The Gospel of Judas

The National Geographic Society has put a lot of time, money, and effort into the restoration and translation of a (3rd? 4th? century) Coptic manuscript of The Gospel of Judas. The original (Greek?) document ran afoul of church officials by the 180’s and its newfound successor may irritate even more of them in the 2000’s. I am glad the Society is involved in this, and wish its leaders well in recouping their costs, even if they have to continue pandering to the media in order to make it happen. Early Christianity was more diverse than many today are comfortable acknowledging, and anything that brings out both the diversity and the discomfort can be to the good.

The story of the document’s discovery is itself an exciting one and worth the price of the several books now coming out that include it. One of its implications is just the kind of thing that has been making people salivate over The Da Vinci Code: Big Dude church leaders from the late first century on have engaged in massive cover-ups of the real truth about Jesus to consolidate their power over rank and file believers everywhere. You can’t ask for a better story line than this. But it is well to remember, as Dan Brown usually but not always does, that we are talking about intriguing, captivating, exciting, not-to-be-taken-literally --- fiction. 

One cover-up alleged to have been exposed by the Judas Gospel is Gentile complicity in Jesus’ death. Making Judas, in name and in demeanor, the quintessential expression of how the Jews reacted to their own Messiah got everybody else off the hook and gave Christians just the scapegoat they needed to get a lot of things off their backs for millennia to come. Supposedly, this new gospel undermines the stereotyping completely. This would be a good thing --- anti-Semitism is blasphemy --- if it had not amounted to  substituting one set of falsehoods for another.

In the gospel, Judas hands Jesus over to the authorities at Jesus’ own request, a request Jesus made of him because he knew, contra everything else that is believed about Jesus’ life, that Judas was the only disciple who truly understood what he was about. In a strange kind of logic, the general agreement of all four of the canonical gospels --- none of whose authors knew any of the other three in person --- about Judas’ act of betrayal is now supposed to count against their reliability and for their participation in a massive cover-up. Could you run that by us again, please?

A second alleged cover-up is of the true nature of Jesus as divine, and as only divine. Those really in the know, in contrast with those who merely allow themselves to be told what to believe, know that Jesus’ so-called humanity is just that, outward appearance, for show purposes only, like an easily discarded and disposed of garment. Tucked into a neat phrase depicting Judas as exceeding all of the other disciples is a good illustration of this kind of reconstruction of Jesus’ identity: “For you will sacrifice the man who clothes me.” Just as clothes cover the body, Jesus’ manhood covers a divine nature that is  indestructible and incapable of really experiencing pain. Upon this view, the crucifixion was just play-acting on Jesus’ part.

One thing that must have turned on second-century Christians about this document is the support it gave for the newly emerging view that the divine nature proclaimed to co-exist with human nature in only one human being is actually in all of us, too, rendering our own physical existence inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. The second century bishop, Irenaeus, now taking a lot of heat for failing to give this peculiar view its due, actually saw very clearly why the view will not do at all. Physicality is a wondrous gift from God, to Jesus and to everyone else besides. Whatever else Jesus’ resurrection implies for our own future with God, it also and emphatically implies that whatever is to come will come in at least some kind of bodily form. 

Comparing the truth “exposed” by the documents upon which Dan Brown drew for The Da Vinci Code with the document which is The Gospel of Judas should make us all just a little more reticent to glom onto the latest “revelations” about so-called long-suppressed ideas and conspiracies from earlier Christian times. What continues to bend people out of shape about the former is the idea of a Jesus so human that he married and had children. Now, the Judas thing comes along to enlist support for just the opposite view, a view which denies his humanity altogether. That’s diversity for you. Any discomfort yet?