Original Reviews

          Thirty years ago an ancient codex was discovered by an Egyptian villager in a cave south of Cairo. The manuscript contained several early Christian texts, including the Gospel of Judas. Carbon dating of the manuscript suggested that it was produced around 280 A.D. We know that the Gospel of Judas was at least a century older than that because it was mentioned and condemned around 180 A.D. by Irenaeus, the Christian bishop of Lyon.

          Bart Ehrman’s commentary on the Gospel of Judas is part of the lively field of biblical scholarship. In recent decades, it has been transformed by another discovery in Egypt, the Nag Hammadi library of manuscripts unearthed in 1945. They were likely hidden away by their owners sometime in the fourth century. Included were dozens of gospels, including the Gospels of Thomas and Mary. Though not the four gospels that found their way into the Christian testament. Gospels were a popular genre of writing in the early centuries of Christianity.

          All four gospels in the Christian testament mention Judas. Each treats him differently according to its understanding of the life of Jesus, his betrayal, and its meaning. Each serves the literary and theological agenda of the writer. Each differs according to the audience for which it was intended.

          Mark, the earliest of the canonical gospels, mentions Judas, but he drops out of sight after the betrayal. Matthew includes stories about Judas’ days after the crucifixion. Mark has him interested in the money; Matthew believes that Jesus’ death on the cross was a fulfillment of prophecies found in Jewish scripture. Hence Judas’s act of betrayal was portrayed by Matthew as an essential role of that fulfillment. Luke casts Judas as a participant in a Satanic plot.

          As with the four Christian gospels, the writer of the Gospel of Judas attributed it to a personality known to the early Christian community. The intention was to lend authority to his writing. That would seem strange in the case of Judas Iscariot! Ehrman explains.

          The Gospel of Judas shows the influence of gnostic patterns of thought. Gnosticism ultimately became a Christian heresy condemned by numerous Christian writers as they worked out an ‘orthodoxy’ and created a biblical canon to support it. Gnostic writings were excluded from the canon. Gnosticism had once been a alternative system of thought in the first centuries of Christianity and informed many of the tracts found in the Nag Hammadi library, including the Gospel of Thomas.

          Gnostic writings provide a different set of myths about the origins of humankind than those that found their way into the Hebrew testament and were embraced by early Christianity. In the gnostic tradition, the god of creation – the demiurge – is at war with the true god in heaven. Humankind has become estranged from god, entrapped in this created physical world, and hence subject to the willfulness of the demiurge. Jesus came into our world to battle the demiurge and allow our spiritual selves to escape this entrapment.

          Both the death and resurrection of Jesus were essential to that freeing of our spirit, and so Judas’ betrayal was integral to that cosmic event. Only Judas, according to the Gospel of Judas, had understood the true relevance of Jesus’ secret teaching. Only Judas had the pheuma (spirit) necessary for their decoding. The other disciples were enveloped in the physical world with limited understanding of the nature of man’s redemption as offered by Jesus.

          Beneath the surface stories in the Gospel of Judas, Ehrman finds residuals of the Jewish apocalyptic tradition. Jesus has come to fulfill the prophecies concerning a messiah in Isaiah. Jesus, Ehrman believes, was confident of his overcoming death and returning as ‘king of the Jews.’ His twelve apostles would each head one of the twelve tribes of Israelite tradition. And the clairvoyant Judas of the Gospel of Judas had all along understood this role of his teacher.