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Casting Judas not as a culpable betrayer, but as an intimate friend and
collaborator of Jesus, the recently announced Gospel of Judas has
understandably generated a stir. However, what the ancient
document says about Jesus is even more controversial. According to
this “Gospel,” Jesus was a bearer of a deep secret that apparently
he revealed to no other disciple except Judas; and then got his help to
die that his spirit may be released to some heavenly realm. Recruited
for this purpose, Judas then “betrays” the Master as an act of
intimate friendship. This is heady stuff. Does the Gospel of
Judas cast doubts on the accounts of the four traditional Gospels and,
implicitly, on all early Christianity?
The
fact that the Gospel of Judas has been authenticated as belonging to the
third century, the original written about a century earlier, does not of
course mean what it says is true. St. Irenaeus of Lyons (ca. 180 AD)
knew about it and denounced it as heresy. Many other Church Fathers and
theologians have, before and after Irenaeus, refuted the same kind of
thinking found in dozens of similar documents which distorted the
apostolic faith. Scholars have called that religious ideology
Gnosticism, a phenomenon that flourished mainly in the second century
and created serious problems for the Church. Since the late
1940’s, when a slew of them were found buried in the dry sands of
Egypt, scholars have been able to study these document first hand.
In the National Geographic documentary featuring the Gospel of Judas,
biblical scholar Craig Evans, near the end of the film, bluntly stated
that nothing new and nothing historically authentic is to be found in
the document. Although the documentary leaned to the opposite
view, most scholars will probably agree with Evans. The Gospel of Judas
is but another small window to Gnosticism, a hodgepodge of religious
speculations that exploded on the scene during the second century.
At that time, individual intellectuals or small and elitist groups
around them, bothered by the basic story of the Bible, especially the
“violent” God of the Old Testament and the “scandalous” death
and resurrection of Jesus, generated their own religious philosophy.
They combined Jewish, Christian and pagan elements to construct
literally fantastic systems of speculation including astrology and
magic. The core theme, found in the Gospel of Judas, is secret knowledge
(gnosis) that leads to salvation.
What
was that secret knowledge about? It was essentially about the
Gnostic system itself that roughly runs as follows: A higher god,
infinitely superior to the God of the Old Testament, sends periodic
illuminators to earth with a secret message to draw back to heaven the
inner divine sparks of receptive human beings hopelessly caught in utter
darkness. According to this worldview, the Old Testament God is an
inferior and ignorant God, responsible for creating the lowest sphere of
existence, the earth, where all the evil of the cosmos had dredged.
Material things, including human bodies, if not evil, are the seat of
evil, and to be escaped from. So in Gnostic thinking the eternal Christ,
who was the son of the higher god and not the Son of the God of the Old
Testament, could not truly have taken human flesh. Instead, he
temporarily entered into Jesus at his baptism and later, at some point
during his arrest and suffering, left the material body and returned to
the sphere of light.
In
the Gnostic system, the saving death and resurrection of Christ play no
role and they are usually entirely omitted. The one killed is not
the Son of God, but only the human Jesus, whose body presumably decayed
to dust. What is decisive for the Gnostic view is not the person
of Jesus the Christ, crucified and risen, but the Gnostic “gospel”
itself, that is, the message of the secret Gnostic system. This
system was thought to provide the key to a kind of self-salvation
through self-knowledge and self-realization in the discovery of the
inner divine self.
What’s wrong with all this? The whole thing. That Jesus
passed on a single secret to a single intimate collaborator is immensely
absurd. Jesus conducted an open ministry addressing his message to
all and publicly conflicting with religious leaders over such
issues as the Sabbath observance, the ritual washing of hands, and the
temple activities. Not even radical critics would deny essential
truth in these words of Jesus: “I have spoken openly to the world; I
have always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all Jews come
together; I have said noting secretly” (John 18:20). The events
of the early Church and its astonishing mission, reported in the Book of
Acts, were “not done in a corner,” St. Paul pointedly observed (Acts
26:26). Against the Gospel of Judas, none of the New Testament
books, all written in the first century, give any hint that early
Christianity was all about elites conveying secrets to elites. The
“mysteries” of God’s kingdom proclaimed by Jesus (Matthew 13:11)
were not about objective teachings, such as “love your enemies” and
many others like it in the Sermon on the Mount. These were taught
to all, disciples and the crowds. Rather, the mystery of God’s
kingdom, both then and today, is the same: it is the personal
experience of grace and forgiveness arising in human hearts from hearing
about God’s rule and living by the gospel.
The Gospel of Judas turns Christianity on its head. Long ago St.
Irenaeus accused the Gnostics of using the Bible as a mosaic from which
they extracted selected tiles and created a wholly different portrait of
Christ, turning, as he said, the portrait of the king into that of a
fox! The Christian gospel puts Christ at the center of the message
salvation and proclaims a true incarnation, a true death, and true
resurrection by which of sinners are redeemed from the power of sin and
enjoy a new life of grace in obedience to Christ. Contrary to the
Gnostic message, the Christian gospel is rooted in the Old Testament as
part of the saving plan of the only true God and Father of Jesus Christ.
St. Paul declares that there is only one Gospel (Gal. 1:6-9) and that he
and all the numerous eye-witnesses to the risen Christ preach the same
Gospel of the crucified, buried and risen Lord (1 Cor. 15:1-11).
In view of the testimony of these eyewitnesses, many of whom had
actually walked with Jesus, only a fool would attribute any credibility
to a strange document written one hundred fifty years later.
Let readers be aware that there can be no compromise here. One
cannot choose parts from the traditional Gospels and parts from the
Gospel of Judas. The two versions of salvation by their very nature
negate each other. They are not two alternative, more or less
acceptable, takes on what authentic Christianity was and is. The Gnostic
gospel proclaims Christ as a kind of disembodied messenger who opposes
the work of the Old Testament God. The Christian gospel proclaims
an incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ in complete harmony with the
same God who is his Father. The Gnostic message views the human
body as virtually evil, something to discard. The Christian message
holds the human body as holy, redeemable, destined for glorious
transformation through resurrection. The Gnostic way of salvation
is one of inward meditation toward self-realization. The Christian
way of salvation is taking up the cross in obedience to Christ and in
communion with his body, the Church, which has a vital mission in part
to work for justice and peace in this world that God loves. When
the two interpretative perspectives are assessed as wholes, the
historical and theological evidence clearly favors the Christian option
as being the most faithful to the message of the Bible and worthy of
life-long commitment.
What about Judas’ betrayal? The betrayal was not as decisive for
Jesus’ death as one might think. Jesus’ enemies would have
gotten to him one way or another. Jesus did not, of course, need
Judas’ help to die, if Jesus’ wanted to do that, because he could
have surrendered to the authorities himself. The idea that Jesus
was looking to die is totally refuted by the experience of Gethsemane in
which Jesus with distress and tears prayed three times to be spared the
cross.
The
betrayal of Judas is significant in its moral (rather immoral)
immensity. Yet, why did Judas betray Jesus? Was it envy, greed, an
attempt to force Jesus’ hand toward revolution against the Romans, or
even an attempt at a reconciliation meeting with the religious leaders
for the common national good? No little attention in print and
film has been given to such questions, and it is no sin. The
vilification of Judas in Christian history is lamentable. For
Christians, the right response to all sinners, including ourselves, is
sorrow and prayer in the spirit of Christ’s love who forgave his
crucifiers. What a magnificent testimony to God’s forgiveness,
if Judas, like Peter, had repented of his misdeed and run up to Jesus as
he stumbled up the hill to Golgotha and asked for mercy!
Forgiveness would have been certain. But it was not to be. Falling
into despair on account of his betrayal, Judas killed himself, an act
that would otherwise have no reasonable explanation, unless one is
prepared to adopt the Gnostic system and see Judas as committing suicide
to release his own soul to astral regions.
Who
has the story right? The second-century Gnostics with their new-fangled
speculations, or the earliest Christians who provided the traditions
behind the four Gospels? If it were not a culpable betrayal, why
would early Christians want to create and perpetuate an embarrassing
story about one of the twelve disciples handing over his Master to the
enemies? To reverse morally the betrayal into an act of friendship
seems utterly ludicrous.
The crux of the fuss has to do with the value wars in the second as well
as the twenty-first centuries. Over recent centuries, the failings of
Christians and institutional Christianity, wars and all, have caused
offense to many intellectuals who have consequently looked elsewhere for
answers. Out of frustration and sometimes hatred, some have even
proposed and have actively sought either radically to revise or even
wholly to destroy traditional Christianity. They have wanted to
throw out the proverbial baby with the water. This sort of thing is both
regrettable and unacceptable. The institutional Church ought to be
fully transparent and get its act together for an effective mission in
the world. However, a radically revised Christianity is no
Christianity at all, but only a fake shadow of it, unworthy of support.
One must also consider that the despisers of Christianity have not come
up with some viable communal alternative that works.
The
ancient Gnostics seem to have been gripped by similar frustrations and
anger. The pain of an unjust and violent world led the Gnostics to the
dreamy ideal of escaping from reality instead of facing it. They
thought to find self-redemption in meditative self-absorption and the
construction of ethereal speculative systems, rather than by following
the way of the cross and martyrdom as adherents of apostolic
Christianity did. Part of the spiritual revolt of the Gnostics, so
it seems, was to attack basic teachings of the Bible and the Church.
And what crazy stuff it was that some came up with. The Naassenes
or Ophites (the respective words in Hebrew and Greek mean “snake”)
venerated the deceiving serpent of Genesis thought to have the wisdom of
the superior god against the plan of the Old Testament God! Other
Gnostics advocated three, seven, nine, thirty or thirty-three levels of
divinity. Marcion, an extreme ascetic who saw evil in matter,
allowed only single people in his communities. He prohibited
marriage and childbearing because, in his view, such practices aided the
work of the inferior creator god. And so Marcion condemned his own
congregations to eventual extinction.
These
examples may show that it is not the case, as some loudly claim today,
that oppressive bishops and a rigid Church suppressed the Gnostics. For
centuries the Church was under persecution and had no social or
political power to oppress anyone. Naturally the leaders and
theologians of the Church were concerned to maintain the apostolic
traditions and therefore they disciplined their own communicants.
However, any person or group outside the Church, or cast out of the
Church, had the same opportunity to flourish in their choices. The
decline of Gnostic groups was chiefly due to the inability of their own
message and practice to draw and keep adherents. Christianity triumphed
not because of its rigid administrative or theological systems, but
because it served the needs and hopes of many who were willing to make
the costly commitment to the apostolic gospel.
In
modern democratic societies, individuals and groups have equal
opportunity to promote their ideologies and practices. The promise
of success is open to all. Let God’s truth be served in
providing real solutions for the real problems of humanity by means of
example and persuasion. In the cauldron of the current cultural war, it
is no surprise that people would differ as radically as people did in
the second century and still regard themselves as Christians. Some
continue to teach that Jesus’ transformed bodily resurrection is an
unnecessary myth, despite the protestations of St. Paul (1 Corinthians,
chapter 15). Others advocate same gender marriage despite the
witness of the Scriptures, all of the historical wisdom and the drastic
social implications. Still others have supported almost limitless
destruction of the unborn as if only the will and convenience of the
potential parent really counts. And many caught up in the spirit
of the age, whether consciously or unconsciously, follow the post-modern
message of looking for the “real” self, finding one’s way,
creating one’s own truth, and doing one’s own thing—while still
claiming to follow Christ. For such persons, the Gospel of Judas
may perhaps be of considerable value. For many others, however, it is no
“gospel” at all.
Rev.
Dr. Theodore G. Stylianopoulos,
Archbishop
Iakovos Professor of Orthodox Theology
and
Professor of New Testament
Holy
Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology
Brookline,
Ma 02445
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