It has long been a mystery to modern scholars how religious documents which were put together in a cut and paste manner thousands of years ago are accepted as truth. This is as troublesome as any document that has come down to us in translation after hundreds of years and in a condition that calls for speculation rather than certitude about the contents.
Most people do not know about what a Geniza is or what its purpose is. Most Jews have little or no connection with the contents of a Geniza which is an above ground burial of worn out texts used to study the basic tenets of religious belief. Such documents are treated with care and honored by such a burial. The famous Geniza of Cairo which was in constant use for centuries provided a wealth of old documents which are still being studied and many more are yet to reach the scholars who devote their lives to translating in our languages what they contained.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection from caves above the Dead Sea. The Hag Hamadi collection is from Egypt and now there is a document from later Christian times, a translation from the Greek into Coptic about a revised relationship between Jesus and Judas.
It can get very confusing. What most people and even scholars do not know is that there are extant copies of religious writings, commentaries and speculation that never made it into the codex’s from which current versions of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles have come down to us. “Approved” or “Official” are the words that come to mind when these rejected works appear from time to time. They were excluded from the text which became the final word or the LAW as given by known, attributed to and guessed at writers. Moses did not write the Five Books attributed to him. That is a start. The rest is as mixed up and confusing and therefore presents a conundrum to believers who think they have the final word because their Bible tells them so.
The most recent excitement over ancient parchment or “leather” fragments is in the hundreds of pieces of a “new” document. The writing on both sides appears to tell the story of a different relationship between Jesus and Judas. Judas may have been doing only what Jesus asked him to do – quite a different story than what appears in the Gospels.
There is a reason for so many different denominations in each religious group. The message passed down through history is from questionable sources. Each variation in the story has its adherents and each version is the truth according to the group that champions it. Where will this be in the next thousand years?