On Thursday, April 6, the National Geographic Society published an English translation of an ancient Gnostic gospel called “The Gospel of Judas,” followed by a special television report that aired on Sunday, April 9.

Marketing is well planned, so it is certainly no coincidence that the National Geographic Society chose Palm Sunday, the Catholic and Protestant holiday, to broadcast its television program that leads up to Good Friday and Easter, the two most important Christian holidays. Let's call it: the business of religion.

Media coverage relied on sensationalism, with newspapers across the country carrying front-page stories with headlines like this one in the Baltimore Sun: “Gospel of Judas: New translation of ancient documents challenges orthodox teaching about Jesus and traitor.” Or this one in the Washington Post: “Ancient Gospel of Judas translation sheds new light on beliefs.”

Why these titles? Because the anonymous author of the Gospel of Judas—unlike the four canonical New Testament disciples Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—says that Judas alone among the twelve disciples received the special teaching and understood the true meaning of Jesus’ message. That Jesus himself asked Judas to hand him over to the Romans, and that Judas was more a sympathizer than a traitor.

But what is the Gospel of Judas?

The Gospel of Judas is a poorly preserved papyrus fragment discovered in 1970 in a cave near Minya, Egypt. Along with it were found several other Gnostic documents, the Apocalypse of James, the Epistle of Peter to Philip, and what scholars call The Book of Allogenes, all written in Coptic, the ancient Egyptian language still used by Christians in the Coptic Orthodox Church. Based on a careful study of the documents, scholars unanimously agree that the text of the Gospel of Judas provided by the National Geographic Society can be dated to the fourth century, between 300 and 340 AD, at the same time that the Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, founded the city of Constantinople, and called the First Ecumenical Council. Thus, about 300 years separate Jesus’ encounter with Judas during the third decade of the first century. In fact, the Gospel of Judas is an ahistorical Gnostic book similar to some texts found in Nag Hammadi in Egypt about sixty years ago.

So first of all, it must be clearly stated that the “Gospel of Judas” was not written by Judas Iscariot himself. In an interview with the Associated Press, one of the leading experts on Coptic manuscripts and Gnosticism, Professor James Robinson of Claremont College, was asked whether the text was “by Judas.” He simply replied, “No.” Robinson went on to elaborate, “There are a lot of gospels from the second, third and fourth centuries that are attributed to the apostles, and we assume that none of them give us any information about the first century.”

In an interview with the Boston Globe, Robinson asserted that the authors of the text want to “pull the rug out from under Christianity as we know it.” Robinson was blunt about the suggestion: “That’s ridiculous.” In fact, Robinson speculated that the timing of the Gospel of Judas’ release was intended to leverage it for the upcoming May 19 release of The Da Vinci Code, a fictionalized version of a Dan Brown novel that centers on ancient Gnostic texts and the Catholic Church’s conspiracy to cover up the marriage of Mary Magdalene to Jesus.

Since all scholars agree that the Gospel of Judas is nothing but a Gnostic document, perhaps the most important question to ask is: What is Gnosticism?

The word is of Greek origin and means knowledge. It is the term scholars use to describe a number of religious movements in the ancient Roman world, many of which have nothing to do with Christianity. It has several themes: Gnostic groups possess the key to knowledge that is not available to others. They are characterized by a hatred of the material world, which they often believe was not created by God, but by a lower god who imprisons human souls. In the Gnostic concept, humans are literally trapped in their bodies and the meaning of salvation is to break free from them. “This envelops me,” Jesus says to Judas in this Gospel of Judas. In Gnosticism, we understand this.

None of these beliefs are Christian:

One of the early Christian teachers, the martyr Irenaeus (+202 AD), bishop of Lugdunum in what is now Lyon, France, wrote a series of books called Against Heresies, refuting various Gnostic teachings, one of which mentions the Gospel of Judas. Irenaeus wrote around 180 AD about the Gnostics who tried to “rewrite” a number of biblical stories about Cain (who killed his brother Abel), the Sodomites (the inhabitants of the city of Sodom, which was notorious for its immoral sexual promiscuity), Esau (who sold his birthright to his brother for a single meal), Korah (who led the revolt against the leadership of Moses) and Judas, and tried to turn them into spiritual heroes. In order to do this, they invented what St. Irenaeus called “fictitious history,” which is the same character as the Gospel of Judas.

You may ask: What is the place of St. Irenaeus in Christianity? Why do we pay attention to what he says? According to Eusebius of Caesarea in his History of the Church, probably written in 326 AD, St. Irenaeus was trained to preach and teach under St. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna in Turkey, who was martyred in 155 AD; St. Polycarp learned Christianity as a child and young man from St. John the Evangelist, who eventually settled in the city of Ephesus in Asia Minor (present-day Turkey).

There is no better way to realize that the Gospel of Judas is not a Christian text, or even a gospel, than to read it and analyze all the media hype surrounding its release. One of the advantages of the National Geographic Society is that it sells DVDs as well as two books on the subject. So you can download the entire Gospel of Judas in Coptic with a seven-page English translation. Yes, that’s right: the entire Gospel of Judas in its English translation is only seven pages long, making it shorter than even the Gospel of Mark, the shortest Gospel in the New Testament. Unlike the four canonical gospels, there is no real history in the Gospel of Judas, which does not tell the story of the Lord Jesus from his physical birth to his death and resurrection.

Instead, the Gospel of Judas begins before the Passover in Jerusalem, where his disciples are praying to God at the dinner table. Jesus laughs at them as he watches them do so. Interestingly, Jesus never laughs in the other canonical Gospels. In the Gospel of Judas, he laughs often. Jesus’ disciples are angry with him for laughing at them, except for Judas, who says to Jesus, “I know who you are and where you come from. You are from the immortal world of Barbelo.” Who is Barbelo, you may ask? In the ancient Gnostic texts, Barbelo is the divine mother of all. Chaos? Things get more and more confusing as you read on.

Because Judas “knew” that Jesus came from “the immortal world of Barbelo” he promised to reveal “mysteries that no man has ever seen.” Here there is a break, then the final part of Jesus’ Gnostic “revelation” to Judas. The brackets indicate gaps in the original text.

This is the truth about the Gospel of Judas. It is no wonder that no Christian sees this Gospel of Judas as a Christian text. Rather, it is clearly a Gnostic text written about two centuries after the Gospel of John, the fourth canonical book of the New Testament, and as it appears from reading it has nothing in common with the four Gospels except its use of the names of Jesus and Judas.
The writer Adam Gopnik points out the importance of the Gospel of Judas by saying: “Orthodox Christians truly see that there is no new threat to the Church in the Gospel of Judas and that it is only an ancient heresy.”

Or as Bishop Bishoy, spokesman for the Coptic Orthodox Church, sees it: “The Gospel of Judas is the delirium of non-Christians trying to create a false mixture between Greek mythology, Far Eastern religions and Christianity.” It is “authored by a group of people who were foreign to the core of early Christianity,” and these “texts are neither accurate nor reliable.”

Anger over the Gospel of Judas will continue to simmer because the National Geographic Society plans to air its report again on April 13 and 22, the latter of which falls on Holy Saturday for Orthodox Christians around the world. But as Professor Robinson said in his Boston Globe interview about the Gospel of Judas, it is ultimately “a tempest in a teacup.”

Article in English
Father Steven Tsichlis – Canada/Irvine

page 3 of the Codex containing the Gospel of Judas