Where’s Judas?

Last Sunday the Daily Mail, a British tabloid with a circulation that makes American newspapers envious, ran a long article [sorry, I don’t have a link] on a “Gospel of Judas”, which the National Geographic Society will unveil to the world in early April. Since then, a majority of the visits to this site have stemmed from Google searches for information about this document, which I discussed briefly in the past (7/11/04 and 1/5/06). National Geographic, which will be pushing television specials and books just in time for the Easter viewing and shopping season, is to be commended on its marketing acumen. On the other hand, no one will ever again be able to regard it as a serious scholarly enterprise. It has sold its birthright for a mess of pottage (or perhaps, worse yet, for a pot of New Age message).

The new “gospel” is a 4th or 5th Century Coptic manuscript, discovered in Egypt in the 1970’s and sold to a dealer in illicit antiquities, from whom it made its way circuitously into the hands of a Swiss foundation. The Swiss formed a joint venture with the National Geographic Society to translate and, more important, exploit the economic potential of the work. The Mail quotes James M. Robinson, eminent for his studies of early gnosticism:

National Geographic acquired these rights after the Swiss owners of the manuscript finally realised they could not sell the actual object because it had been illegally smuggled out of Egypt.

National Geographic took the bait because they saw an opportunity to cause a sensation by coming out right around Easter and right before the Da Vinci Code movie with something that the pre-publicity implies is a new gospel from the New Testament, when in fact it is a copy of a book originally written well over 100 years after the death of Christ.

From the bits that have been leaked so far, it is a reasonable guess that “Judas” is a work described by St. Irenaeus in his Refutation of All Heresies (c. 180 A.D.). If so, its discovery is of considerable interest to specialists in early Christianity. It appears to emanate from one of the many groups that welded the person of Jesus to fantastical cosmological ideas. Most of what we know about them comes from their orthodox opponents, such as Irenaeus. An account of their doctrines from the inside is a valuable addition to historical knowledge.

Once upon a time, the National Geographic Society would have been content with that, but a sober account of a 2nd Century pseudepigraphion wouldn’t make much money (just as Professor Robinson’s forthcoming study is unlikely to be a best seller). Hence, “Judas” has been tarted up and made to look like a harlot who, in the word’s of the Mail headline writer, “could threaten the very basis of Christian teaching”.

Well, no. We already knew that some early semi-Christians taught that Judas was the hero of the Gospel story, carrying out his betrayal at Christ’s behest. Related sects went further, making the serpent in the Garden of Eden the servant of the True God, conceived as the enemy of the lesser deity who created the material world and was worshiped by the Jews. These concepts weren’t credible in the 2nd Century, which is why they died out, and gain nothing merely because one of their proponents’ compositions has survived to the present day.

It will be interesting, for those of us who are interested in such matters, to learn how the writer of the “Gospel of Judas” perceived the cosmos and where his teachings fit into the fragmentary skein of gnostic and early heretical ideas. Conceivably, there is information that will shed light on the strains of primitive Christianity ancestral to the Church of today. Therefore, I’m glad that these 26 pages of Coptic have belatedly come to light. Nonetheless, one is tempted to say that, by subordinating scholarship to opportunistic money making and giving the public a distorted picture of what it has found, both the owners of the manuscript and the National Geographic Society have played a role in relation to the “Gospel of Judas” not unanalogous to that of the real Judas in relation to Our Lord.

Update (4/8/06): The text of the new “gospel” has now been made public. FWIW, you can read my initial analysis here.

Comments

[John Doman]

Re: the last posts --
The items that were bolded were supposed to be hyperlinks: they were going to the text of the Gospel of Judas.
http://www9.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel/_pdf/GospelofJudas.pdf
Read it for a good laugh!

[John Doman]

Hey, Scholar of Classics!
Speaking of "ideas not being destroyed completely": how about a religion whose members were imprisoned, tortured, thrown to lions, soaked in tar and lit as human torches...a religion whose books were burned and confiscated, a religion which was illegal for 260 years (52-312 AD), and yet still survived?
How about the thousands of people over the past 2,000 years who have gladly sacrificed their lives for the belief that Jesus Christ was and is both God and Man, who died and rose again?
Or how about the Catholic Church? You know, that thing that's been around for 2,000 plus years, making it by far the longest-lived human institution in history?
How about the Shroud of Turin? Or the image of Guadalope? Or the thousands of other miracles that you can look up just by googling "miracles, scientic evidence." If you can prove by scientific evidence that all these miracles are false, then maybe I'll start taking you seriously.

Who cares there's some similarities between Christianity and Paganism? How, exactly, does that prove or even insinuate that Christianity is false? Use logic, please; that would be helpful to me and other poor ignorant benighted Roman Catholics like me. Oh, but here's an idea: Maybe, just maybe, Mithraic religions, and gnosticism, are similar to Christianity!! Maybe Christianity came first? Have you thought of that possibility?

But just so you know the facts about the "Gospel of Judas". It was written no earlier than 130 AD, which would be about 100 years after Jesus died (and rose from the dead, but you probably don't believe that.) It claims to be a "secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week three days before he celebrated passover. In it, Jesus mocks the diciples for the worship of "their god," which I assume is Yahweh, the God that the Jews worshipped. Then this Jesus rambles on for pages and pages about "luminaries" and "chaos" and other typical gnostic gobbledegook. Uh huh. Okay. And of course, we should just trust this one document over all the other documents. We should take this document's word that Jesus, a faithful Jew and a rabbi, would mock other Jews for worshiping Yahweh. We shouldn't be skeptical about the Gospel of Judas. But we SHOULD be skeptical about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which were written a lot sooner to the actual events.

How is the "Gospel of Judas" more "real history" than the real Gospels? Do tell me, Scholar of Classics! Enlighten me, Don Joe! Share your secret wisdom to the masses, O Shining Lights of Logic and Reason!

[Scholar of Classics.]

Your outright discounting and dismissal before you have any actual knowledge of something is actually exactly what I've come to expect from your brand of Biblical "scholars". Why even bother writing about something of which you have almost no knowledge? You're clearly content to kick back in your cave and gaze upon the projections of shadows on the wall that were created by the authors of books who wished to label such things as "heresies".

Forget not that all Christianity started as what scholars refer to as a "mystery cult". It was terribly common in such cults of Roman and Greek origin to have death-resurrection motifs, transubstantiation, acts of symbolic cannibalism, and generalized mysticism and miracles. Whenever you dismiss the mystery gospels used by Gnostic heretics in early centuries as "...weld(ing) Jesus to fantastical cosmological ideas", you also discount almost your entire canon that was also read by them and has fantastical notions such as transubstantiation/transmutation, elements of a Mithraic sacrifice, a Pentacost, and an Apocalypse ("revealing of something hidden") of John.

A remotely objective history of Jesus Christ was lost long ago, and it will likely never be realized. The Roman Catholics won the battle between Christian mystery cults and rose to the top. However, the texts of the losing sects have somehow "miraculously" survived and escaped the purges and book burnings to a time when those who have delusions that they alone possess the entire and only Truth are powerless to snatch them from scholars and destroy them. Those texts shall now haunt you and plant the seeds of doubt, but when you get right down to it, it was not up to a council of men in ancient times to censor your path to knowing God...it is up to you to read every word attributed to an avatar of God, and to make a judgement based on your understanding and whatever divine insights you may receive.

It all goes to show that violent purges and book burnings, no matter how powerful the force behind them, cannot destroy an idea completely. In the end, if you choose to remain ignorant and blissful, you alone will answer for that. Just as "heretics" are also responsible for their beliefs. No free rides to enlightenment or salvation, here!

[Don Joe]

What of the synoptic gospels and _their_ heretical departure from true history?