Gospel of Judas

The Gospel of Judas, referred to in early Christian literature, has been found. Actually it was found in the 1970's in a desert in Egypt and then circulated around for several decades among antiquities dealers, eventually making its way to the United States. The "rescued" codex was studied and translated under a grant from the National Geographic Society. You can read more about the discovery on their website. It is written in Coptic and is dated in the 300's C.E. But the gospel is mentioned in early Christian literature dated at 180 C.E.

Here, from the New York Times, is what is so interesting about the Gospel of Judas:

The most revealing passages in the Judas manuscript begins, "The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week, three days before he celebrated Passover."

The account goes on to relate that Jesus refers to the other disciples, telling Judas "you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." By that, scholars familiar with Gnostic thinking said, Jesus meant that by helping him get rid of his physical flesh, Judas will act to liberate the true spiritual self or divine being within Jesus.

Unlike the accounts in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the anonymous author of the Gospel of Judas believed that Judas Iscariot alone among the 12 disciples understood the meaning of Jesus' teachings and acceded to his will. In the diversity of early Christian thought, a group known as Gnostics believed in a secret knowledge of how people could escape the prisons of their material bodies and return to the spiritual realm from which they came.

The Gospel of Judas is one more example of the wide diversity of understanding about Jesus that existed in early Christianity:

Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton who specializes in studies of the Gnostics, said in a statement, "These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion, and demonstrating how diverse — and fascinating — the early Christian movement really was."

The Gospel of Judas is only one of many texts discovered in the last 65 years, including the gospels of Thomas, Mary Magdalene and Philip, believed to be written by Gnostics.

The Gnostics' beliefs were often viewed by bishops and early church leaders as unorthodox, and they were frequently denounced as heretics. The discoveries of Gnostic texts have shaken up Biblical scholarship by revealing the diversity of beliefs and practices among early followers of Jesus.

As the findings have trickled down to churches and universities, they have produced a new generation of Christians who now regard the Bible not as the literal word of God, but as a product of historical and political forces that determined which texts should be included in the canon, and which edited out.

This last paragraph brings me to two quotes from Robert Funk's Honest to Jesus. The first is by biblical scholar Helmut Koester (from Ancient Christian Gospels):

For the description of the history and development of gospel literature in the earliest period of Christianity, the epithets "heretical" and "orthodox" are meaningless. Only dogmatic prejudice can assert that the canonical writings have an exclusive claim to apostolic origin and thus to historical priority.

The second is Funk himself:

The canon of the New Testament was developed, along with the creeds, as a way of excluding political enemies, so regarded because they deviated from institutional opinion or practice; the primary interest was to build a fence around right doctrine and heirarchical privelege. This also had the effect of consolidating ecclesiastical power. The scholars of the Bible in the twentieth century--at least those who call themselves critical scholars--should have as their aim the desire to lay bare that process. The power we seek is the power of information that we can share with a literate readership.

What does it all mean? Well, first of all it means that there was a wide diversity of opinion and belief about Jesus among early Christians. More than any of us ever realized growing up in Sunday School. What is exciting about this moment in history, is that we -- as Funk says not just scholars who specialize in dead languages but the average interested person on the street -- can actually read these other gospels and learn about the people who wrote them. We can also more clearly see the issues that divided them, and understand how there came to be an "orthodox" Christianity. Most of us who grew up in churches grew up believing that what we know as Christianity was really the only game in town, the one true option, initiated by Jesus and the first disciples and fixed in the Bible all according to God's plan. We now know this is a vast oversimplication of what was a wide open and messy process.

What is perhaps even more exciting for many of us is that the question of the canon of scripture is once again an open question. I have no interest in changing the Bible as we currently know it; but I also have no interest in limiting my learning and teaching about Jesus to just the Christian Bible. I want to know what all of the gospels have to say about Jesus and the Christian life. The goal is to see behind what we have been given to believe about Jesus as the orthodox truth, to see who Jesus really was and what he said and did, and to perhaps then be able to see more clearly what he saw -- the realm of God in our midst. As others have said, our faith is too often a matter of pointing at Jesus when we should be casting our vision in the direction he himself was pointing.