurred to us…
He often plays with this idea of betrayal: Caín y Abel, “La forma de la espada,” “Tema del traidor y del héroe”…