The Gospel of Judas

Just over a month ago, on April 6th, 2006, National Geographic News released a story to the press. Here are some excerpts from it:
Lost Gospel Revealed; Says Jesus Asked Judas to Betray Him
He is one of the most reviled men in history. But was Judas only obeying his master's wishes when he betrayed Jesus with a kiss? That's what a newly revealed ancient Christian text says. After being lost for nearly 1,700 years, the Gospel of Judas was recently restored, authenticated, and translated.
What Does It Mean?
Some biblical scholars are calling the Gospel of Judas the most significant archaeological discovery in 60 years. The only known surviving copy of the gospel was found in a codex, or ancient book, that dates back to the third or fourth century A.D.
The Bible's New Testament Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—depict Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus, as a traitor. In biblical accounts Judas gives up Jesus Christ to his opponents, who later crucify the founder of Christianity. The Gospel of Judas, however, portrays him as acting at Jesus' request.
Rodolphe Kasser, a clergyman and former professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, says, “This lost gospel, providing information on Judas Iscariot—considered for 20 centuries and by hundreds of millions of believers as an antichrist of the worst kind—bears witness to something completely different from what was said [about Judas] in the Bible.”

Well, now. An authentic ancient document that says something “completely different” from what the Bible says. That makes many people in the Church feel somewhat . . . unsettled. It makes doubters scoff at the idea that we’re still gathering in church every Sunday, despite the “evidence” that’s been presented that demonstrates—in their mind, anyway—that Biblical Christianity is false. And it can make a seeker—someone who’s seeking out the real truth about God and Jesus and their life—it can make them turn aside from the one true faith and cause them to start looking in a different direction.
There is no doubt that the media is portraying this “gospel” a major find, and in a certain historical sense, it is truly amazing! We know that around the year 180 A.D. the ancient church father Irenaeus made mention of this Gospel of Judas. 180 A.D. . . . and then it appears to have completely vanished until this copy was found in a cave around the year 1978. The copy that was found is written in Egyptian Coptic, and is probably a 3rd or 4th century translation of the original document which would have certainly been written in Greek. The owners of the document—the National Geographic Society—have submitted it to carbon 14 dating (and I’m sure they have also analyzed the style of penmanship) and confirmed that it is indeed over 1600 years old. So yes, finding something this old and this rare is a truly remarkable historical discovery.
But the hype about this “gospel” isn’t primarily about whether or not it’s an amazing archeological discovery. No, the talk that you’ll hear about the Gospel of Judas is how it gives us a new understanding of the Christian faith.
A few quotes from the article: “I expect this gospel to be important mainly for the deeper insight it will give scholars into the thoughts and beliefs of certain Christians in the second century of the Christian era, namely the Gnostics,” said Stephen Emmel, a Coptic studies professor at the University of Münster in Germany.
Bart Ehrman is chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "This gospel," he said, "has a completely different understanding of God, the world, Christ, salvation, human existence—not to mention of Judas himself—than came to be embodied in the Christian creeds and canon.”
“"This ancient text helps the modern world rediscover something that the early Christians knew firsthand,” said Reverend Donald Senior, president of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Illinois. “In the early centuries of the Christian era there were multiple sacred texts resulting from communities in various parts of the Mediterranean world trying to come to grips with the meaning of Jesus Christ for their lives.”
It’s something like The DaVinci Code. The media and certain scholars want you to believe that you’re missing out on something, that the Church hid certain knowledge from you. In short, they want you to believe that this new discovery will fundamentally alter the Christian faith. They believe the faith as we know it—as I preach it—is too confining, too restrictive. A broader, more inclusive faith . . . a diverse faith; that’s their goal. In order to achieve that goal, they are making it seem as though that early on there were actually many different types of Christianity.
The set of teachings that the media is portraying as a sect of Christianity is called Gnosticism. There were a number of different Gnostic writings in ancient times, and a lot of them had Biblical-sounding names. Names like the Gospel of Thomas, the Acts of Peter, the Dialogue of the Savior. As The DaVinci Code suggests, there is even a Gospel of Mary. But what we’re going to find is that “Christianity” and “Gnosticism” are NOT variations on the same theme, they are NOT simply branches of the same tree, but the are, in fact, entirely different religious systems. Calling Gnosticism a sect—or branch—of Christianity is simply false. It’s not like comparing Lutherans and Baptists, for example; we’re both essentially Christian despite our differences in certain doctrines. It’s more like comparing Lutherans and Mormons; we use some of the same terminology, it might sound the same on a superficial level, but dig deeper and you will find that the are radically, fundamentally, diametrically in opposition to one another. We can quickly see the difference if we compare the big picture—the big story—of Christianity and Gnosticism.
The big story of Christianity is God’s love. Specifically, His redeeming love for mankind. The story goes like this: God creates the world, placing mankind as the very pinnacle of His creation. His creation is good and pleasing to Him. But there is a fall, and the world and God’s beloved creatures are thrown into sin, chaos, despair, and death. But God sets out to repair the damage to His creation, and is so intimately involved in redeeming mankind that He actually takes on flesh. He becomes a man, suffering and dying in order to bring about the redemption of all mankind and the restoration of all of creation. This story is one of active redemption.
The big story of Gnosticism, however, is knowledge of the Divine. In this story the world—all of creation, in fact—is wrong. It’s very existence is an evil that must be overcome. God—who is not a personal God but more of an impersonal force, an abstract concept—gives special, secret knowledge to a select few. With this knowledge they escape the evil of the physical world and live in a world of pure spirit. This story is not one of God’s action, but of man’s ascension. In Christianity God descends to our level to save us from ourselves. In Gnosticism man ascends to become the god that he somehow already is.
Now that we’ve got the basic background down, let’s examine the evidence for our CSI crime scene. The basic claim is that this Gospel of Judas should have just as much authority for us as does the Bible. The idea put forth is that because, like our Bible, the Gospel of Judas is an ancient document that speaks of Jesus and bears the name of a known Apostle that we should consider is just as important as the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. It’s really a question of canonicity; a question of whether the Gospel of Judas—or the other Gnostic writings, for that matter—belong in the Bible or not.
Now, let’s explain the concept of “canon.” First off, it’s not a big gun! “Canon”—spelled with one “n” in the middle: c-a-n-o-n—is a word that means “ruler” or “measuring stick”. We use it to describe the authority that we give to the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments. See, contrary to popular belief, the Bible didn’t just drop right out of the sky! Yes, in a manner of speaking there was a process of selection for Biblical writings, and yes, there were certain writings that were eliminated. Is that a cover-up, a suppression of equally valid texts? Let’s look at the evidence.
The Apostle John warns us in 1 John 4:1, “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” That seems reasonable enough. We can’t just accept everything that comes down the pike as being the true Word of God, now, can we? The ancient church recognized this was true as well, and so there were four basic tests the ancient church applied to any writing to determine if it was an authoritative, inspired work of God.
The first test was Apostolic authority. Was a book written by an Apostle? Was it written by someone who was a close co-worker with an apostle? The Apostles were the ones who had personally spent time with Jesus. Look again at 1st John. 1 John 1:1 says, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched-- this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.” John knew Jesus personally—he saw him with his own eyes, he touched him with his own hands, and he heard the Lord’s teachings straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. John would be someone that you could trust when he would write or teach about faith in Christ.
If the writing wasn’t directly from an apostle, it had to be someone with enough authority to be recognized by everybody. Mark—it was said that he wrote down Peter’s account of the sayings and doings of the Lord. Luke traveled with Paul on missionary journeys. James and Jude were brothers of Jesus Christ himself. Each of these men had recognized authority by the people of the early church.
And what about the Gospel of Judas? Well, it’s certainly got an apostolic name. But it is interesting to note that it never says that it’s the Gospel according to Judas. That is to say it never makes any claims that Judas himself wrote it. It merely says this: “The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week three days before he celebrated Passover.” So we can’t prove that Judas wrote it. But that’s not unique to this book. If you look closely at the four Gospels in your Bible, you’ll also notice that not a single one of them specifically says anywhere who it was written by. If you know someone well, you can recognize them. When I call up my wife on the phone, I don’t have to announce, “Hello Stephanie, this is Vicar Troy Neujahr calling.” She just knows it’s me. In the same way, I assume that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were so well known that they didn’t need to tell everyone that it was them writing.
Based on that issue alone we can’t prove anything about the Gospel of Judas. It at least has the right name. So let’s dig deeper.
The second criteria for a writing to be authoritative was antiquity—how old it was. The basic idea was that an Apostle’s writing was authoritative, because that Apostle would have learned the teachings from Christ Himself. Now, obviously, if an Apostle or a close co-worker of an Apostle was writing, that writing would have had to occur during the lifetime of the Apostles; what is called the Apostolic Age. I mean, you can’t write something after you’re dead! Assume that each of the Apostles was roughly Jesus’ age and each of them you could reasonably expect to live until about 70A.D. or so—if they were to die of natural causes, which most of them didn’t. Then perhaps they’ve got some younger men they’re mentoring, you’re not going to have a huge difference in age, so maybe these young men live about another thirty years. That puts the end of the Apostolic Age around 100 A.D., give or take a few years.
Was the Gospel of Judas written during this Apostolic Age, or was it from a later time? On this we’ll consult the early church father St. Irenaeus, who was a student of Polycarp, who was in turn a student of the Apostle John. Irenaeus refuted the Gospel of Judas in 180 A.D., saying, “They”—that’s the Gnostics—“declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with [Gnostic teachings], 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 [call] the Gospel of Judas.”
Using Irenaeus as a reference, our best estimates place the writing of the Gospel of Judas around the middle of the second century—about fifty years after what I’m calling the end of the Apostolic Age. That’s simply too late.
For example, there was an excellent book called the Shepherd of Hermas. Certain church fathers held this book in high regard—it was that good. But the Shepherd was written somewhere between 105 and 135, and it was felt that was simply too late to truly belong to the Apostolic Age. And if the Shepherd couldn’t make the cut as belonging to the Apostolic age, then I doubt the Gospel of Judas should be considered, either.
Now notice, this isn’t a matter of a church power play deciding what’s in and what’s out. This is simply a matter of ordinary people recognizing that the teachings of Jesus were passed down to the Apostles, who in turn passed them down to other believers. In other words, early believers learned to test the Spirits. Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.
This isn’t a new process, either. Even from the earliest times both Jesus and the Apostles who followed Him warned believers to watch out for false teachings. In one of the strongest passages in the Bible, the Apostle Paul says to the church of Galatia in Galatians 1:6-8, “6 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel-- 7 which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. 8 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned!”
The Apostle’s teachings could be trusted because they were Jesus’ teachings. If anyone taught something other than Christ’s teachings, they were simply considered untrue. This is the third test: the test of orthodoxy.
The word “orthodoxy” comes from two Greek words. Ortho, meaning “correct” and doxas, “to think.” Literally to have “orthodoxy” is to have correct thinking about a matter. Christ’s own teachings—the teachings He handed down to the Apostles, the teachings regarded by the people are authoritative—are the standard for orthodoxy.
Well, the Gospel of Judas could possibly have Apostolic authority. However, it does appear to be slightly past the Apostolic Age. How does the Gospel of Judas measure up to the test of correct teaching, of orthodoxy? Let’s take a look.
“One day he was with his disciples in Judea, and he found them gathered together and seated in pious observance. When he approached his disciples, gathered together and seated and offering a prayer of thanksgiving over the bread, he laughed.”
“The disciples said to him, ‘Master, why are you laughing at our prayer of thanksgiving? We have done what is right.’”
“He answered and said to them, ‘I am not laughing at you. You are not doing this because of your own will but because it is through this that your god will be praised.’”
Right off the bat the Gospel of Judas suggests that the Disciples had it wrong. They’re praying to God, but Jesus mocks them for their apparently misplaced faith. “Your god” . . . not the God, not even “your Father in Heaven” . . . but “your god.” That seems to imply that the disciples had a different God than what Jesus was teaching. Well, that sounds kind of odd, doesn’t it? Raises a red flag or two?
How about this? A little later Jesus is teaching some secret teachings to Judas, and it goes like this: “Jesus said, ‘Come, that I may teach you about secrets no person has ever seen. For there exists a great and boundless real, whose extent no generation of angels has seen, in which there is a great invisible Spirit. Which no eye of an angel has ever seen, no though of the heart has comprehended, and it was never called by any name.” Huh. Well, I know God is Spirit, but I thought for sure that He told Moses that His name was “I Am.” That’s out of place, too, isn’t it?
But let’s cut right to it. In the media you’ll hear all about how this book gives us a new view of Judas and Jesus . . . but they’ll never tell you everything that the book says, because we’ll laugh ourselves silly. Check this out: “Judas said to [Jesus], ‘I know who you are and where you have come from. You are from the immortal realm of Barbelo.”
Or how about when this Jesus character describes the beginning of the human race? “Adamas was in the first luminous cloud that no angels has ever seen among all those called ‘God.’ . . . He made the incorruptible generation of Seth appear. . . . He made seventy-two luminaries appear in the incorruptible generation, in accordance with the will of the Spirit. The seventy-two luminaries themselves made three hundred sixty luminaries appear in the incorruptible generation, in accordance with the will of the Spirit, that their numbers should be five for each.”
This stuff just gets crazier and crazier! It continues on like this, speaking of the “Self-Generated” and the evil angel Yaldaboath that is actually responsible for creating the world. This isn’t the teaching of the Apostles! It’s not the teaching of Jesus!
But the biggest nail in the coffin is this: Not once—ever—does this supposed “gospel” refer to Jesus as the Christ. Oh, sure, it mentions Christ—but it says that there are twelve angels. And it says, “The first is Seth, who is called Christ.” But what is the authoritative teaching of the Apostles? What did John say? 1 John 4:2-3, “Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3 but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.” Based on the test of orthodoxy, can we acknowledge that this Gospel of Judas has Scriptural authority? NO!!
The Gospel of Judas may perhaps qualify for the test of Apostolic authority. It gets pushed slightly beyond acceptable boundaries for the test of antiquity. It goes way off the deep end when we consider the test of orthodoxy, and so of course it is no surprise whatsoever that it utterly and completely fails the final test, the test of catholicity.
“Catholic” is a word that is misunderstood. When we say the word “Catholic” we almost automatically think of the Roman Catholic Church; but that’s not what it means. “Catholic” simply means “universal.” The test of Catholicity measures whether or not the church—as a whole—accepted a book or not. Universal acceptance of a particular book meant that everyone—from the highest church leader to the person in the pew—everyone looked at that book and said, “Yep . . . that’s Scripture, all right!” The Gospel of Judas has never enjoyed universal acceptance.
If a book had Apostolic authority, if it was written during the Apostolic age, and if it was determined to have correct, orthodox teaching, then believers copied it and passed it along to other believers. So I’d be willing to wager that a book that was universally accepted would have numerous copies floating around.
The New Testament is the best attested of all ancient literature. The people of the ancient church found the twenty-seven books of the New Testament so helpful for their life in Christ that they copied and copied and copied it, and so today we have a collection of over 24, 600 pieces of the copies the people of the early church made. Some are just small fragments, some are whole pages, and a few are even entire books. We’ve got pieces of copies from the first century all the way to the 8th and 9th centuries and beyond. Christians of each era found these twenty-seven books to be reliable and helpful.
So then . . . how helpful and reliable was the Gospel of Judas considered to be? How many pieces do we have from copies the early church made? Hmmmm . . . . one. ONE. And it was buried for 1600 years! Sounds like folks back then thought it was pretty important, huh? No, of course not! The book was read by enough people to get noticed, and then it fell into disuse because the junk theology it proposes was debunked as being un-Christian.
But there’s more. Very early in church history we see the practice of binding certain manuscripts together in a sort of book. It was a fairly early practice to bind together and distribute the four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But never once have we found a Gnostic gospel bound together with the authoritative ones. Do you see the importance of that? Never once, for instance, would you find Matthew, Mark, Luke, and the Gospel of Thomas bound together. It just doesn’t happen. The reason is because even the earliest church didn’t view these writings as being equal! The people of the church have never placed these Gnostic gospels on par with Scripture. Why should the media expect that we’ll do it now?
For no other reason than just because it’s a 1600 year old writing, the Gospel of Judas is indeed a fantastic historical find, I’ll admit that. But it doesn’t change anything for our faith. It doesn’t present any new challenges; it doesn’t even do any new heresies. It’s old hat. People will want you to believe it’s going to change everything, but the fact is that the reason it was ignored for so many years to begin with is because it does not tell us anything we need to know about life and salvation in Jesus Christ.
1 John 1:1-4, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched-- this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. 2 The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. 3 We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. 4 We write this to make our joy complete.”
John 20:31, “31 But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”