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There were many ancient texts that didn't make it into the bible. Some of these are: Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Truth, Gospel of the Twelve, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Basilides, Gospel of the Egyptians, Gospel of the Hebrews, Gospel of Matthias, Preaching of Peter, Acts of Andrew, etc. The reason these gospels didn't make it into the bible is because they didn't square with the oral testimony given by the Apostles. So the discovery of a gospel of Judas or a myth about Mary Magdalene shouldn't alarm us.
Our faith is not based on myths; it is based on the eyewitness testimony of 12 credible men, the Apostles who were personally chosen by Jesus. Albeit, Judas was one of the original Apostles, but after he betrayed Jesus he killed himself. And the remaining 11 Apostles chose Matthias to take his place (Acts 1:26). One of the criteria for choosing a replacement for Judas was that this disciple walked and talked with Jesus, in other words, that the person was an eyewitness to what Jesus taught and the miracles he performed.
The Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic gospel, the text of which was partially reconstructed in 2006. It has a strong positive focus on Judas Iscariot, but does not claim to have been written by him.
The Gospel of Judas was never recognized as divinely inspired. Such documents were simply too young to have apostolic authority. Moreover, they were inconsistent with the fundamental teachings of the Christian religion. It is no coincidence that in the last chapter of the last book of the New Testament there is a dire warning. Although the text was intended primarily to refer to the book of Revelation, it nonetheless has a wider application for the Bible as a whole. It reads: "For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, if any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book" (Rev. 22:18-19).
The Gospel of Judas is in fact just another example of the phenomenon known as pseudonymity--- documents with falsely attributed authors--- other such examples are the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, The Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip and so on. Pseudonymity was a practice of those who did not have enough authority themselves to create sacred texts and so borrowed the name of an earlier illustrious or in this case notorious figure to create the air of an authentic eyewitness document. It needs to be said that this practice was very clearly denounced not only by church fathers like Tertullian and Ireneaus and Hippolytus who tell us about monks and priests being defrocked for dreaming up such documents, but in the wider Greco-Roman world there were plenty of persons who deplored this practice and saw it as a form of deception and fraud. For example, Cicero and Quintilian both complain about people creating documents in their name which they had nothing to do with. There was indeed a moral issue with such documents, then as now. It was not an 'acceptable literary practice of that era' as some might lead you to believe.
Irenaeus , a major figure among the early church fathers, mentions a Gospel of Judas in his anti-Gnostic work Adversus Haereses, written in about 180. He writes there are some who:declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to themselves. . .They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, 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 fictional history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas. This document will tell us more about the split off movement called Gnosticism, and so is of considerable interest as we learn more about church history in the period from the late 2nd century through the fourth century, it tells us nothing about the origins of Christianity or the beginnings of the Jesus movement. This document has no material which could or should shake the faith of Christians in what is said in the NT about Jesus and Judas for the very good reason that it comes from a much later source, and one that not even its advocates are really suggesting is written by the historical Judas.
The most remarkable feature of this text is its thoroughly Gnostic character. The substance of this Gospel bears virtually no resemblance to orthodox Christianity -- a fact that explains why the early church recognized this writing for what it is, and rejected it as neither authoritative nor authentic.
When Judas speaks of a vision and asks for its interpretation, Jesus answers: "Judas, your star has led you astray." Jesus continues: "No person of mortal birth is worthy to enter the house you have seen, for that place is reserved for the holy. Neither the sun nor the moon will rule there, nor the day, but the holy will abide there always, in the eternal realm with the holy angels. Look, I have explained to you the mysteries of the kingdom and I have taught you about the error of the stars; and ... sent it ... on the twelve aeons."
The concept of secret and mysterious knowledge was central to Gnostic sects. The gospel of Judas purports to reveal conversations between Jesus and Judas that had been kept secret from the rest of humanity. The Gnostics prized their secret knowledge, and taught a profound dualism between the material and spiritual worlds. They understood the material world, including the entire cosmos, to be a trap for the spiritual world. In essence, the Gnostics sought to escape the material world and to enter the world of spirit.
Accordingly, the most revealing statement in the entire text of the gospel of Judas records Jesus saying to Judas, "But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."
In other words, Judas would perform a service to Jesus by betraying Him to those who would then crucify Him, liberating Jesus from the physical body and freeing Him as spirit. As the editors of the gospel of Judas indicate in a footnote, "The death of Jesus, with the assistance of Judas, is taken to be the liberation of the spiritual person within."
Needless to say, this is in direct conflict with the Christian Gospel and the New Testament. The consistent witness of the New Testament is that Jesus came in order to die for sinners -- willingly accepting the cross and dying as the substitutionary sacrifice for sin.
This redemptive action is completely missing from the gospel of Judas. For that reason, the text was rejected by early Christian leaders. In his foreword to "The Lost Gospel," Bart Ehrman, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explains, "This gospel was about the relationship between Jesus and Judas, and indicated that Judas didn't actually betray Jesus, but did what Jesus wanted him to do, because Judas was the one who really knew the truth, as Jesus wanted it communicated."
The third paragraph of Judas (fol. 33) states the following:“He began to speak with them about the mysteries beyond the world and what would take place at the end. Often he did not appear to his disciples as himself, but he was found among them as a child.” Here, Judas present Jesus as someone who can change his form to appears as a child. How many mere mortal human can change their shape?
Ehrman, no friend to orthodox Christianity, has correctly explained the problem. Irenaeus rejected the text precisely because it was in direct conflict with the canonical Gospels and with the teaching of the Apostles. Accordingly, it was his responsibility to warn the church about the heretical nature of this document. Still, the very fact that Irenaeus mentions the document with such a specific reference gives considerable credence to the claim that the gospel of Judas is as old in its origin as its patrons now claim.
We now know a great deal about the Gnostic sects common to the first centuries of Christianity. The particular sect thought to be associated with the origin of the gospel of Judas was known as the Cainites. The peculiar teachings of this sect included the rehabilitation of many characters presented negatively in the Bible -- starting with Cain. In essence, the Cainites attempted to take the negative figures of the Bible and present them in a heroic light. In order to do this, of course, they had to create alternative texts and an alternative rendering of the story of Jesus.
The Gnostic character of the text is immediately evident. In his supposed conversations with Judas, Jesus speaks in Gnostic categories such as "aeons" and an "eternal realm." Judas is identified as the "thirteenth spirit" who was appointed by God to be the agent of releasing Jesus from the physical body in which He was trapped in the incarnation.
What are Christians to make of all this? The publication of the gospel of Judas is a matter of genuine interest. After all, it is important for Christians to understand the context of early Christianity -- a context in which the church was required to exercise tremendous discernment in confronting heretical teachings and rejecting spurious texts.
The scholarly research behind the publication of the gospel of Judas appears to be sound and responsible. The codex manuscript was submitted to the most rigorous historical process in terms of dating, chemical composition, and similar questions. In the end, it appears that the document is most likely authentic, in terms of its origin from within a heretical sect in the third century.
Nevertheless, extravagant claims about the theological significance of the gospel of Judas are unwarranted, ridiculous, and driven by those who themselves call for a reformulation of Christianity.
The resurgence of interest in Gnostic texts such as the gospel of Thomas and the gospel of Judas is driven by an effort, at least on the part of some figures, to argue that early Christianity had no essential theological core. Instead, scholars such as Elaine Pagels of Princeton University want to argue that, "These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion, and demonstrating how diverse -- and fascinating -- the early Christian movement really was." What Pagels and many other figures argue is that early Christianity was a cauldron of competing theologies, and that ideological and political factors explain why an "orthodox" tradition eventually won, suppressing all competing theologies. Accordingly, these same figures argue that today's Christians should be open to these variant teachings that had long been suppressed and hidden from view.
Metropolitan Bishoy, leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church, dismissed the gospel of Judas as "non-Christian babbling resulting from a group of people trying to create a false 'amalgam' between the Greek mythology and Far East religions with Christianity . . . They were written by a group of people who were aliens to the main Christian stream of the early Christianity. These texts are neither reliable nor accurate Christian texts, as they are historically and logically alien to the main Christian thinking and philosophy of the early and present Christians." The Metropolitan is right, but we are better armed to face the heresies of our own day if we face with honesty the heresies of times past.
Simon Gathercole, a New Testament professor at Aberdeen University, defended the text as authentic, but relatively unimportant. "It is certainly an ancient text, but not ancient enough to tell us anything new," Gathercole explains. "It contains themes which are alien to the first-century world of Jesus and Judas, but which became popular later."
Indeed, those Gnostic ideas did become popular later, and they are becoming increasingly popular now. The truth of the Gospel stands, and Christians will retain firm confidence in the authenticity of the New Testament and, in particular, of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Nevertheless, old Gnosticisms are continually repackaged and "rediscovered" even as new forms of Gnostic thought emerge in our postmodern culture.
Informed Christians will be watchful and aware when confronting churches or institutions that present spurious writings, rejected as heretical by the early church, on the same plane as the New Testament.
The verdict of Athanasius, one of the greatest leaders of the early church, still stands: "Let no man add to these, neither let him take ought from these, for concerning these the Lord put to shame the Sadducees, and said, 'Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures.' And He reproved the Jews, saying, 'Search the Scriptures, for these are they that testify of Me.'"
Summation: Just like the Mormons have their book entitled: “Church of the Latter day Saints” the Cainites had their books. And this was one of their books, they had to endorse their own personnel views. So, if you want to know what the Gnostics or specifically the Cainities believed this book is excellent. But it have nothing to do with true Christianity. |
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