The Gospel According to Judas
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John make up the four accepted Gospels of the Christian New Testament. In the 1970s in a cave in the desert near El Minya, Egypt, a manuscript in poor condition was discovered. It claimed to be a ‘so called’ Gospel of Judas. This Easter Sunday the National Geographic Society of USA features it in a television special.
The New Testament presents Judas as the betrayer of Jesus to the Jewish priests for thirty pieces of silver. This papyrus portrays Judas as Jesus’ friend, asked by Jesus Himself to betray his identity to fulfil the Biblical prophecies. The Gospels tells us that Jesus privately told Judas to do what he must do just before the Last Supper. This is what is built up as the so-called ‘Gospel of Judas’.
The author was not Judas Iscariot (he had suicided well over a hundred and fifty years before this was written), but an unknown novelist who imagined the story of Judas Iscariot meeting Jesus some time after the Resurrection. They are friends, and Judas is the one who enables Jesus to fulfil his mission—to die to enable our salvation.
The 66-page manuscript also contains a text titled James and an imaginary letter of Peter to Philip and some other fragments. This codex was a Coptic copy of an earlier Greek manuscript and was written in about 300AD. At some time it was torn in half and the whole is in many fragments with large pieces missing.
The story of how this gospel was found, and the international effort to authenticate, conserve, and translate it, is much more exciting than what it contains. The papyrus codex was found in the 1970’s in a place called Kararra, on the eastern side of the Nile and sold to a dealer in Cairo. From there it circulated among antiquities traders, moving from Egypt to Europe to the United States stored in a New York safe deposit box for 16 years and then purchased in 2000 by a Swiss antiquities dealer.
St. Irenaeus of Lyon, France, wrote a condemnation of this particular document as a novel falsely claiming to be from Judas in 180 AD, so we know that original document written in Greek was in existence then. It was one of about thirty such imaginary works purporting to be written by people Jesus knew.
It is important because it tells us something of the thinking of people at that time (as any novel reflects the period in which was it was written). But it does not add anything to our knowledge of Judas Iscariot.
The books of the New Testament had to be written by a disciple of Jesus who was an eyewitness to the Resurrection (eg. Matthew, John, James), one who spoke to each of the eyewitnesses (eg. Luke 1:1-4), or someone who was there who wrote down what a disciple said (eg. Mark, who was at the Upper Room and in Gethsemane, and who travelled and wrote down what Peter remembered, or the Apostle Paul who met the Risen Lord on the Damascus Road and during his solitude in Arabia).
In early Christianity, there were at least 30 other gospels floating around, and there were dozens if not hundreds of original documents in the 3rd and 4th centuries. This latest discovery is a copy of one of these.
This ‘new gospel’ and the heresy it espouses — Gnosticism — were rejected as fiction by Christian leaders and the Church as early as 180 A.D.
Gnosticism was an attempt to add to Christianity an essentially Eastern worldview dressed up with Christian language. It was presented to the Roman world as the true Gospel — complete with endless mysteries that only those with secret knowledge could unravel. Christian pastors and theologians repeatedly rejected all forms of Gnosticism, until, by the middle of the third century, it had all but disappeared.
Strangely enough, it has re-appeared in novels like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. It provides the means for Christianity’s detractors to debunk the historical Jesus, and it certainly sells books. Gnosticism has particular appeal today because of the post-modern age that rejects historical truth in preference to fantasy.
As Chuck Colson says, “The danger is that we have a biblically illiterate population. People today don’t know — maybe don’t care — whether there is a difference between the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of John. They are unfamiliar with the work of the ancient canonical councils of the Church (which rejected the Gnostic ‘gospels’ time and again) or even of the basic creeds or confessions of the Christian Church. Sadly, people are as gullible today as ever.”
This regurgitated Gnosticism— The Da Vinci Code and the ‘gospel’ of Judas — is nothing more than historically unsupportable fantasy. The true facts have been accessible for two thousand years and proven historically accurate. They are in the Bible.
GORDON MOYES
