As celebrations commence that are keystone to Christian faith, the central tenets of Christianity – the cross and resurrection – is being challenged by the “Gospel of Judas,” a text that respected theologians have pointed out as Gnostic in origin and ‘‘relatively unimportant’’ in current understandings of Jesus and Judas.

|PIC1|Originally found in the 1970s and recently translated and released in English by the National Geographic Society, the “Gospel of Judas” omits crucial Christian events such as the betrayal of Jesus by Judas, the scene of His death on the cross, and Jesus’ resurrection – resulting in a text that is incompatible with the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in terms of the purpose of Jesus on Earth.

“It (The Gospel of Judas) presents a completely different cosmology and theology from what we find in the New Testament,” said George Gutherie, a Christian studies professor at Union University based in Jackson, Tenn., USA in a report released by the school on Apr. 10.

Gutherie along with other faculty members at the Christian university agree that the document is an “unreliable” source for historical events in the life of Jesus and promotes “heresy of Gnostism.”

“It is not in any way, shape or form a writing that tells us anything reliable about either the real Jesus or Judas,” said Greg Thornbury, dean of Union’s School of Christian Studies.

The “Gospel of Judas” was actually mentioned by second-century theologian Irenaeus in his work, Against All Heresies.

“Irenaeus explicitly says that the Gnostics wrote many different gospels and books, but he, along with all other church leaders of the second through fourth centuries, regarded them as grossly inaccurate and harmful in what they taught,” said Dr. Clinton E. Arnold, professor and chair of the New Testament department at Biola University, USA.

|TOP|Gnoticism was an ancient teaching condemned by the early Christian church as heretical. Gnosticism held the belief that salvation comes through “gnosis,” the Greek word for “knowledge.” It surfaced as early as the last first century A.D. and was popular among some communities through the fourth century A.D.

“It’s about becoming an insider on the secrets of the universe,” Guthrie explained.

For example, at one point in the document, Jesus tells Judas Iscariot, “Come, that I may teach you about secrets no person has ever seen.”

Jesus also tells Judas that he will exceed all of the other disciples, “For you will sacrifice the man who clothes me,” according to the document. It suggests that Judas’ betrayal of Jesus came at the request of Jesus himself.

“Yes, it is quite clearly a document written by someone who was a Gnostic,” stated Arnold. “The language, the ideas, the theology, and the names mentioned in it all suggest it was written by someone who was an ardent advocate of Gnosticism.”

Union’s Thornbury calls the document a Gnostic “propaganda piece.”

|AD|“In other words, this newly discovered ‘gospel’ is nothing more than one of many propaganda pieces produced by Gnostics — a group of people who were desperate to undermine the doctrine of the bodily resurrection of Jesus,” the dean said.

Gnosticism believed in the dualism between the true God and the evil God. One of the bad things this evil God did was to create the world. The evil God is similar to the Old Testament God seen through Genesis 1 whereas another secret, hidden, unknown god exists in the kingdom of light. Gnostics seek to reveal this unknown god and believed that Jesus was a heavenly being who whispered secrets to people.

“Their Jesus was very different than the Jesus who is revealed in the Bible,” said Arnold. “The Gnostic Jesus did not become incarnate to die on the cross to make atonement for the sin of the world.”

“He came to reveal the higher knowledge about the existence of the unknown god and that every person has a ‘divine spark’ of this god within them. This divine spark is trapped in our physical bodies and longs for release from the entombment of the flesh to be reunited with the unknown god in the kingdom of light,” he explained.

The professor of New Testament Language and Literature further explained that the “only reason” the death of Jesus was important to Gnostics was because Jesus was freed from his physical body which Gnostics regard as evil.

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, USA was one of the first theologians to comment on the ancient text, calling it a “highly interesting” document that offers insight into the thinking of “heretical groups” with “alternative understanding of Christianity.”

Dr. Mohler – who has often been asked to represent the Christian voice on programs such as CNN’s “Larry King Live,” and “Dateline NBC” – had also pointed out the text’s Gnostic features and concluded that the “Gospel of Judas” does not challenge the authority of the nearly two thousand-year-old New Testament.

“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,” he concluded

|QUOTE|In the UK the Bible Society and a number of New Testament professors have come out to quell the media hype and sensationalism over the Gospel of Judas.

In a press statement, the UK’s Bible Society said it would be “miraculous” if the Gospel of Judas unveiled in Washington DC last week “was actually written by Judas the apostle, since he had been dead for over 100 years”.

The Bible Society stressed that the Gospel of Judas, which portrays Judas as a favoured disciple who turned Jesus in at his own request, was regarded as a fake by the early Christian writer Irenaeus, being written a whole century after the real Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver.

Other Bible experts have expressed an academic interest in the text and what it can reveal about later Christian history but have also been quick to dismiss the media claims that the Gospel of Judas will challenge the Christian faith.

Dr. Simon Gathercole, a New Testament expert from The University of Aberdeen, stated: “The so-called "Gospel of Judas" is certainly an ancient text, but not ancient enough to tell us anything new about the real Judas or Jesus. It contains a number of religious themes which are completely alien to the first-century world of Jesus and Judas, but which did become popular later, in the second century AD.

“An analogy would be finding a speech claiming to be written by Queen Victoria, in which she talked about The Lord of the Rings and her CD collection.”

The crumbling papyrus text is the most interesting to scholars and theologians from a bundle of texts unearthed in the Egyptian desert in the late 1970s and which resurfaced following decades of being passed through the hands of antiquity dealers.

New Testament expert at the University of Manchester, Dr Todd Klutz, said: “Like nearly all literary remains from antiquity, the Coptic manuscript of the Gospel of Judas will need to be analysed and discussed by scholars for a considerable time before anything resembling sober results can be attained.

“Based on informed reports by those who know the text best, I would conjecture that its greatest value will not reside in what it might tell us about the historical figures of Jesus and Judas but rather in what it reveals about the immediate context of its third or fourth century copyist and possibly also the Greek text on which it is probably based - which may correspond to a document criticised by Irenaeus late in the second century.”

The text was launched in Washington D.C. last week by the National Geographic Society after painstaking reconstruction. According to carbon dating, it was written in the fourth century AD, with experts at the launch confident it was a translation from Greek into Coptic.




[Editor's Note: Michelle Vu reported from Washington DC, USA for this article, and Maria Mackay from London, UK]







Michelle Vu & Maria Mackay
Christian Today Correspondents