May 2006

The Gospel of Judas

            A lot of news coverage this past week has been given to the so-called “Gospel of Judas.”  It was lost for centuries and unveiled by scholars this month.  It amounted to thirteen papyrus sheets bound in leather were found in a cave in Egypt.  The text tells of the last days of Jesus’ life from the viewpoint of Judas, but it is really more the story of Judas than Jesus.  It defends him as Jesus’ most trusted disciple and the only one who realizes that he is the son of God.  In a nutshell it says that the betrayal wasn’t Judas’ idea, but that Jesus made him do it.  Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina, one of those studying the document, says, “We’re confident this is genuine ancient Christian literature.”  But this manuscript appears hundreds of years after the New Testament books were written.  And the whole reason they were lost is that from the very beginning they were rejected by the Christian community. 

            Part of the reason for the rejection was that Christians immediately recognized that this was not a genuine account of history, but was merely an attempt to clear Judas of guilt.  The other reason was that a true Gospel tells of the life, death and resurrection of Christ.  This Gnostic gospel does not do that.  Gnosticism was a heretical cult which developed around the second and third centuries (when this document was written).  You can download and read the entire document, which is only about seven pages long, and see if you can make any more sense of it than I could: http://www9.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel/document.html

            Gnostics believed that the material world was evil and only the spiritual world contained anything good.  It disregarded the creation and God’s pronouncement that it was “good.” Therefore they believed that Jesus body was not real — it only appeared to be real.  Jesus therefore did not suffer physically on the cross and die.  Neither did he experience a physical resurrection, but again it was only an apparition.  The key passage, according to Emmel, has Jesus telling Judas “you will exceed all of them.  For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” A passage which reflects the view that material things and the body are traps for the inner soul.

            There have always been opposing views about Jesus, but from the beginning the eyewitnesses and others who were taught by them rejected these as distortions which had nothing to do with reality.  Many today have varying views of who Jesus is, but the real story can be found in the Scriptures which lead us not only to the real Jesus, but to life itself. 

Easter blessings,

Rod