That Judas book

One or two people have asked me what I think about The Gospel According to Judas. To be honest, it was on the list of things to think about when some rather more important tasks had been tackled. Back from an afternoon's walk to Aylesford, I cooked up something to eat and read the Catholic Herald. They have a good article on it which got me looking on the internet.

Courtesy of The Cafeteria is Closed, I found the article by Fr Paul Mankowski which the Herald had quoted. In his remarks on the gospel according to judas, Mankowski offers the following clarfications:
  • The Pope did not "bless" the Archer-Moloney novel.
  • The Pontifical Biblical Institute provided the bottled water at the speaker's rostrum for the Archer-Moloney press conference. Its scholars had nothing whatever to do with the book's content.
  • The Archer-Moloney novel was not "published with Vatican approval."
  • No biblical scholar, including my former colleague Fr. Frank Moloney, believes Fr. Frank Moloney to be "the world's greatest living biblical scholar."
  • Fr. Moloney is not "one of the Pope's top theological advisers."
  • The International Theological Commission, of which Fr. Moloney was a member, enjoys the same level of teaching authority as the Philatelic Office of the Holy See -- that's to say: zero.
  • The teaching of the dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum §11 has not been abrogated.
The rest of Mankowski's article is well worth reading.

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