Rev. Victoria Heard
April 2006
In Holy Week, with a media splash worthy of Hollywood, National Geographic announced the discovery of “the long lost gospel of Judas” and aired a special on the discovery of the text on Palm Sunday. The talking points are that Judas’s “betrayal” was at Jesus’ behest, and that Jesus promised Judas that the other disciples will curse him, but, in the end, Judas will rule over them.
The fragmentary text is an important discovery for historians, for it will flesh out what was already known of the Gnostic groups in early church history. There is no evidence that Judas’s gospel was written before the middle of the second century. Although the text has been lost for centuries, Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons mentioned it in his survey and rebuttal of heresies which he wrote about 180 AD. Irenaeus carefully read all the writings of Gnostic authors, laying out the belief systems behind them and then contrasted those beliefs with the traditions of the apostles. He mentions the Gospel of Judas as a book of the Cainites, who made heroes of Cain, Korah, and Judas, because they had rebelled against the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. To the Cainites, the God of the Bible was evil because he had created matter.
Irenaeus describes the thirty gendered deities and the seventy-two heavens that constitute “the pleroma of the Bythus”, which seems to be a sort of divine plasma. I was forcibly reminded of Scientology, where you have to keep going to more expensive and elaborate seminars to understand how to get to “the clear”. The universe of Judas’s gospel is astoundingly cluttered. There are dozens of deities-- gods and demiurges galore. The Gnostics saw the God of the Bible as a lesser entity who botched the job of creation, so that humans and other spirits are trapped by their material bodies. That is why Judas does Jesus a favor: he frees him from the prison of his body. Judas’s Jesus scorns the body and the material world around us. How different from the Jesus of the Gospels who delights in telling stories of nature and ordinary human activities, of lilies and sheep, of women sweeping and fathers hugging sons!
Reading a translation of the text, I was struck by something unsavory that the press release did not mention: Jesus’ laughter. This Jesus laughs often at the stupidity of his disciples. He relishes his secret knowledge. Judas, according the text, is his favorite disciple because he partially gets the secret truths that the others are too stupid to grasp. In contrast, the Jesus of the Bible teaches the uneducated crowds and has time for children and outcasts. The Jesus of the gospel of Judas revels in his spiritual superiority. His tribe is of the elite. Judas’s Jesus would be at home in the Harvard Faculty Club, where he would write clever and urbane treatises, talk to the Times, and avoid teaching undergraduates.
The temptation to know secrets that other people do not know is a powerful siren. Children love to know secrets and to feel superior to other children. Grown-ups are not immune from the passion. Have you never felt the warm feeling of being accepted when someone senior explains the real reasons behind a public action, reasons that are different from the press release? We read gossip columnists for the same thrill: to know the “real” story. It is an old lure that Judas’s Jesus offers. Beware the religious text that tries, like a man with a coat full of watches, to tell you the ‘secrets’ of God.
Don’t let the hype around the Gospel of Judas draw you to suspect the contents of the Bible that is in every Motel Six bedside stand. Let conspiracy kooks revel in The Da Vinci Code and mutter that they know the real truth about Jesus. It does not matter whether they say that he married Mary Magdalene and moved to the south of France to better the French kings, or he was the offspring of the thirty Eons of the Pleroma and commands “the luminaries in the enlightened eons.” Irenaeus said that you had to pay to get the details, while the good news of the crucified Jesus was free.
The discovery of the lost gospel of Judas does not affect the clarity and consistency of the four canonical Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John describe Jesus of Nazareth, who proclaims the love of the Father for all mankind and loves the material world. Their account of his death and resurrection and the new life offered in Christ is a matter of public record. The man in Judas’s gospel is a man you cannot like, much less want to follow. Nor is this supercilious Jesus seemingly interested in saving the world or dying for us. He is too busy pushing the secrets of the Pleroma. I wager that we would have had to pay a pretty drachma to go to the follow-up seminar on the secret details of the cosmos. It’s interesting historically, but don’t buy a watch from this gospel.
This article posted by Church of the Word, Gainesville, VA.
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