UPDATE: The best fisking of the breathless presentation of The G of J by those who want to radically deconstruct Christianity as “important” can be found here. Do NOT miss this one! 😉
I hate to rain on the parade of (historically, culturally, literarily) subliterate and/or disingenuous, but The Gospel of Judas is not news. OK, I lied. I don’t hate to rain on that parade.
For the past 65 years or so, every now and then another obscure “gospel” of somebody or other written in the heyday of Gnosticism surfaces. Some are more interesting or better-written fiction than others. Fiction? Well, yes. Each of them purport to be written by people who knew the Nazarene face-to-face. And each of them reveal themselves, through both external physical and historical evidence/provenance and through internal textual evidence, to have been manufactured two to three centuries after the Carpenter walked the earth.
The Gospels of the Canon, however, were all accepted as first, or in the case of Luke’s Gospel, second-hand (as in testimony taken from first-hand witnesses and recorded by Luke) direct eyewitness testimony recordings. There were other criteria, but none of the later fictitious works of the gnostics passed even this simple first-order test.
And the texts of the Gnostic “gospels” all reveal another thing: they are different to the gnostic writings of earlier centuries—long before the time of Christ—only in their appropriation of Christian trappings to clothe their tired old mysticism, which had been around (though not all that successfully) since post-Cyrus Babylonian syncretism.
Read the so-called “Gospel of Judas” for yourself(pdf file linked). If you have even the foggiest grasp of the middle eastern cultures/history of 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. and of the history of the Christian church during its first few centuries, the thing reverals itself as pure fiction—and not particularly well-written fiction at that. The first thing that sprang to mind when I read the thing was, “If ‘the original’ of which this is imagined to be a copy was written in the second century, why wasn’t this in wide circulation during the broadest gnostic movements of the second century? Why didn’t Marcion and others of his ilk quote the thing? Surely it would have provided great support for their gnostic teachings!”
But it was not quoted by other gnostics (as far as I can recall). Not in the second century when “the original” is supposed to have been written and not since. This “copy” is unique, sui generis, as it were (apart from its tiresome spouting of the same old, same old gnostic line).
The thing first surfaced in the 1970s and has been alternately circulating and “moldering in a bank box”¹; for the past thirty years or so. The NYT and other Mass Media Podpeople’s outlets decided to make a big splash during Lent/Easter season for reasons known only to the editors of these rags, but the media hype and distortions follow the same old Mass Media Podpeople’s antipathy to the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John…
Do read the thing, if you have the background in the history and culture the thing was written in. Otherwise, you could be easily misled by the breathless cries of the idiots (or deliberate liars who forsake all intellectual honesty to pursue whatever agenda they value other than truth) who view (or proclaim) this as an important discovery… Yeh: important on the order of Dan Brown’s insipid lil conspiracy tale, “The DaVinci Code.”
Well, I certainly have better things to occupy myself with on Palm Sunday.
For example, here’s an excerpt of the lyrics to Twila Paris’ “Lamb of God”—something no gnostic could honestly sing. The mp3 file below is a lower quality sample from the streamed audio freely available from Jennifer Ramsey’s Still Waters CD. Do visit her site and consider purchasing a copy. All the cuts are good. (Heard any good Gnostic music recently? I didn’t think so… )
Your only Son No sin to hide
But You have sent Him from Your side
To walk upon this guilty sod
And to become the Lamb of GodYour gift of Love They crucified
They laughed and scorned him as he died
The humble King They named a fraud
And sacrificed the Lamb of GodChorus:
Oh Lamb of God, Sweet lamb of God
I love the Holy Lamb of God
Oh wash me in His precious Blood
My Jesus Christ the Lamb of God