A Gnewer Gnosis?

One of my church members alerted me to this AMAZING DISCOVERY! You can read all about it at http://theconstructivecurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2006/04/gospel-of-brutus-revolutionary.html. He even gave me the clever title! Thanks, JE!

The Gospel of Brutus: A Revolutionary Revelation About the Real Jesus

The National Oceanic Society has recently released a long-lost and world-changing document, The Gospel of Brutus, which was found in a water-tight piece of pottery off the Greek coast. The Gospel, written by an unknown follower of Jesus named Brutus, reveals the inner teachings of Jesus that were long suppressed by the orthodox, power-mongering, and generally narrow-mined and anal-retentive clerics throughout history.

The document claims that Brutus was a secret Greek follower of Jesus, to whom Jesus disclosed the true, secret, inner, esoteric, and self-empowering teachings that he never revealed to his other disciples. In fact, what he told Brutus completely contradicts most everything in the four canonical gospels. The document, dated by scholars to have been written in about 300 CE, but composed about a century earlier, shows that Jesus was not Jewish in this worldview or sensibilities at all. For example:

"To you, Brutus, I reveal the mysteries, secrets, and inner realities of the Kingdom of Spirit—truths not known to those enslaved by the earth and its supposed Creator, Yahweh.” Hence, the idea that Jesus was a Jewish Rabbi who frequently quoted the Hebrew Scriptures is just a bald-faced lie. That is merely what the orthodox power-players want you to believe.

Jesus further says: "O Brutus, it is the Greeks, not the Jews, who truly understand the ways of the inner kingdom. The body is a mistake, a trash heep. I have no body, but only the ignorant cling to it, as they cling to all errors, not knowing the fullness of the utterly unknowable, but desirable, Being of Being of Being."

The newly discovered Gospel, of which there are no known copies elsewhere, also gives a remarkable prophecy:

"Far later, O Brutus, my beloved, when the True Unknowable Being will be revealed to beings, after the Time of Darkness, a scholar of the Light, of Truth, of true Prophet and Profit, will make the message known. Her name is Sage Maureen Bagels. She will be the shepherd of this Treasure, and nothing of the refuse of earth will hinder her overcoming. Follow her star and it will become your living fire."

Quite predictably, orthodox scholars have questioned the Gospel of Brutus on the ridiculous grounds that its author is unknown; it must have been written long after the canonical gospels; that its portrayal of Jesus as more Greek than Jewish flies in the face of history (both biblical and extra-biblical); and that an esoteric document of dubious pedigree hardly overturns two thousand years of Christian tradition that begins in the middle of the First Century.

Sage Bagels has already defended the credibility of The Gospel of Brutus in "The Old World Times" and is preparing a learned treatise on the subject. “The people who revered The Gospel of Brutus did not think they were heretics,” she wisely intoned. “Give esotericism a chance,” she also sagaciously pleaded.

Posted by Douglas Groothuis at 12:50 PM Saturday, April 8, 2006.

By the way, Doug Groothuis is a GREAT writer on alternative religions, the New Age Movement, and other challenges to the gospel. Google him and you'll get lots of great materials.