Gospel of Judas
It’s been all over the media, and the blogosphere, of late – the discovery of the Gospel of Judas a gnostic gospel dating from a couple of hundred years after Christ, which portrays the disciple Judas in a more positive light. As far as I’ve seen it’s all a bit of a non-story – just the media trying to cash in on the religious controversy of the Da Vinci Code with another similaly “shocking revelation” about Jesus. It’s been pretty well hammered out all over the net. Father Roderick for one gave a good discussion about it on his podcast, and many other blogs have done the same. One good new (for me) blog I discovered which discussed it a bit was the Confessing Evangelical (an evangelical Lutheran guy who seems to write an awful lot about Anglicans..) He quotes from both Archbishop Rowan Williams and Bishop Tom Wright on the subject of Judas. In case you hadn’t noticed I’m a bit of a fan of Wright’s, and as usual he’s right on the money here. This is some of what he had to say in his Maundy Thursday sermon…
First, as a historian I want every scrap of information about the ancient world, every coin, every inscription, every papyrus. I am delighted at every new find and publication. But, precisely as a historian, I have to say that this ‘Gospel of Judas’ has no historical worth at all. It tells us nothing about the true Jesus, or for that matter about the true Judas. It breathes a totally different air from that of early first-century Palestine. It’s like finding a document purporting to be about Napoleon and his senior advisors, and discovering that they’re talking about nuclear submarines and B52 bombers. It is that crass.
But, second and more important, the ‘gospel of Judas’ and the worldview it represents are deeply, dangerously, damagingly opposed to the goodness of creation and the call of Israel, which of course go together. The whole scripture, and with it all mainline Jewish and Christian thought, is based on the belief that there is one God who made the world, who made it good, and who will put it to rights at the last. Gnosticism declares, very explicitly in the ‘gospel of Judas’, that the world was made by a lesser, low-grade divinity, and that the thing to do is to find the way to escape, to get rid of this human nature which is bottling up the divine spark within us. That’s why the ‘gospel of Judas’ declares that it was Judas who truly understood Jesus, the ‘Jesus’ reinvented in the gnostic imagination, the ‘Jesus’ who wanted to be killed so that he could get rid of his body and live as a pure spirit. This has been touted as an appropriate answer to the church’s use of the figure of Judas as a stick to beat the Jewish people with, but that is ridiculous: the ‘gospel of Judas’ is deeply, structurally anti-Jewish in every line.
… third, it cuts the nerve of working for God’s kingdom in the real world. Who cares about speaking the truth to power if the real task is to escape? Why bother feeding the hungry and housing the homeless, why worry about global debt or global warming or the madness of global warfare, if the main thing to do is to follow your own star and discover your true spiritual identity? Why bother following the real Jesus and standing defenceless before the powers of the world if you can invent a fake Jesus who panders to your inner desires? Let’s be quite clear: despite the sneers of so many who say that the New Testament was written, edited and then chosen out of a much larger collection of books in order to sustain the church’s political power and prestige, the truth is that in the second and third century, long before anyone thought of the Constantinian settlement, it was the people who were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Acts, Romans and the rest who were being thrown to the lions, burned at the stake, beaten and bullied and beheaded. Why would Caesar worry about ‘Thomas’, ‘Judas’ and the other pseudo-gospels? The rulers of this world are not bothered when yet another little group invents a new form of private spirituality. What makes Caesar shiver in his shoes is if people start to believe that whereas the Gentile rulers do it one way, God does it a different way, that there is a different way of power, a different form of rulership, and that Jesus has inaugurated and modelled it in his servanthood and suffering, and that the community that hails him as the only true Lord is going out into the world to live that way, and to celebrate it, as we do today, in sacrament and vocation and healing.
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