Gospel of Judas Again

A conversation I had yesterday with someone about the Gospel of Judas discovery leads me to say more about the significance of this gospel's discovery. The discovery and publication of this gospel is significant for what it adds to the picture of early Christianity.

There was a time when we only had the polemical writings of the early church "fathers" who told us about some of the "heresies" that challenged the orthodox understanding of Christianity. But with the discoveries of the various gnostic scriptures over the last 75 years, including now the Gospel of Judas, we can actually read the texts themselves and get a less biased picture of what they believed. We know now that there was real diversity and there wasn't only one obvious and "true" understanding.

But what will we find out about the historical Jesus when we read all of these newly discovered texts? That depends. For example, John Dominic Crossan has written that it is quite possible Judas didn't even exist as a real person, but that he was a creation of the early Christian community. Judas the betrayer was created to represent the Judeans who the early Christians felt "betrayed" Jesus by not accepting him as messiah. But even if Judas did exist, the Gospel of Judas still might not tell us anything real about Jesus and Judas.

This is where biblical criticism helps. Over the last couple of hundred years biblical scholars have developed a method of reading and analyzing the texts that allows them to say "these are the words of Jesus" and "these are the words of Mark" or one of the other gospels. Or this is history and this is myth. Or this is the apostle Paul writing and this is someone writing in his name.

Once the Gospel of Judas is in the hands of more scholars this process will begin in earnest for this particular gospel. My hunch, and it is only a hunch as I have only seen the snippets released to the media, is that we won't learn much from the gospel about the historical Jesus. Our best sources thus far for the real Jesus remain the four gospels in the Bible and the Gospel of Thomas.