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      What about the Gospel of Judas ?
 

RESOURCES:
The Background of the "Gospel of Judas"
The Text of the "Gospel of Judas"
New York Sun article by a scholar from the Jesus Seminar - not exactly  biased towards an orthodox position!

Having just read the Gospel of Judas I wanted to give you a quick overview of my initial impressions.  This is a fascinating document and it will probably take several years for scholars to fully flesh out it's significance.  You can use the links above to read it for yourself.  Here are my first thoughts from my first reading:

•  It is not a gospel
  This text is not in the genre of a Gospel.  It does not tell the story of Jesus' life.  It does not discuss the resurrection.  It is only 7 pages long and consists of mostly "secret" conversations with Judas.  The Gospels tell the "Good News" of why Jesus came and what he did.  This text does not.   So what ever you would want to call it, it does not fall in the same category as the canonical gospels.

•  It is clearly Gnostic
  Gnosticism was a religious movement that reduced Christianity to an effort to attain secret knowledge.  It tended to look at the body and physical existence as either unimportant or evil.  It tended to infuse the original good news about Jesus Christ with foreign philosophical ideas.  The "Gospel of Judas"  includes the vocabulary and emphasis found in other Gnostic writings and not found in the books of the New Testament.  These include a preoccupation with secret knowledge, "aeons", and the function of stars.  These ideas can be seen to arise from Platonic and Hellenistic influences but not from Judaism.  Gnostic theology emphasizes the special few who attain eternity because of their secret knowledge. 

•  It is another Jesus speaking
  The Jesus of this text is preoccupied with numbers - the numbers and order of luminaries and aeons, etc.  This is clearly quite different than the Jesus of the New Testament who is not interested in trying to describe a numeric, hierarchal structure of heaven.  The Jesus of the New Testament is the one who says "Come to me, ALL of you who are heavy burdened and I will give you rest..."  The vocabulary used by the Jesus in the "Gospel of Judas" is completely foreign not only to the New Testament Gospels, but all the New Testament documents.

•  It's world view is alien to the Hebrew scriptures
  The gospel of Judas talks about other gods, angels creating angels, and is highly dualistic.  It says that the great invisible spirit behind it all  has never been called by any name.  This is the exact opposite theology of what would be produced from the culture that created the Old Testament and whose central theme is "There are no other Gods beside me".   Any text that is going to be considered part of the cannon of the Jewish Jesus cannot be so foreign to the teaching of the Old Testament.

•  It doesn't change the gospel
  There is only one existing copy of the "Gospel of Judas" that we currently know about and it is badly damaged with chunks missing.  There are so many theologically key lines missing or undecipherable in this one copy that it would be hard to draw many clear theological conclusions from it.  Most of the buzz surrounding this text is about a single line:

  Jesus talking to Judas says:

  "You will exceed all of them.  For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me"

  Even if Judas somehow was 'just obeying orders' by betraying Jesus, it would change nothing abut the message of the gospel - who Jesus was, why he came and what he did. 

•  It was rejected by the early church for a good reason
  The key factor used to date the Gospel of Judas is the fact that Irenaeus denounced it around 180 AD. In his "Against Heresies" Irenaeus says:
  
  "They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas. "
  
  Thus, given the points above, the early church rejected this text from the beginning as spurious.  The more familiar you become with both the New Testament and Gnostic writings the more clearly you will see their differences.  Despite the many different voices and cultures included in the bible, they are all talking about the same Jesus.   I might point out to those who like the idea of additional gospels because it sounds like a way of being more inclusive, more open minded, and perhaps knocking down the "authority" of the bible - that the exact opposite is the case.  The Gnostic writings in general are very elitist, very exclusive, and have a very low view of women.  They were obsessed with the end times and had very little to say about social justice in this world today.  Their Jesus was a revealer of light but not a redeemer of people.  They have an extremism not found in the New Testament.  It is a good thing they were excluded.   The New Testament will always be offensive to some but it is as good as it gets!

CONCLUSION

The "Gospel of Judas" is not part of actual story of the historical Jesus, but rather a second century response to it.  It is an interesting example of the popular "spirituality" of that day.  Such writings are found in all generations including our own.  The best analogy would be this.  There is a lot of stuff in Christian books stores and some of it is pretty good and some of it is pretty bad.  The bad stuff is well intentioned but gets whacky because the authors have not taken into account the whole council of scripture - rather they have gone off in one extreme or another.  Now imagine a person who knows nothing about our culture or language who walks into a Christian bookstore and starts grabbing books.  They would all look equal - they are all books about Christianity found in a Christian bookstore.  But all ideas and all books are not created equal.  Some are a lot closer to the truth than others.  It would take such a person a while to distinguish between the book called "The Bible" and the other books which are secondary and which provide a lot popular pontificating about the bible.  In a sense the Nag Hammadi Library and other ancient discoveries are like that.  While the difference between the books would be clear and obvious to a Christian of that culture, it takes people outside the culture (like us) a while to realize what is what.

What is exciting about this text is that it seems to confirm a statement made by Irenaeus in 180 AD (that there was a thing called the Gospel of Judas) which previously had no external validation.   Increasingly we are seeing that the comments made by orthodox writers in the early church about what they saw as "adventures in missing the point" in the writings of their Gnostic contemporaries - are being confirmed by archeology.

That's my initial quick read - my first pass.  It will be interesting see what scholars do with this text in the years ahead!

Pastor Langdon Palmer