The Gospel of Judas

The Gospel of Judas

Anti-biblical skeptics made quite a splash with the publication of an ancient document called The Gospel of Judas. The impact was heightened when National Geographic produced a television documentary and published a book about this book of Judas.

The document has been dated at ca. 300 AD and was found in upper Egypt in the 1970s. It is written in the Coptic language on material called papyrus made from the pulp of the papyrus plant that grows in marshlands of that region. It is thought there originally were 62 pages of the document, but only 26 have survived.

The Gospel of Judas is thought to have been written between 130-150 A.D. Irenaeus of Lyons (d. 195) mentioned it in his book Against Heresies. He noted that it was in use among a sect called Cainites, a Gnostic group that revered Cain, the murderous son of Adam as their hero. They also rewrote the records of Esau, Korah and other Old Testament villains, including the people of Sodom, casting them all as spiritual heroes. Tertullian of Carthage (160-220 A.D.) also mentioned it in his book Against Marcion.

It is acknowledged that the Gospel of Judas is the product of some unknown Gnostic writer. Gnosticism arose in Egypt in the second and third centuries as a challenge to Christianity. Among the chief teachers of this movement were Marcion, Basilides and Valentinus. In this system men blended Greek philosophy and speculation with arrogant pride and Biblical teaching. This resulted in a thoroughly corrupted message. The name Gnostic derives from the Greek word gnosis which means knowledge. They claimed to have unique and secret knowledge about spiritual matters, unknown to common folks. They valued their secret knowledge above the written scripture received from the apostles and prophets.

For some 1800 years the little we knew about the Gnostics and their teachings was from that which was written against them. In 1945 peasants found a large sealed jar in a cave near Nag-Hammadi in upper Egypt containing 46 Gnostic treatises. They taught:

That there were two gods, one good and one evil.
Jehovah of the Old Testament was that evil god and the Father of the New Testament was the loving benevolent god.
The believed that matter was inherently evil, therefore Christ was not really a man nor die on the cross.
Since man's flesh is evil, he must deny even the normal appetites of the body and live an acetic, celibate life. Some however went the opposite direction and said since the body is wholly evil, it is only the spirit that matters. So if one indulged the body, it would not affect the purity of the spirit.
In Gnosticism, redemption came through the reception of their secret knowledge, rather than by grace through faith in Christ Jesus.
It was the most serious threat to confront the second century church.
To promote their Gnostic doctrine and practices their leaders wrote many books, sending them forth under the names of well-known people of the Biblical record. Among the Gnostic gospels are The Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Thaddeus, Gospel of Matthias, Gospel of Philip, Acts of Peter, Gospel According to the Hebrews and the Gospel of Judas. Some 45 have been identified.

The Gospel of Judas claims to be "the secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas." It is a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus and brief dialogs between Jesus and Judas. Judas is portrayed as Jesus' favorite disciple whom Jesus authorized to initiate his arrest. This was mistakenly expected to precipitate a general uprising among the people that would result in him being crowned their king.

Books such as this can be described as apocryphal, that is of doubtful origin. They are also classed as pseudepigraphal which means writings ascribed to someone other than the real author, generally with a view to giving them an enhanced authority and reception (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, p. 1122). Writers who wished to challenge or contradict the Christian message while staying within the church, would mask their identity behind the name of some well-known biblical person. "The most striking thing about the Gnostic texts ... is the vast and bizarre mythology that characterizes...them" (Westminister Dictionary of Church History, p. 367). Craig Evans rightly concludes, "this tale is a meaningless fiction written long ago in support of a dead-end belief system. â€˜There is nothing in the Gospel of Judas that tells us anything we could consider historically reliable'" (The Gospel of Judas, National Geographic web site).

An intellectual community weary of the limitations and constraints of only four genuine gospel, is always eager to find and quick to embrace any scrap or shard that offers something new to story of Jesus. The more bizarre, the more scintillating, the more it contradicts the canonical gospels, the more readily it is accepted. Such books as the Gospel of Judas are paraded and promoted as "Lost Books of the Bible." They are touted as having equal merit and value with the records of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Those thus promoting them have obvious motives:

a. For some it is the potential of making money off a gullible, curious reading public.

b. For others, it is a diabolic desire to discredit, undermine and harm the religion of Christ. This is generally done under the deceptive, pius guise of "biblical scholarship."

Skeptical, unbelieving scholars solemnly proclaim that such ancient forgeries will cast valuable and needed light on the life and teaching of Jesus. Many of the Biblical professors in the great secular universities have much more in common with the Gnostics than with Jehovah who revealed his will to humanity through his Son and preserved it in a sacred Book... our Bible. The publication of such pseudo gospels gives the skeptical theologian and professor a golden opportunity to cast doubt on the canonical books of Scripture and classify them as the same as these books of speculative theosophy.

It is interesting when archeologists find some fragment of a book or artifact that in some way verifies or established the authenticity of the New Testament it is scrutinized, criticized and generally denied on every hand. But let one scrap such as the Judas Gospel be found that contradicts the Biblical record, and it is immediately embraced and presented as sacred and holy. L. R. Hafly observed, unbelief is gullible for any morsel that will feed its atheistic belly."

The Gospel of Judas is of the same value as the shrunken head recovered from some primitive jungle tribe. It is a curiosity, something to be displayed in a museum. It has no practical value. It adds nothing to our knowledge of the Christian religion. It is bizarre to behold, but like the art of shrinking heads, it offers nothing we need today. It tells us much about the people who held such views. They rejected the basic tenets of Christianity and sought to rewrite them to harmonize with their own philosophy. That is one reason some are so eager to embrace it today. JHW

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