Philobiblon

After the discovery of the “missing link” fish/amphibian yesterday, today it is the unveiling of the Gospel of Judas:

The Gospel of Judas, a fragile clutch of a leather-bound papyrus thought to have been inscribed in about AD300…
According to this version of events, not only was Judas obeying orders when he handed Jesus to his persecutors, he was Christ’s most trusted disciple, singled out to receive mystical knowledge.
According to the 26-page gospel, copied in the ancient Coptic language apparently from a Greek original more than a hundred years older, Jesus told Judas: “Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal.”

Scholars are saying it doesn’t reveal anything fundamental that wasn’t already known about the gnostics (about whom I’ve written here and here), but it is a nice reminder that the whole idea of the Bible as a single, unchanging document, set in stone, is utterly ridiculous – a bit of a problem for the fundamentalists.
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Simon Jenkins in the Guardian today is getting stuck into modernist architect. That left me looking out my Sixties tower block window (and a very nice, practical, well laid-out, light and airy flat) it is too, wondering if the fault on “failed estates” really is with the architecture, or with the lack of investment in maintenance, services etc? I tend towards the latter view.

Perhaps some of the huge estates, with their linked walkways, as seen for example in east London, do by their nature create problems, but to sweep up all modernist architecture in that seems a bit harsh.
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The Tories have decided that prison doesn’t work and the solution lies in rehabilitation not punishment. Meanwhile Labour keeps locking more and more people up without making any provision for their rehabilitation. It is getting to be a funny old political world.

One figure of note from that article: 2 per cent of the prison budget is spent on education – TWO PER CENT! No wonder the recidivism rate is awful.