Egypt is an old Christian manuscript recently translated, present a never-before-seen version of the story of Jesus: one in which the Messiah by the Jews escaped almost capture by his physical appearance, among other deviations from canonical biblical texts.
Roelof van den Broek of the Utrecht University in Netherlands, which the Coptic text translated and published, told LiveScience that it dates from about 1200 years the monastery of St. Michael in Egypt, located in the desert near contemporary al-Habib in Faiyum.
The text is attributed to St. Cyril of Jerusalem, who lived somewhere around 400 ad.
Shape-shifting Messiah
It is well established, even in canonical texts, that Judas betrayed Jesus with a Kiss by the Messiah to identify. The apocryphal text explains that Judas did this because Jesus had the power to change shape.
"When the Jews to Jude said: how shall we arrest him [Jesus], for he does not have a single shape but its appearance changes. Sometimes he's Ruddy, sometimes he is white, he is sometimes red, sometimes he wheat colored, sometimes he is pallid as ascetics, sometimes he's in his youth, sometimes an old man, "says of the translated text.
Judas said so that he would Kiss Jesus for identification, so that this last change shape and evade capture.
This explanation of Judas ' kiss also appears in other, older texts.
"To those who saw him [Jesus] he appeared not equal for everyone," van den Broek quotes Origen — a theologian who A.D. 185-254 lived — as saying.
Credibility
But Van den Broek said he found it "hard to believe" that the monks of the monastery of St. Michael accepted everything that was written in the text.
He told LiveScience that "Holy in Egypt, the Bible had all be explained in the fourth/fifth century, but apocryphal stories and books remained popular among Egyptian Christians, especially among monks."
In addition, Van den Broek explained that the text does not mean that these events actually took place, but at least some people at the time seem to have believed in them. — GMA News
