The Gospel of Judas Is an Academic Affair
By Cary McMullen
When I was about 7 or 8, my mother took me to a revival at our small-town Baptist church in East Texas. One night the preacher described the fate of Judas Iscariot in vivid terms. Combining the different accounts found in the Gospel of Matthew and the Book of Acts, he told us Jesus' betrayer hanged himself, and then because the rope broke, he was dashed upon rocks, bursting open so that his "innards" gushed out.
It made quite an impression, as it was intended to. The devil had got hold of Judas, said the preacher, and look what happened. I doubt if he had read Dante, but Dante's conclusion was much the same. In his poem "Inferno," Judas shares the lowest circle of hell with Satan.
Today, on Easter, Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ and put Judas back into the Pit until next year, when his treachery is remembered once more. If Jesus is the tragic hero of Western culture, Judas is its ultimate villain.
So the April 6 publication of a long-lost gospel attributed to Judas was naturally bound to arouse intense curiosity. There's a titillation factor at work -- the Gospel of Judas portrays him not as an outcast but as a true insider to whom Jesus tells the secret divine plan. Since the opening of the exhibit displaying the 1,700-year-old manuscript at the National Geographic Society museum in Washington, all major media organizations have given it prominent coverage.
In case you missed the coverage, the Gospel of Judas is a text of a now-defunct sect declared heretical by early church leaders.
It is an important discovery, and the story of its recovery, restoration and translation, as told in two companion books ("The Gospel of Judas," $22; "The Lost Gospel," $27) published by the National Geographic Society, is unquestionably fascinating. Its significance, however, is more academic than religious.
SO WHAT IS IT?
To the extent that there is a controversy about the gospel -- and there's not much of one -- it's the question of authority and heresy. What is a scripture anyway? And who gets to decide which texts are scripture?
Some of the scholars involved in the translation and analysis of the ancient codex have implied that the Gospel of Judas, like many other excluded writings, was a victim of mere intolerance and closed-mindedness on the part of early church leaders. More on this later.
In case you haven't read the news accounts, the Gospel of Judas is a short text (about 20 pages) consisting mostly of conversations between Jesus and his disciples, principally Judas. The manuscript had been badly treated by antiquities dealers, and only about 85 percent could be restored.
Scholars believe this is a text of the Sethian Gnostics, originally written sometime in the middle of the second century, about 100 years after the death of Jesus. It's similar to the texts discovered in December 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. The recovered codex is a copy made about A.D. 280.
Gnosticism was a diverse philosophy that predated Christianity, but some branches borrowed Christian beliefs. It relies heavily on Platonic ideas.
The Gnostics had a complicated mythology about the creation and nature of the world.
In general, they believed the body and the entire material world is evil and corrupt. There is a true, pure God, but he had nothing to do with the world we know. A hierarchy of lesser deities were responsible for creating the Earth and humanity. Some -- not all -- people had trapped within their bodies a spark of divinity that was their true identity, but most did not know it. Only those who had this spark could learn their true destiny by mastering the knowledge (gnosis, in Greek) of the pathway to the pure heavenly realm.
As a result, they said, the God who created the world and pronounced it good, as it says in Genesis, was in fact a lesser deity who deceived the Jews. So they read the Old Testament as a kind of photographic negative. Anyone condemned in the Jewish scriptures must actually be a bearer of the secret knowledge. Judas, of course, fits this perfectly.
A DIFFERENT JESUS,
JUDAS AS UNIQUE DISCIPLE
In the Gnostic texts, such as the gospels of Thomas and Mary, Jesus is not the son of God come to Earth, since God could not possibly have dealings with human beings.
The newly discovered gospel, writes Marvin Meyer in an essay in the National Geographic book, "The Gospel of Judas," "contains very little that could be considered specifically Christian." Rather, Jesus is a teacher who possesses this secret knowledge, although as a teacher he is rather baffling. No one comprehends his obscure sayings that hint at the transcendent realm.
For example, in the Gospel of Judas, Jesus tells the disciples, "Truly I say to you, no one born of this aeon (world) will see that generation, and no host of angels of the stars will rule over that generation, and no person of mortal birth can associate with it . . ."
Judas, however, is the exception. "Judas said to him, `I know who you are and where you have come from. You are from the immortal realm of Barbelo (a feminine deity). And I am not worthy to utter the name of the one who has sent you."
Because Judas is a man of "knowledge," Jesus reveals the structure of the Gnostic heavens to him and then gives him a task -- to be the instrument by which Jesus' body is put to death, thus liberating his spirit. "(Y)ou will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me," he tells Judas.
What is the signficance of this? Does it offer any insights into the historical figures of Jesus and Judas?
Some of the scholars involved in the Gospel of Judas project, those of a more liberal persuasion such as Meyer, have implied that the Gospel of Judas offers a plausible historical alternative to the New Testament gospels. At least two scholars I spoke with, both themselves liberals, scoff at that.
"This is not something that happened in 30 A.D. but was made up by the Gnostics in the second or third century," said James M. Robinson, who translated and edited the Nag Hammadi texts and has written his own book, "The Secrets of Judas" (HarperSanFrancisco).
AN ALTERNATIVE CHRISTIANITY?
The Gospel of Judas doesn't pretend to tell history. It is in part a polemic against all other religious world views, including Christianity as it was taught in what we now know as the New Testament. It mocks those who follow the teaching of the apostles, because the Gnostics considered them ignorant.
Which raises the question -who was right? Does the New Testament give us the truth or does the Gospel of Judas?
Some scholars -- Meyer, Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels, among others, seem to believe the "canonization" -- the fixing of the canon, or list of accepted texts -- of the 27 books of the New Testament was an authoritarian affair.
That is, the bishops, deacons and priests of the early church got together, much the way the pope today might call a consistory, they picked out the ones they wanted and everyone else just had to accept it. Those who didn't were branded heretics. Ehrman uses the term "squelched" to refer to the Gnostic texts.
The Gospel of Judas, these scholars say, represents one of many alternative forms of Christianity that were floating around in the first few centuries, and their ideas should be regarded as just as legitimate as what we now call orthodox. In short, the Gospel of Judas is being employed in some quarters as a sharp stick with which to jab ecclesiastical authority.
But as Old Testament scholar James Sanders pointed out years ago, the canon is a product of the community's consensus about what is authoritative. It was actually a pretty democratic process, and the judgment of the early Christian communities was that the Gnostic texts were esoteric, they contradicted virtually all of the Jewish and Christian writings and, as Catholic writer Amy Welborn says, "They're terribly boring." Only a patrician, intellectual ascetic would find them attractive.
Seminary professor Craig Evans says in the National Geographic documentary, "The average Christian was saying, `I want to hear Matthew' or `I want to hear Mark.' Not very many were saying, `I want to hear Thomas' or `I want to hear Judas.' "
The real question for average Christians is not what the Gospel of Judas says about the person of Judas but what it says about Jesus, and the Gnostic Jesus isn't a figure of faith, hope or love, to use St. Paul's phrase. He is not the kind of Jesus who heals the sick or offers hope to the poor, the outcast, the friendless and those looking for comfort in this life. In a Gnostic Christianity, there would be no hospitals, no shelters, no charities.
Jesus' death in the Gospel of Judas doesn't have significance for anyone other than himself, and there is no resurrection -- he's trying to escape this world not return to it -- so there isn't much hope offered for the afterlife for most of us. Those who don't have the right kind of knowledge are doomed. A Gnostic heaven is a pretty elite place.
Had the Gospel of Judas been discovered in an era less given to spiritual experimentation, it might have caused mild interest and little more. The anti-authoritarian skepticism and valorization of outlaws that characterizes our day has no doubt fueled some of the attention it has received.
But I suspect once people read the gospel for themselves and realize that the reason Judas is portrayed as a good guy has little to do with censorship and a lot to do with an obscure philosophy that looks pretty prickly by today's standards, the document will be left to academics to puzzle and quarrel over.
And Judas will go back to being the villain. Whether historically or symbolically, he fills that role. As the Rev. Bryan Mickle, pastor of a Presbyterian Church said to me, "Judas represents the worst in all of us. Why do any of us betray our friends or our Lord? In that regard, we're all like Judas."
