The Gospel Of Contratimes

Christianity has always been under attack. Whether it was the attacks of the Ebionites or Docetists of the first centuries of the Christian era; whether it was the gnostics of the early Church or the sceptics of the Enlightenment, the Christian faith has been on the defensive.

A couple of years ago the Church, particularly the Catholic Church, began defending itself from the fictive insinuations of Dan Brown's wildly popular, The Da Vinci Code. And in the past couple of weeks, the Church has been addressing the "gospel" du jour, "The Gospel of Judas", a gnostic work of anonymous authorship (Judas Iscariot did not write it). Though the Judas gospel has been circulating through the antiquities markets since the 1970's, the reason it is in the news is because this is Christianity's Lenten season: The release of James M. Robinson's book on the matter, "The Secrets of Judas: The Story of the Misunderstood Disciple and his Lost Gospel", (April 2006 by Harper San Francisco) was no doubt timed to exploit the Christian doubters and naysayers market during the Faith's holiest time.

I have not studied the text, but I have an opinion already. Let me quickly cite this news account:

The most revealing passages in the Judas manuscript begins, "The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week, three days before he celebrated Passover."

The account goes on to relate that Jesus refers to the other disciples, telling Judas "you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." By that, scholars familiar with Gnostic thinking said, Jesus meant that by helping him get rid of his physical flesh, Judas will act to liberate the true spiritual self or divine being within Jesus. ("'Gospel of Judas' Surfaces After 1,700 Years", John Noble Wilford and Laurie Goodstein, The New York Times, April 6, 2006) [emphasis added]

Anyone who has spent significant time reading the canonical Gospels deemed authentic and accurate by the councils of the Christian Church, will no doubt be jarred by Jesus' words to Judas. His words are jarring because they are thoroughly non-semitic; they are not really Hebraic but Greek. For Jesus, as depicted in this Gospel, is indeed a gnostic, a sort of neo-platonist who believes that carnality, the flesh and blood of living, is somehow a defiling constraint to true spiritual being and enlightenment. But this gnostic Christ rings utterly hollow and vapid: It is gnosis, or knowledge, that he not only seeks for himself but urges others to seek and attain. That this, however, is indeed a heresy of the Christian faith should go without saying; sadly, it must be said again and again. For the orthodox teaching is that Jesus was the Incarnation of God, the God of the universe in the flesh, his very being a celebration of the proper use of the body, of the carnal, in the truest and best sense of that word. Jesus was indeed raised from the dead as a corporeal being, and not as an ethereal, spiritual, ghostly visage of his former self. The body and spirit are not divided but united in Christ. The canonical gospels which the Church adores are replete with the tactile, sensual, embodied images of the Incarnate God as he eats, sleeps, dies; as he feeds and heals and caresses real bodies, real flesh; as he utilizes the things of home and hearth, of earth and agrarian culture, in his teachings from beginning to end. That Judas' Jesus suddenly jumps out of his skin in a secret meeting with Judas is just laughable. I am even tempted to suggest that it is anti-semitic, for the Jews of Jesus' time were people not readily given to the gnostic, anti-flesh, anti-material ecstacies of their more 'enlightened' neighbors. Gnosticism was deemed heresy by the Church for two important reasons: It denigrates the physical world, and it elevates certain people to a preferred, enlightened status, giving them the aura of transcendence, an aura that is damned for its presumptuousness and conceit.

Trust me when I say that there are plenty of gnostics among us, and a vast number of them are far more likely to read Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels and this message from Judas the Betrayer than they are to read the Gospel of St. John.

I am not opposed to the Gospel of Judas taking its rightful, informative place in the pseudepigraphal, apocryphal literature of the Church. But it is not a serious contender for canonization: It is informative, but it is utterly without authority.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contatimes - All Rights Reserved.

Related essay (addendum 4.21.06): Stromata's "Not Just Judas"

Technorati tags: Jesus, Gospel of Judas, Gnosticism, Da Vinci Code

Photo: In affirmation of the centrality of the physical world within Christian thought, I post this picture of a fox kit exploring the big, wide world outside its den. Image was taken with a Canon EOS3, using a 300/2.8 lens and 1.4 extender. 1/1000 @ f4. Kodak E100VS. Click for larger view.