Just days before the onset of Holy Week, the National Geographic Society displayed at its Museum in Washington, D.C., the only known surviving copy of the so-called “Gospel of Judas,” a document that portrays the apostle who betrayed Jesus in a more flattering light than what appears in the New Testament.
The text presents Judas as the disciple closest to Jesus, who committed his act of betrayal at Jesus’ behest.
On Palm Sunday, the National Geographic Channel presented a two-hour special on how the NGS eventually came to be in possession of the 26-page document, and the efforts made to verify its authenticity,
The text, written in Coptic, is believed to have been penned around 300 A.D., and is purported to be a copy of an earlier document written a century earlier in Greek. It was unearthed in El Minya, Egypt, in the 1970s.
An Egyptian trader in such antiquities tried to sell the text in the U.S., but could not get his asking price. The fragile pages stayed for 16 years in a bank safe deposit box in New York and later spent some time in the freezer compartment of a refrigerator in Ohio, where they deteriorated.
NGS recently acquired the text, had it preserved, translated into English and tested for authenticity.
The University of Arizona’s radiocarbon dating lab in Tucson, the same facility that tested the Dead Sea Scrolls, dated five tiny pieces of papyrus and leather binding from the codex to between A.D. 220 and 340.
According to Religion News Service, the “Gospel of Judas” is simply the latest in a series of “Gnostic” texts to be uncovered. Nearly 50 other similar documents, including the “Gospel of Thomas” and the “Gospel of Philip,” were found and identified by archaeologists in the 1940s.
The Gnostics believed that Christ neither died on the cross nor was resurrected. Instead, they regarded Jesus as someone with mystical insight and powers who imparted to his disciples a type of “secret knowledge” or gnosis, which ordinary people were incapable of understanding.
At one point in the document, Jesus purportedly tells Judas, “Come, that I may teach you about secrets no person has ever seen.”
In addition, the text says that Judas will exceed all of the other disciples, and suggests that his betrayal of Christ came at the request of Jesus himself. “For you will sacrifice the man who clothes me,” the document states.
During the second century, there was a struggle between the Gnostics and those who are now recognized as the precursors to Orthodox Christianity, over the meaning of Jesus’ life and his message.
Orthodox scholars say, none of the Gnostic texts rises to the level of Scripture.
Baptist Press notes that the 27 books of the New Testament were recognized as Scripture by the early church mainly because of their association with an apostle. BP states that the only books not written by an apostle were Mark, Luke, Acts, Hebrews and Jude. Luke and Acts were penned by Luke, who was associated closely with the Apostle Paul. Mark had ties to the Apostle Peter, and Jude was the brother of the Apostle James. Although it remains unclear whether the Apostle Paul wrote Hebrews, it was accepted by the early church on the basis of its internal qualities and divine inspiration.
Marvin Meyer, a Bible and Christian Studies professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA., a chief translator of the text, said it was interesting to note that–as opposed to the canonical Gospels, which are Gospels “according to”–this document is a Gospel “of.” Meyer said what is less clear is whether the document is a Gospel “about” Judas, or a Gospel “for” Judas.
Greg Thornbury, dean of Union University’s School of Christian Studies in Jackson, TN, called the document a “Gnostic “propaganda piece.”
“In other words, this newly discovered ‘gospel’ is nothing more than one of many propaganda pieces produced by Gnostics–a group of people who were desperate to undermine the doctrine of the bodily resurrection of Jesus,” Thornbury said.
The “Gospel of Judas” was identified as a heretical document as far back as around 180 A.D. by St. Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyon, who classified it as a form of “Cainite” Gnosticism of which he stated, “They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things (Gnostic secret knowledge), 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.’”
The view of St. Irenaeus is shared by the Rev. John Looby of St. Edmund’s Catholic Church in Ellenburg, N.Y.
“Heretical means that there’s a derivation from the accepted teachings of the Church. Looking at this, there are several red flags that jump out immediately. It (Gospel of Judas) speaks of secret knowledge, hidden from everyone but a select few. Christianity is open to all.”
Looby added, “It’s a fascinating discovery. The study of ancient documents is valuable for a number of reasons, but it cannot become part of the New Testament. There’s no connection between the ‘Gospel of Judas’ and the historical Judas. This was written hundreds of years after he died, and is a copy of a text written in another language.”
Elaine Pagels, a professor of Religion at Princeton University and a specialist in Gnosticism, said such discoveries are “exploding the myth of a monolithic religion and demonstrating how diverse–and fascinating–the early Christian movement was.”
Pagels continued, “Whether or not one agrees with it, or finds it interesting or reprehensible, it’s an enormously interesting perspective on it that some follower of Jesus in the early Christian movement obviously thought was significant.”
Richard Hays, a professor of the New Testament at Duke Divinity School, said the impact this discovery will have on Christianity is “just about zero.”
According to Hays, “There’s a lot of foolishness around this. The publicity machine unveiled this thing the week before Easter.”
The “Gospel of Judas” has since been returned to Egypt by NGS where it will be exhibited in Cairo’s Coptic Museum.
However, some scholars said they were troubled by the whole episode.
Jane Waldbaum, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, said, “The artifact was poorly handled for years because the people holding it were more concerned with making money than protecting it.”
The Roman Catholic Church has been one of the document’s harshest critics.
During his first Holy Thursday as pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI recounted the Biblical betrayal of Jesus by Judas. For Judas, Benedict said, “money was more important than communion with Jesus, more important than God and his love. He evaluated Jesus in terms of power and success. For him, only power and success were real. Love didn’t count. He became hardened, incapable of conversion, of the trusting return of the prodigal son, and threw away his ruined life.”
Father Raniero Cantalamessa, Preacher to the Pontifical Household, condemned both the “Gospel of Judas” and the controversial best selling book, The Da Vanci Code, in his Good Friday homily at the Vatican.
“There is much talk about Judas’ betrayal, without realizing that it is being repeated. Christ is being sold again, no longer to the leaders of the Sanhedrin for thirty denarii, but to editors and booksellers for billions of denarii. No one will succeed in halting this speculative wave, which instead will flare up with the imminent release of a certain film, but being concerned for years with the history of Ancient Christianity, I feel the duty to call attention to a huge misunderstanding which is at the bottom of all this pseudo-historical literature.
The apocryphal gospels on which they lean are texts that have always been known, in whole or in part, but with which not even the most critical and hostile historians of Christianity ever thought, before today, that history could be made. It would be as if, within two centuries, an attempt were made to reconstruct a present-day history based on novels written in our age,” Cantalamessa said.
The Da Vinci Code, which has sold more than 40-million copies and opens in theaters later this month, theorizes that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and they had children.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, criticized both the “Gospel of Judas” and The Da Vinci Code in his Easter Sunday sermon as “the stuff of our imagination these days.”
The head of the Church of England and spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, Williams said, “We are instantly fascinated by the suggestion of conspiracies and cover-ups. Anything that looks like the official version is automatically suspect. Someone is trying to stop you finding out what ‘really’ happened, because what really happened could upset or challenge the power of officialdom.”
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