 As you have probably read elsewhere, and quite a few readers kindly emailed me about this topic, the Gospel of Judas was announced to the world press this week, and what a great splash it made. Nothing grabs headlines quite like any controversial idea about Jesus, and here we're talking about a very old controversial idea about Jesus.
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.
Unlike the accounts in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the anonymous author of the Gospel of Judas believed that Judas Iscariot alone among the 12 disciples understood the meaning of Jesus' teachings and acceded to his will. In the diversity of early Christian thought, a group known as Gnostics believed in a secret knowledge of how people could escape the prisons of their material bodies and return to the spiritual realm from which they came.
Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton who specializes in studies of the Gnostics, said in a statement, "These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion, and demonstrating how diverse — and fascinating — the early Christian movement really was."
The Gospel of Judas is only one of many texts discovered in the last 65 years, including the gospels of Thomas, Mary Magdalene and Philip, believed to be written by Gnostics.
The Gnostics' beliefs were often viewed by bishops and early church leaders as unorthodox, and they were frequently denounced as heretics. The discoveries of Gnostic texts have shaken up Biblical scholarship by revealing the diversity of beliefs and practices among early followers of Jesus.
Since the basic ideas of gnosticism have been known very well since Nag Hammadi, I'd say that Biblical scholarship takes a bit more to be shaken up. Don't get me wrong, this is a great, fascinating find, since we now can read a full text, albeit in an early Coptic translation, of this gnostic gospel which has been notorious since Irenaeus, the church father who made his career out of attacking gnosticism.
The mainstream press, sloppy as always (the NYT a nice exception, for a particularly silly example go read the Guardian), hails this as "Judas' side of the story" and a "rehabilitation" for the ultimate traitor. I doubt any modern scholars seriously believe that this text has any connection to the real Judas Iscariot, assuming such a person even existed.
This find brings attention to what has been known for a long time for those who pay attention: there were a significant number of Christian sects competing for supremacy in the first few centuries of our era, and the one that won out, dictated what became orthodoxy and what was heresy. Gnosticism, which predates Christianity but which exact roots are not really known, lost out big.
You can see traces of gnosticism in all of Christianity: its negativity towards everything of this world, every carnal pleasure, and of course the Pauline gospel that the final destiny of humans is in the spirit realm. Paul, though the orthodox try to deny this, preached a spiritual, not a bodily, resurrection. Yet, the gnostics went much further than this. They denied God the Father as creator of this physical realm; the real creator was an evil demiurg sometimes called Jaldabaoth, and he is none other than the creator-god Yahweh of the Old Testament (or, the Jewish Bible), whom the gnostics despise. The real God, the Father of lights, is way beyond this small deity, and he wants to bring this miserable physical world to an end, and free all the spirits to return home to the light.
Logically, then, it follows that those who opposed the OT heroes who worshipped Yahweh were the real heroes, including Cain. The gnostics also point to an apparent inconsistency in the NT gospels: if Jesus' true objective was to die on the cross, how come Judas who sent him there is the ultimate villain? And that is the subject of the Gospel of Judas, which takes this thought to its somewhat logical conclusion.
The orthodox who want to dismiss this, and other, gospels are in for a bit of a problem. They can't really argue the Gospel of Judas (or, for that matter, the far more mainstream Thomas' gospel) is far more recent than the four canonical gospels. There is just no good evidence that any of the gospels were written in the 1st century, though many assume the synoptics were completed shortly after 70 AD (the destruction of Jerusalem, a watershed in both early Christian and Jewish history). No eyewitness to Jesus' life ever wrote anything we have today, and the gospel authors do not cite actual witnesses in any meaningful way. Thus, all extant written material on Jesus' life was quite far removed in time and space, at a time where reliable recordings of events were rare.
I can't see that the canonical gospels have any better claim on telling "the real story" than this "new" Gospel of Judas, but saying that is not saying very much indeed.
PS: I wrote my own speculative thoughts on Judas the Traitor quite some time ago. I have also discussed that Jesus may or may not have existed.
10:28:46 PM 
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