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This
past Thursday, April 6th, the National Geographic Society published an
English translation of an ancient Gnostic text called The Gospel of
Judas, and then followed this up with a television special that aired
the following Sunday, April 9th.
A
carefully planned marketing ploy, it was certainly no accident that the
National Geographic Society chose to air their television program on
Palm Sunday for Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians, one of the
most important of all Christian holidays, and leads up to the events of
Good Friday and Easter. Let’s face it: religion sells.
In
a frenzy of media coverage occasionally bordering on sensationalism,
newspapers around the country carried front page stories with titles
like that of an article found in The Baltimore Sun: “Gospel of Judas
rattles beliefs. Newly translated ancient documents challenge orthodox
teaching on Jesus and his betrayer.” Or an article in The Washington
Post: “Ancient Gospel of Judas translation sheds new light on
disciple.”
Why
these headlines? Because the anonymous author of The Gospel of Judas –
unlike the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John that
are found in the New Testament – writes that Judas alone among the
twelve disciples received a special revelation and understood the true
meaning of Jesus’ teaching; and that Jesus himself asked Judas to hand
him over to the Romans for execution, making Judas a sympathetic figure
rather than a traitor.
But
what is The Gospel of Judas? The Gospel of Judas is part of a
poorly preserved papyrus codex that was discovered in the 1970’s in a
cave near El Minya, Egypt. Also found in this codex are several other
Gnostic documents such as The Apocalypse of James, The Letter of Peter
to Philip and what scholars are, for now, calling The Book of Allogenes,
all written in Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language based on Greek that
is still used among the Christians of the Coptic Orthodox Church, a
persecuted minority in today’s overwhelmingly Muslim Egypt. On the
basis of careful examination of the codex, scholars are in general
agreement that the text of The Gospel of Judas released by the National
Geographic Society may be dated to somewhere around the beginning of the
fourth century, between 300 and 340AD, roughly the same time as the
Roman emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, called the First
Ecumenical Council and established the city of Constantinople and
therefore some 300 years after the encounter of Jesus with Judas in
Jerusalem during the third decade of the first century. Basically, The
Gospel of Judas is just another notoriously unhistorical Gnostic gospel
like some of the texts that were found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt some
sixty years ago.
Therefore,
it must first be clearly stated that The Gospel of Judas is not a gospel
written by Judas himself. In an Associated Press interview, one of the
world’s foremost experts on Coptic manuscripts and Gnosticism,
Professor James M. Robinson, an emeritus professor at Claremont Graduate
University, was asked whether or not this text goes “back to Judas”
and his unequivocal answer was simply “No.” Expanding on this point,
Robinson continued, “There are a lot of second, third and fourth
century gospels attributed to various apostles. We don’t really assume
they give us any first century information.”
In
an interview that appeared in The Boston Globe, Robinson stated that, in
his opinion, some participants in the National Geographic effort “are
making the sly suggestion that the Gospel of Judas is more or less
equally valid” with the Gospels of the New Testament and that it
“contains things that could pull the rug out from Christianity as we
know it.” Robinson’s blunt response to such a suggestion: “This is
just ridiculous.” In fact, Robinson speculated that the timing of the
release of The Gospel of Judas was aimed at capitalizing on interest in
the film version of The Da Vinci Code, due to be released on May 19th, a
fictional story by novelist Dan Brown that centers on ancient Gnostic
texts and a conspiracy by the Roman Catholic Church to cover up a
marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
Because,
as all scholars agree, The Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic document,
perhaps the most important question to be asked is: what is Gnosticism?
The root of the word Gnosticism is the Greek word gnosis, meaning
“knowledge.” Gnosticism is an umbrella term that modern scholars use
to describe a number of religious movements in the ancient Roman world,
many of which were not at all related to Christianity, all of which had
several common themes: that the members of various Gnostic sects had a
secret knowledge not available to others; that there exists a series of
lesser, mediating divinities and luminaries sometimes called Archons,
sometimes called Aeons; and a dualistic outlook, an antithesis between
matter and spirit, body and soul; and a hatred of the physical world
that was often believed to have been created not by God, but by a
lesser, evil demigod to imprison the souls of human beings. In
Gnosticism, human beings are literally trapped in their bodies and the
content of salvation is to be released from the body “that clothes
me” as the Jesus of The Gospel of Judas says to Judas. Only the
Gnostics, those “in the know,” understand this.
None
of these beliefs are Christian.
Early
Christian teachers like St. Irenaeus (+202AD), the martyred bishop of
the city of Lugdunum in what was then the Roman province of Gaul but is
today Lyons in France, wrote a series of books called Against Heresies,
refuting the teachings of various Gnostic teachers and, in one of them,
even mentions The Gospel of Judas. Around 180AD, St. Irenaeus wrote of
the Gnostic sect of the Cainites, who attempted to “rehabilitate” a
number of Biblical villains such as Cain (who murdered his brother
Abel), the Sodomites (the inhabitants of the city of Sodom notorious for
their sexual immorality), Esau (who sold his birthright to his brother
for a single meal), Korah (who led a revolt against the leadership of
Moses) and Judas, turning them into spiritual heroes. In order to do
this, they produced what St. Irenaeus called “a fictitious
history…which they style The Gospel of Judas.”
You
may ask: what are St. Irenaeus’ credentials as a teacher of
Christianity? Why should we pay any attention to what he has to say?
According to Eusebius of Caesarea in his History of the Church, probably
written in 326AD, St. Irenaeus as a young man had heard the preaching
and teaching of St. Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna in modern Turkey, who
was martyred in 155AD; and St. Polycarp, as a child and young man, had
learned the Christian faith from no less a figure than St. John the
Evangelist, who had eventually settled in the city of Ephesus, also
located in modern Turkey.
But
there is no clearer way to understand that The Gospel of Judas is not a
Christian text and in some ways not even a Gospel at all than to simply
read it and not merely all the media hype surrounding its release. One
of the good things about the National Geographic Society website
promoting the sale of DVD’s of their television special as well as the
two books on the subject that National Geographic published this month,
is that you can download the entire Gospel of Judas in both its original
Coptic form and a seven page English translation. Yes, that’s correct:
the entire Gospel of Judas in English translation is only seven
type-written pages long, a far cry from the length of even the Gospel of
Mark, the shortest of the four canonical Gospels found in the New
Testament. And, unlike Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, there is little
actual history in The Gospel of Judas, no real telling of the story of
the Lord Jesus from birth to death and resurrection.
Instead,
The Gospel of Judas begins just before Jesus’ last Passover in
Jerusalem as the disciples are offering a prayer to God over the dinner
table. Watching them do this, Jesus laughs at them. Interestingly
enough, in none of the canonical Gospels does Jesus ever laugh. But in
The Gospel of Judas he laughs often, usually a sardonic
how-little-you-know kind of laugh. The disciples become furious with
Jesus for laughing at them – all except Judas, who says to Jesus, “I
know who you are and where you have come from. You are from the immortal
realm of Barbelo.” Who is Barbelo, you may ask? In ancient Gnostic
texts, Barbelo is the Divine Mother of all and the Forethought of the
Infinite One. Confused? If you are at all familiar with the story of
Jesus, you should be. But things only get more obscure and confusing as
you continue reading the text.
Because
of Judas’ “knowledge” that Jesus comes from “the immortal realm
of Barbelo,” he is promised a revelation “about secrets no person
has ever seen.” Cutting to the chase, here is the last part of the
“revelation” that the Gnostic “Jesus” gives to Judas. Brackets
indicate gaps in the text. Notice just where “Christ” appears and
who he is in this text.
“The multitude of those immortals is called the cosmos – that is,
perdition – by
the Father and the 72 luminaries who are with the Self-Generated and his
72 Aeons. In him the first human appeared with his incorruptible powers.
And the Aeon then appeared with his generation, in whom the cloud of knowledge
and
the angel is called El. […] aeon […] after that […] said, let 12
angels come into
being to rule over chaos and the underworld. And look, from the cloud
there
appeared an angel whose face flashed with fire and whose appearance was
defiled
with blood. His name was Nebro, which means rebel; others call him
Yaldabaoth.
Another angel, Saklas, also came from the cloud. So Nebro created 6
angels – as
well as Saklas – to be his assistants and these produced 12 angels in
the heavens,
with each one receiving a portion in the heavens. The 12 rulers spoke to
the 12
angels […] the first is Seth, who is called Christ. The second is
Harmathoth. The
third is Galila. The fourth is Yobel. The fifth is Adonaios. These are
the five who
ruled over the underworld, and first over all chaos.”
This
is the “truth” of The Gospel of Judas. Little wonder that no
Christian would consider The Gospel of Judas to be a Christian text. It
is clearly a Gnostic text, this particular codex written nearly two
centuries after the Gospel of John, the last of the four canonical
Gospels in the New Testament to be written and, as can be seen from
actually reading it, this newly published “gospel” has virtually
nothing in common with the four Christian Gospels or the Christian faith
except the use of the names Jesus and Judas.
Adam
Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, summarizes the place of The Gospel of
Judas: “Orthodox Christians will point out, correctly, that there is
no new challenge to the Church in the Judas Gospel, much less a crisis
of faith. This is an ancient heresy, dealt with firmly…throughout
Church history. The finding of this new Gospel, though obviously
remarkable as a bit of textual history, no more challenges the basis of
the Church’s faith than the discovery of a document from the
nineteenth century written in Ohio and defending King George would be a
challenge to the basis of American democracy.”
Or,
as Metropolitan Bishoy, a bishop and spokesman for the Coptic Orthodox
Church has said: The Gospel of Judas is “non-Christian babbling
resulting from a group of people trying to create a false amalgam
between Greek mythology and far Eastern religions with Christianity.”
It was “written by a group of people who were alien to the mainstream
of early Christianity.” Such “texts are neither reliable nor
accurate.”
The
furor over the Gospel of Judas will continue to be hot and heavy for a
few weeks, as National Geographic intends to air an encore of their
television special on April 13th and 22nd, the latter date being Holy
Saturday for Eastern Orthodox Christians around the world. But, as
Professor Robinson said in his Boston Globe interview, The Gospel of
Judas is, in the end, “a tempest in a teapot.”
page 3 of the Codex containing the Gospel of Judas
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