Bearer of Bad News: A brief analysis of the so-called “Gospel of Judas"

Bearer of Bad News: A brief analysis of the so-called “Gospel of Judas" — Conclusion
Vivificat! - A Catholic Blog of Commentary and Opinion ^ | 21 April 2006 | Teófilo

Posted on 04/21/2006 7:52:05 PM PDT by Teófilo

The Gnostic Jabberwocky Jabbers and Jabbers

I'm sure you're probably familiar with Lewis Carroll's poem, Jabberwocky. Here are the first two verses, so that you get the taste of it:

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!"

You may read the whole thing here if you wish, and follow the witty discussion about here. But I digress.

What I am saying is that Gnosticism is a lot like this Lewis Carroll's poem. It's part intelligible, part nonsense and the part that is nonsense is like an empty vessel that one can fill with any meaning imaginable or with no meaning at all, making it a pursuit of the obscure and hermetic for its own sake, the words becoming tools to trigger numinous and mysterious, awe-full feelings in one's belly. Some find "beauty" in that, and mystery, and hidden knowledge granted only to the few and the patient, not to the rabble who depends on altars, bibles, eucharists and sensible sacraments. To be "cool," one had to be a Gnostic and to be a Gnostic, one had to learn the jargon.

We see the jargon readily in this "gospel of Jude." After tearing into the apostles, demoting St. Peter and promoting Judas, and cutting through the Eucharistic Sacrifice and Liturgy, and delegitimizing bishops and priests, the Gnostic Jesus launched into a cosmology lesson according to Gnostic categories. References to aeons, angels, ruling stars, human generations, astrological influences, gematria; descents from Nebro, Yaldabaoth, Saklas, Seth—who is equated to Christ—down to Adam and Eve, all surrounded with wispy turns of phrase hinting at hidden meanings and hermetic wisdom only available to select initiates. This is the so-called knowledge the writer(s) of this gospel wants to seed in the minds of his/her audience, having prepared the ground previously, so-to-speak, by destroying the claims of the Church via ridicule and the Gnostic Jesus' own sarcastic laughter.

You might say that the combination of Gnostic skepticism, irony, sarcasm, ridicule, and pseudo-deep rhetoric was quite effective. Otherwise we would not be talking about it now after 1,800 years. Yet, some one understood what Gnosticism and the gospel of Judas meant and what it portended. He struck back, masterfully.

St. Irenaeus slay the Gnostic Jabberwocky

Bishop St. Irenaeus of Lyon, Church Father. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia,

Information as to his life is scarce, and in some measure inexact. He was born in Proconsular Asia, or at least in some province bordering thereon, in the first half of the second century; the exact date is controverted, between the years 115 and 125, according to some, or, according to others, between 130 and 142. It is certain that, while still very young, Irenaeus had seen and heard the holy Bishop Polycarp (d. 155) at Smyrna. During the persecution of Marcus Aurelius, Irenaeus was a priest of the Church of Lyons. The clergy of that city, many of whom were suffering imprisonment for the Faith, sent him (177 or 178) to Rome with a letter to Pope Eleutherius concerning Montanism, and on that occasion bore emphatic testimony to his merits. Returning to Gaul, Irenaeus succeeded the martyr Saint Pothinus as Bishop of Lyons. During the religious peace which followed the persecution of Marcus Aurelius, the new bishop divided his activities between the duties of a pastor and of a missionary (as to which we have but brief data, late and not very certain) and his writings, almost all of which were directed against Gnosticism, the heresy then spreading in Gaul and elsewhere. In 190 or 191 he interceded with Pope Victor to lift the sentence of excommunication laid by that pontiff upon the Christian communities of Asia Minor which persevered in the practice of the Quartodecimans in regard to the celebration of Easter. Nothing is known of the date of his death, which must have occurred at the end of the second or the beginning of the third century. In spite of some isolated and later testimony to that effect, it is not very probable that he ended his career with martyrdom. His feast is celebrated on 28 June in the Latin Church, and on 23 August in the Greek.

He is important and relevant to our discussion for two reasons: 1. he knew and rebutted the gospel of Judas and 2. St. Ireneaus' rebuttal sets the latest composition date for the gospel of Judas.

St. Ireneaus is best know for his work entitled, Against the Heresies, which he wrote around 180 AD. This is the quote where the saint mentions the gospel of Judas:

Others again declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to themselves. On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator, yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas. (i, 31, 1) (Source)

The saintly bishop's critique was not lost on Brian Handwerk, who writing for the National Geographic News stated that:

St. Irenaeus's method was to savage alternative theological views and interpretations—including the Gospel of Judas—which he referred to as "fictitious histories."

Handwerk didn't even bother to find out why St. Ireneaus was so peeved at the Gnostics in general and at the gospel of Judas in particular. Of course not, because in order to ascertain the bishop's view one must engage in a compare-and-contrast study of the kind I have attempted in this essay and the conclusions may not have been good for business in the end. The headline "Gospel according to Judas found and found not to transmit authentic memories of Jesus, Judas" would not sell many magazines.

The National Geographic Society slips

One more example illustrates the National Geographic Society's sloppy treatment of the facts. Towards the end of the made-for-TV documentary, one of the scholars—I don't remember his name, I guess I'll have to watch this thing again—stated that the gospel of Judas contained—this is not a direct quote—"no authentic historical memories about Jesus or Judas, that its value laid on the insights the document provided on other early Christian movements." They switched right away to Dr. Elaine Pagels, one of the world's foremost experts in Gnostic Christianity for a retort, which was "How does he know?"

A scholar of Dr. Pagels' stature should know that proving the negative is a logical fallacy, that to demand it from a fellow scholar is unfair and uncouth, and that to hint that the lack of proof of the negative allowed for the mere possibility that the gospel of Judas did, in fact, record authentic historical memories is due to very sloppy reasoning on her part. Curiously enough, there was no "retort" clip to Dr. Pagels' "how he knows" question. Her fallacy was left hanging as a plausible argument of the gospel of Judas historical accuracy. Her rhetorical question begged for an answer but the producers allowed for none.

Conclusion

We have reached the conclusion of this analysis, and these are my summary findings.

The so-called "Gospel of Judas" is a pseudonymous Gnostic tractate, written toward the middle of the second century AD. It was not written before St. Ignatius' Letters to the Smyrnaeans in 110 AD and definitely not after St. Irenaeus's Against the Heresies in 180 AD. The internal evidence examined here presupposes knowledge of Church conditions, teachings, and government existing during this 70-year span. The first generation of witnesses was probably all gone by then; therefore, the gospel of Judas did not record any first hand, historical information. This argument becomes decisive if the scholarly consensus dating the gospel of Judas to AD 150-170 holds true.
I think we can also play the higher-critical game when it comes to the gospel of Judas. I think the gospel of Judas is a hodgepodge of fragmentary notes taken at various times of Gnostic criticisms of orthodox understandings of the Old and New Testament, coupled with positive explanations of Gnostic cosmogony, written together, smoothed, and harmonized into a single work by an anonymous redactor. This redactor is the one who titled the work "Gospel of Judas."
The aim of the author(s) or better yet, the redactor of the gospel of Judas was to boost Gnostic Christianity at the expense of the emerging orthodox Catholic consensus. The author(s) attempted to achieve this goal by undermining the claims of Catholic bishops to apostolic authority by undermining the apostles themselves, by propping up Judas against them and against St. Peter in particular—although Peter is only addressed indirectly, through his confession.
The gospel of Judas has historical value in the sense that it highlights the controversies that led to the stabilization and formulation of the Christian biblical canon, and it does offer a new perspective on Gnostic beliefs. It offers no new historical insight into the persons of Jesus of Nazareth or Judas Iscariot; its claim that Judas betrayed Jesus at his bidding is not a historical tradition preserved in this writing; it is, like St. Irenaeus suspected, a work of religious fiction, not written by eye-witnesses, and not sanctioned by disciples of the primitive eyewitnesses and their tradition. Contrary to what Dr. Pagels states, the gospel of Judas offers no new insight on the origins of Christianity.

I end with the words Pope Benedict XVI spoken last Holy Thursday (AD 2006):

"You are clean, but not all of you," says the Lord (John 13:10). In this phrase the great gift of purification is revealed that he offers us, as he wants to sit at table together with us, to become our food. "But not all"; there is the dark mystery of rejection, which with what happened to Judas is made present and must make us reflect in fact on this Holy Thursday, the day in which Jesus gives himself to us. The Lord's love knows no limits, but man can put a limit to it.
"You are clean, but not all of you." What makes man filthy? The rejection of love, not wanting to be loved, not loving. Arrogance, which believes it has no need of purification, which closes itself to God's saving goodness.
Arrogance does not want to confess and recognize that we are in need of purification. In Judas, we see the nature of this rejection in an even clearer way. He judges Jesus according to the categories of power and success. For him, only the reality of power and success exist, love does not count at all. And he is avid: Money is more import than communion with Jesus, more important than God and his love. In this way, he becomes also a liar, he plays the game of double jeopardy with truth; he lives in lies and loses the sense of the supreme truth, God. Thus he is hardened, makes himself incapable of conversion, of beginning the confident return of the prodigal son, and throws a destroyed life away.
"You are clean, but not all of you." The Lord warns us today in the face of that self-sufficiency that puts a limit to his unlimited love. He invites us to imitate his humility, to trust in it, to let ourselves be "infected" by it. He invites us to return home no matter how lost we feel and to let his purifying goodness raise us and makes us enter the communion of the table with him, with God himself.

What better words than these? Judas rejected love, rejected being loved, and rejected loving. What his rejection of Love led him to do made him unclean and in the end, destroyed him. This is the true message of Judas' life and this is the message that the author(s), redactor, and disseminators of this "gospel" would rather have you ignore.

TOPICS: Apologetics; Catholic; History; Orthodox Christian; Other non-Christian; Theology; Worship
KEYWORDS: gnosticism