i despise religion and i despised the majority of my time at university, but i always enjoyed the classics department in 2005 i took a class i thought sounded

i despise religion and i despised the majority of my time at university, but i always enjoyed the classics department in 2005 i took a class i thought sounded interesting, introduction to coptic coptic is a middle egyptian language, somewhere between ancient and contemporary egyptian(i) there are some 30 plus gospels written, when the church chose their canon they went with the four because they contained ideas and perspectives in line with the church's message, manipulation through ommission these other gospels have fascinating insights into the breadth of perspective of people at the time the vast majority of them were either written in or translated into coptic magdelene and thomas are some hightlights of the thirty for the class we were learning to read`translate coptic by translating a copy of the gospel of thomas about midway through semester, as the fable went, a wealthy individual came on hard times and went through thaer attic looking for items to pawn off one item was an ancient text.. upon further investigation this text turned out to be the gospel of judas judas, the one who betrays christ as it so happened, my professor was the leading coptic scholar in the states at the time, he lost out on the book deal to a higher ranked scholar on the world scene but he were given facsmiles of the fragments to aide in deciphering and translating so one day he came to class and we put away thomas and this tiny room in the classics department with nine kids and a professor were some of the first to read the gospel of judas in millenia some things struck me signifigantly: the big payoff is during the garden scene, famously where christ sweats blood.. in judas' account judas goes to christ in the garden in secret and confesses to him: ~'i am the one you spoke of at the meal, i am the one who is going to betray you, and i hope you can forgive me for i have decided i am unable to go through with it'; christ responds: 'you need to continue with your plan.. you see, you need to do what you need to do so that i may do i what i need to do' but my favourite was how every, every, instance of the word christ in the text was accompanied with the quantifier 'laughing' . (i) .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic