Casting Judas not as a culpable betrayer, but as an intimate friend and collaborator of Jesus, the recently announced Gospel of Judas has understandably generated a stir. However, what the ancient document says about Jesus is even more controversial. According to this “Gospel,” Jesus was a bearer of a deep secret that apparently he revealed to no other disciple except Judas; and then got his help to die that his spirit may be released to some heavenly realm. Recruited for this purpose, Judas then “betrays” the Master as an act of intimate friendship. This is heady stuff. Does the Gospel of Judas cast doubts on the accounts of the four traditional Gospels and, implicitly, on all early Christianity?

The fact that the Gospel of Judas has been authenticated as belonging to the third century, the original written about a century earlier, does not of course mean what it says is true. St. Irenaeus of Lyons (ca. 180 AD) knew about it and denounced it as heresy. Many other Church Fathers and theologians have, before and after Irenaeus, refuted the same kind of thinking found in dozens of similar documents which distorted the apostolic faith. Scholars have called that religious ideology Gnosticism, a phenomenon that flourished mainly in the second century and created serious problems for the Church. Since the late 1940’s, when a slew of them were found buried in the dry sands of Egypt, scholars have been able to study these document first hand. In the National Geographic documentary featuring the Gospel of Judas, biblical scholar Craig Evans, near the end of the film, bluntly stated that nothing new and nothing historically authentic is to be found in the document. Although the documentary leaned to the opposite view, most scholars will probably agree with Evans. The Gospel of Judas is but another small window to Gnosticism, a hodgepodge of religious speculations that exploded on the scene during the second century. At that time, individual intellectuals or small and elitist groups around them, bothered by the basic story of the Bible, especially the “violent” God of the Old Testament and the “scandalous” death and resurrection of Jesus, generated their own religious philosophy. They combined Jewish, Christian and pagan elements to construct literally fantastic systems of speculation including astrology and magic. The core theme, found in the Gospel of Judas, is secret knowledge (gnosis) that leads to salvation.

What was that secret knowledge about? It was essentially about the Gnostic system itself that roughly runs as follows: A higher god, infinitely superior to the God of the Old Testament, sends periodic illuminators to earth with a secret message to draw back to heaven the inner divine sparks of receptive human beings hopelessly caught in utter darkness. According to this worldview, the Old Testament God is an inferior and ignorant God, responsible for creating the lowest sphere of existence, the earth, where all the evil of the cosmos had dredged. Material things, including human bodies, if not evil, are the seat of evil, and to be escaped from. So in Gnostic thinking the eternal Christ, who was the son of the higher god and not the Son of the God of the Old Testament, could not truly have taken human flesh. Instead, he temporarily entered into Jesus at his baptism and later, at some point during his arrest and suffering, left the material body and returned to the sphere of light.

In the Gnostic system, the saving death and resurrection of Christ play no role and they are usually entirely omitted. The one killed is not the Son of God, but only the human Jesus, whose body presumably decayed to dust. What is decisive for the Gnostic view is not the person of Jesus the Christ, crucified and risen, but the Gnostic “gospel” itself, that is, the message of the secret Gnostic system. This system was thought to provide the key to a kind of self-salvation through self-knowledge and self-realization in the discovery of the inner divine self.