|
Dear Father Joe
What’s with the Gospel of Judas?
One time at seminary, we were going through
the lunch line. At the head of the table was
a large pile of apples. Someone had made a
note and posted it on the tray of apples.
The note said, “Take only ONE. God is
watching.”
Moving further along the lunch line, at the
other end of the table was a large pile of
chocolate chip cookies. On that pile was a
note written in a different hand that
stated, “Take all you want. God is watching
the apples.”
I‘ve been asked this
one a lot - tons of stuff is floating around
about it. Let’s start with what we know. At
some point in the 1970s, a document was
discovered in a cave in Egypt that was
called the Gospel of Judas. Now, because the
people who found it were demanding
incredible amounts of money for it, and
their explanations about how they found it
were considered a bit ... ambiguous ...
nobody bought it. It floated around for a
while, until it was purchased by a group in
Europe. Before this, the only evidence we
had of its existence was from a second
century saint named Irenaeus. Irenaeus wrote
a condemnation of this “invented history”
found in the Gospel of Judas and stated that
people who hated God and Christianity wrote
it.
Where did it come from? Obviously, its age
precludes the possibility of it having been
written by Judas himself, and Irenaeus said
it was written by a group of Gnostics who
were of the Cainite sect. The Cainites
worshiped Cain (from the Cain/Abel story)
and believed that the “God of the Old
Testament” was evil. They taught that a
lesser god sent Jesus to earth.
What does the Gospel of Judas say? Its main
contention is that Judas was Jesus’ chief
disciple and that Jesus arranged for Judas
to betray him. This gospel is not a
narrative like the other gospels, but simply
a series of conversations between Jesus and
Judas.
What do the other Gospels say? The Gospels
of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which are
much older than that of Judas, are uniform
in their portrayal of the role of Judas. In
Matthew, Jesus states that it would have
been better if Judas had never been born.
(Mt 26:24) In John, Jesus refers to Judas as
“the son of destruction.” (John 17:12) In
Matthew, Judas is said to have hanged
himself. In Acts, it indicates that Judas
bought land with his silver, tripped in the
field and was gutted by a rock (yikes).
Either way, the appeal of this “gospel” is
in its age (probably written in the second
or third century) and the fact that it
offers a new idea. There is no theological
value to this document, and its credentials
aren’t too strong. There are not many
legitimate scholars who believe it should be
placed in the Bible, nor that it is an
authentic document in its revelations of any
truth about Jesus. In April 2006, the
Vatican released this statement about the
Gospel of Judas:
“The Vatican, by word of Pope Benedict XVI,
grants the recently surfaced Judas’ Gospel
no credit with regards to its apocryphal
claims that Judas betrayed Jesus in
compliance with the latter’s own requests…”
Why then, all the hype? I think Rowan
Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury
summed it up best in his 2006 Easter
address:
“We are instantly fascinated by the
suggestion of conspiracies and cover-ups;
this has become so much the stuff of our
imagination these days that it is only
natural, it seems, to expect it when we turn
to ancient texts, especially biblical texts.
We treat them as if they were unconvincing
press releases from some official source,
whose intention is to conceal the real
story; and that real story waits for the
intrepid investigator to uncover it and
share it with the waiting world. Anything
that looks like the official version is
automatically suspect.”
So, there it is; a brief review of what the
Gospel of Judas is, where it came from and
what it means. Now, if you really want to
know the truth about Jesus’ life on earth,
crack open Matthew, Mark, Luke and John;
they are the oldest texts we have about
Jesus.
Enjoy another day in God’s presence!
- Father Joseph Krupp
|
|