The translation of The Gospel of Judas, due to be published on Thursday, contains no reference to the resurrection, according to the UK Mail on Sunday newspaper.

The controversial publication just a week before Easter, when the resurrection is celebrated by Christians, is sure to fuel a new round of hot-tempered debate around these age-old questions.

The manuscript is said to have been discovered in a limstone tomb in Eqypt in the 1970s, and is not part of the Gnostic haul recovered from Nag Hammadi in 1945. It represents a new perspective on the position Judas played in the Jesus story. In the Coptic Gospel, Judas appears as a hero, not a villain and is Christ’s favored disciple. In betraying Christ, Judas was fulfilling a divine mission, it claims.

American theologian, Bart Ehrman, says that in the Judas document there is no account of Jesus’s death because “his death isn’t what really matters”. What does matter to Judas is not that the body is going to come back to life but that “the body is going to die and the spirit is going to live on”.

This mystical view was eliminated from the Romanized version of Christianity in the 4th century, and subsequently reinforced by the French Bishop, Irenaeus, whose choice of four edited Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, has defined Western Christian thinking ever since.

However, there is strong evidence that the early Christians, including Jesus himself, were far more mystically-inclined than the materialist, political Roman church has allowed us to believe for 20 centuries. A large part of the spirituality of the Jesus story has been written out of history as if it never existed. The Gospel of Judas reveals much of this strand of early Christian thought.

National Geographic, the publisher of the translation, insists that it’s an authentic and plausible Christian text. Tests show it to be a 4th-century copy of a manuscript written in Greek in AD 187. National Geographic’s Herbert Krosney describes how in the text Judas is the only disciple who had the courage to stand before Jesus. He is told “to step away from the others”, for he will exceed them by “sacrific[ing] the man that clothes me”.

This last statement bears much comparison with the descriptions of nirvanic experiences described here on Spiritual Nirvana.

This is sure to be a controversial week for all of us interested in genuine spiritual matters so, for the other side of the argument, let’s turn to Charles Hedrick, an American historian: “I believe [this] is a copy of a document known as The Gospel of Judas that was originally written in the 2nd century by the Gnostics, a sect denounced by the early Fathers of the Church like St Irenaeus as heretics for trying to vindicate Judas. Timing the publication of this for Easter is dramatic stuff but my prediction is that after the initial uproar it will have no impact whatever on the future of Christianity”

The Mail on Sunday quotes a “Vatican scholar” as decrying the project as “dangerous”, and a “high-ranking Church of England figure” commenting: “Saying that Judas was a hero is not a generally accepted chain of thought”.

These ideas have been around a long time. They are not going to go away now. Books like The Da Vinci Code will see to that.

Continuing our series on Ramana Maharshi, the greatest Indian sage of the 20th century, here is an extract from my book, The Nirvaneans:

That there is “nothing but the Self” is the central premise from which Advaita Vedanta takes its source. All else flows from this austere statement. Vedanta”s greatest modern exponent, the Nirvanean, Ramana Maharshi, (1879 - 1950) continually emphasised the point to visitors at his ashram in Southern India.

“That silent Self alone is God; Self alone is the individual soul. Self alone is this ancient world.”

The “mind” is only a collection of thoughts, a pale reflection of the universal Self; and the mind distorts the light of the Self into the appearance of the world. It is as if a piece of ornamental glass, irregular and multi-coloured, had been inserted between us and the pure, white light of the Self. The kaleidoscopic dazzle of hues refracted through it make up our world, which distracts us from the original truth of what we are. The glass is the mind and ego which gives rise to it, and is fundamentally illusory.

It is the role of religion, at its best, to convince us of this reality and direct our efforts along the simplest path for achieving our own experience of it. The admittance of other matters or complications, for example, rituals, multiple deities, institutional hierarchies or the working of wonders, is the result of ego activity and leads us away from the goal not towards it. By this definition of religion: non-dual, simple and direct, Sri Ramana’s life is exemplary.

Despite the exalted reputation built up during his lifetime, some learned Hindus found Ramana’s teachings hard to follow. Although he had a deep knowledge of the scriptures and often quoted the Bible, he preached an extraordinarily pure distillation of the highest truth free from jargon and philosophical embellishment.

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Dan Brown, author of the wildly successful The Da Vinci Code, is being sued by two of the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (HBHG) for plagiarism.

The problem they have is that countless books written in the wake of HBHG have mined that book for facts and ideas. Moreover, thousands of copies of HBHG were sold off the back of Da Vinci, which has generated a whole publishing industry in its trail.

The interesting question is, have those ideas gained common acceptance, especially among leading authorities in the field?

Quite a number of Biblical scholars have written books broadly agreeing with many of the points brought out in HBHG. The Templar fortune, for example, and the “treasure” of the Cathars — thought to be the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, have been much discussed. The “Priory of Sion” may or may not be the genuine article, but the concept of Rex Deus, a group descended from the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem, seems to have a strong foundation in fact.

The Gnostic Gospel of Mary shows Mary Magdalen to have been much more than a common harlot. Respectable scholars now believe she was Mary of Bethany, and some say the wedding there was Jesus’s own to Mary. So, children would not have been out of the question.

There is alleged to be a document in the Vatican library dated 37AD which tracks Joseph of Arimathea’s journeys to Britain, and persistent rumours and historical echoes have come down to us in folk tales and various accounts.

That Mary might have escaped to the South of France and inadvertently founded the Merovingian dynasty is credible given the many references to Mary and Mary Magdalen in churches in the region.

Any analysis of the conventional Gospels show them to be contradictory and historically inaccurate. They were most probably rehashed from older Egyptian sources, involving Horus, a god born to a virgin mother, Isis, then murdered and resurrected miraculously. These already-ancient ideas would have been grafted on to memories of a local holy man in order to bolster his claims in the very competitive religious marketplace of the time.

My book, COSMOSITY, shows that all these powerful echoes relate to a mystical state, which I call Nirvanic experience (to avoid religious distortion), and which demonstrates the immortality of consciousness.

There’s probably some deep underlying truth in both HBHG and The Da Vinci Code. But, like a dream, the details appear garbled when reviewed after the event.

I wrote a post recently quoting Andrew Cohen’s short piece, distributed by email, about the difference between what’s personal and impersonal.

This is a topic I have a great interest in because it goes to the heart of the meaning of life. We tend to think that losing the personal side of things and entering the impersonal is a loss of consciousness and a depletion of our resources. In fact, it’s a raising of our awareness beyond the imperatives of the physical life. It’s often called “the sorrowless state” and that’s because the fate of our little “person” is no longer relevant to consciousness.

Andrew Cohen covers this topic particularly well in his Evolutionary Enlightenment drive. A recent blog post delves deeply into it.

Since its first significant emergence on July 30, 2001, this potential has revealed itself in a series of powerful eruptions of enlightened or nondual awareness among different groups of my students. A deeper or higher state of consciousness that transcends ego would miraculously engulf many individuals simultaneously, in such a way that suddenly the very ground of relatedness or intersubjective awareness would be enlightenment itself. As has been described on this blog, it literally took years for this new potential that I call Radical, Transformative, Impersonal, Evolutionary Enlightenment to even begin to come into being. When it did, it emerged as an intoxicating and profound shared state experience, in which many were coming together in what I call the Authentic Self, for longer and longer periods of time. Last November, this state was sustained for literally weeks on end, and spread like wildfire throughout my entire international student body.

Impersonality is a release, not a death. Although no loss or gain is involved, it is a vastly superior situation to the ape-like existence we experience on Earth.