The Gospel of Judas

If you're intrigued by the reports and articles on the recently-published Gospel of Judas, a good place to start would be Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity (2007) by Elaine Pagels and Karen King. Pagels and King are two of the leading authorities on the forms of early Christianity than are generally called Gnosticism. They comment in passing that "Gnosticism" may no longer an entirely useful term. But the Gospel of Judas clearly has similarities to other forms of what we called Gnosticism.

The book includes a text by Pagels and King analyzing Judas and its historical context, and a translation of the work by King, with extensive notes on the translation. The available text of the book is in Coptic, a form of the Egyptian language using Greek letters; the original is believed to have been in Greek. Pagels' and King's book is a popular work, not one of technical scholarship. That means its accessible to a wide audience, but backed by solid scholarship.

National Geographic's Web site has some background information on the book and how it came to be published in 2006.

Pagels and King argue that a key concern of the author of the Gospel of Judas, which dates to the mid-2nd century, was how Christians should respond to Roman persecution. The Christian trend that became the orthodox tradition held that Christians captured by the Romans and faced with torture and brutal execution should nevertheless refuse to publicly disavow the faith. Some leaders even argued that Christians knowing that authorities were actively seeking them out should not even flee.

St. Iranaeus (died 200-203)

The author was outraged at this position. The community of which he was part (by inference from the text) knew that they also faced persecution. But they felt that the attitude of leaders like Irenaeus were being reckless and misrepresenting the theological meaning of sacrifice in the Christian religion. Pagels and King write:

How does such teaching impel people to act? - some Christians, like Irenaeus, when faced with the reality of persecution and death, advocated that people should be martyred, arguing that God wills all this suffering for people's own good. For Irenaeus, suffering and even death are meant to teach people about the greatness and goodness of God in granting eternal life to a sinful humanity. But the author of the Gospel of Judas not only denies that God desires such sacrifice, he also suggests that the practical effect of such views is hideous: It makes people complicit in murder. By teaching that Jesus died in agony "for the sins of the world" and encouraging his followers to die as he did, certain leaders send them on a path toward destruction - while encouraging them with the false promise that they will be resurrected from death to eternal life in the flesh.

They go on to explain that this attitude toward how Christians should respond to Roman persecution was also part of a larger theological difference with other Christians over the meaning of Jesus' sacrifice.

For the author of Judas, they argue, the real message of Jesus was the knowledge that there is a higher realm of spirit in additional to the material world that we know. Unlike some Gnostics, though, the Judas community did not see the material world as evil. This whole question of the relation of spirit and body, spirit and the material world, was a major theological issue in early Christianity.

Pagels and King write:

Thus the "good news" of the Gospel of Judas is that, as Paul wrote, "the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed in us" (Romans 8:18). For although what happens to Jesus, so far as anyone in the world can see, ends in the hideous anguish of crucifixion, and what happens to Judas ends in his murder, each has hope. Those who hear this message recognize that rather than being simply physical bodies with complex psychological components, we are fundamentally spiritual beings who need to discover what, in us, belongs to the spirit. This gospel suggests that our lives consist of more than what biology or psychology can explore - that our real life begins when the spirit of God transforms the soul.

The also explain some of the complex Gnostic cosmology assumed by the Judas community, which may seem bizarre to those not much exposed to it. I won't try to describe it here. But in the notes to the translation, King (I assume the notes to her translation are hers) says that the particular cosmology of Judas is similar to what scholars called Sethian Gnosticism or Sethianism.

She also makes clear in the notes, as they do in the text, that the Gospel of Judas has a strongly anti-Jewish emphasis:

When the I was first published, newspapers and other media announced that it would undermine Christian anti-Judaism by rehabilitating Judas (whose name is related to the word Jew). No longer the betrayers of Christ, Jews would be free from that slander at last. But while the Gospel of Judas does give a positive face to Judas s act of handing Jesus over, it also portrays the Jewish chief priests and scribes as the ones who are waiting to catch Jesus. No hint appears that the Romans - who actually put Jesus to death—played any role at all. All blame is placed squarely on the Jews - those scribes who pay Judas to hand Jesus over and even Jesus's own disciples, who are portrayed as killers and sinners standing at the altar of the Jerusalem Temple. This ending offers no redemption for Jewish-Christian relations, but it does call us to reconsider how the (largely unhistorical) portrait of Judas in the gospels and many other unhistorical features of the gospel story need to be corrected. Whether people accept or reject what the Gospel of Judas says, it should be approached in terms of what we can learn about the historical situation of the Christians who wrote and read it: their anger, their prejudices, their fears - and their hopes.

Tags: elaine pagels, gospel of judas, karen king