|
First Response: What can we learn from The Gospel of Judas? |
|
|
|
|
Written by Editor
|
First Response - July 2006
What can we learn from The Gospel of Judas?
By Don Williams
This spring, The Gospel of Judas shook the Academic Community. It also shook much of the Church, especially that part tuned in to the media. Here was an ancient manuscript, pulled from the Egyptian desert, going back to about 100 years after Jesus’ ministry, presenting a very different picture of who he is and what he came to do. For the liberal community, for those opposed to Christian orthodoxy, it was fodder for their canons. It has long been held and now spectacularly presented through Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code (book and movie) that rather than the traditional, mainstream understanding of Jesus being normative, there were many understandings of Jesus. One is no more privileged than another. Did, in fact, the church suppress the real Jesus (or Jesuses) and create its dogmatic Jesus (under Constantine, 312-337 AD) for political reasons? Does The Gospel of Judas reveal a Jesus just as historical and probable as Matthew or John?
Such questions are not new. But a new find, like The Gospel of Judas (and Dan Brown) bring them up dramatically again. For skeptics, for those bashed by the church, for those simply wanting a “relative” Jesus rather than the absolute Lord, this new discovery is a great friend. In our post-modern era, pluralism reigns. There is nothing better for those in this intellectual environment than to have a “pluralistic Jesus,” especially when it overturns historic doctrine and the integrity of the church which bears it.
Before we say some things about the substance of this new find, we need to remember Karl Barth (the greatest neo-orthodox theologian of the 20th Century) when he says that we need to learn from the heretics. Why is the Gospel of Judas such an eye-popper? Why does it land with such force in our post-modern world? And what does it have to teach us?
I Love a Secret
Our history is rife with conspiracy theories. Who shot John Kennedy after all? Why did J. Edgar Hoover have files on Martin Luther King? What was George Bush’s real reason for the war in Iraq? Does it connect to his family’s oil interests? On and on the questions and suspicions go. No wonder The DaVinci Code is such a success. It is not only a chase novel at high speed, it is all about a cover up so we will never know that Jesus was married and had a family. We will never connect the “Holy Grail” to the “Sacred Feminine.”
The Gospel of Judas fits this mind-set dramatically. It tells us that the renegade disciple, Judas, who betrayed Jesus, was really his closest friend, the only follower who knew what he was really about. His betrayal then, unlike our canonical Gospels, was an act of love, not disappointment or despair (or a design of Satan). It is Judas who is separated from the rest to receive the “real” revelation of Jesus. This turns traditional Christianity upside down. The villain is the hero after all. Rather than having St. Peter’s in Rome, we should have St. Judas’s.
More than that, The Gospel of Judas yanks us out of the Hebraic worldview (perception of reality) and throws us into the highly developed worldview of Hellenism. Here there is an absolute dualism between the body and the soul. As Plato taught, the goal of life is to be released from the “prison-house of the body” so that the soul can ascend into heavenly contemplation of the eternal good. This means that this material world, this creation, including our bodies, is evil, the expression of a lesser god rather than the expression the true, most high God. Rather than healing or restoring this creation, salvation means deliverance from it, into a pure spiritual world. Moreover, there are many divine beings or emanations from the High God. The whole upper spiritual world is layered with them. The soul must journey through these layers to find its true spiritual home. In fact, it came from pure spirit, fell into matter and is now being redeemed from its material existence.
What we need now is not the Redeemer to deliver us from sin, Satan and death. We need the Teacher or Prophet to deliver us from ignorance and show us (the few elect who have eternal souls) the way back to our divine origin. In other words, our problem is not sin, it is ignorance. Our solution is not forgiveness, it is enlightenment. In a relativistic age such as ours, where there is little sense of personal sin or guilt left, this fits just fine. Maybe Jesus will help us develop or discover our true spirituality – and lead us into bliss, whether it is contemplation of the divine or simply the contemplation of our own divinity.
A Look at The Gospel of Judas
This “new” Gospel is not structured like our canonical Gospels. Rather than narrating history, it uses a few disconnected moments, with little interest in their context, to present Jesus as the Teacher in a question and answer format. This is a Gospel with no historical interest, apart from acknowledging Judas as Jesus’ betrayer just before Passover and identifying events (which vary from our Canonical Gospels) leading to Jesus’ arrest. This is its only connection with Biblical history. Unlike our Gospels, there is no appeal to Old Testament Scriptures or the fulfillment of prophesy. After all, the Creator is as evil as his creation. Why bring him up? This means, of course, that there is also no connection with Israel as his chosen people. Only the Gnostic elect are chosen. They have the divine spark within, waiting to be liberated.
Like other Gnostic movements, The Gospel of Judas rejects orthodox Christianity’s Jewish-historical context. It offers no messianic King. Instead we have Jesus the Wisdom Teacher, the Revealer from the Heavenly Realm. His goal is not to pay for our sins by his death. His goal (and ours) is to be released from this evil, material world by death – so that the tomb of his flesh will vomit up his eternal spirit and fly him heavenward. As Jesus says to Judas at the end of the “Gospel,” “But you will exceed all of them [the other disciples]. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” And who is the “me”? It is Jesus’ spiritual self, now liberated from his fleshly clothes through death.
Let’s glance at the content of this Gospel (Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst, eds., The Gospel of Judas (Washington DC, National Geographic, 2006):
The text begins announcing the “secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot…” Notice that this is a secret only shared between Jesus and Judas (and the reader). It goes on to say that Jesus spoke to his Twelve Disciples “the mysteries beyond the world.” “Often he did not appear to his disciples as himself…” The whole revelation, rather than being good news for the nations, is clouded in mystery – Jesus himself becoming mysterious. Next, as his disciples share in the Eucharist, he mocks them with laughter and distinguishes their god from his God. The disciples are angry and blaspheme Jesus in their hearts. The great divide is set between them and Jesus, between their god and his God. Only Judas dares to stand before Jesus. He says, “I know who you are and where you have come from. You are from the immortal realm of Barbelo [the divine realm; Barbelo is the divine mother of all]. And I am not worthy to utter the name of the one who sent you.”
With this, Jesus asks Judas to step away from the others. He will tell him alone “the mysteries of the kingdom.” Unlike our Gospels, these mysteries are hidden, only revealed to Judas. Jesus goes on to say that Judas may reach the kingdom, but he will grieve a great deal. This anticipates his betrayal of Jesus and the rejection he receives as a result.
Next, Jesus vanishes to “another great and holy generation.” This “generation” is the upper story of truth and light, angels and aeons, which is totally distinguished from this earthly generation. Jesus warns, “Truly [I] say to you, no one born [of] this aeon will see that [generation], and no host of angels of the stars will rule over that generation and no person of mortal birth can associate with it…” It is only for the elect who have the divine spark within them.
The text goes on with a critique of the Jerusalem Temple which becomes an allegorical critique of the Orthodox Church, leading people astray, filled with immorality of the worst kind
Rather than teaching a future resurrection, this Jesus promises that when the spirit leaves the elect, “their bodies will die but their souls will be alive, and they will be taken up (to the eternal realms).” The future is up above us when we are released from the material world. Here is Platonic dualism; the absolute separation between flesh and spirit. No resurrection is possible or desirable.
Jesus goes on to call Judas “You thirteenth spirit,” distinguishing him from the Twelve Apostles. Judas sees them in a vision stoning him but his destiny is to be over them: “You will become the thirteenth, and you will be cursed by the other generations – and you will come to rule over them. In the last days they will curse your ascent to the holy [generation].”
The Gospel of Judas goes on to unveil a full cosmological system: the High God, the great angel, Self-Generated, who then generates ranks of other angels, cosmic forces. This ideal world also has its ideal Adam (Adamas). But from the lower ranks there emanates other angels who rule over chaos and the underworld. Here is where Adam and Eve appear. This distances the material world absolutely from the High God. The Angel Michael gives spirits to people in the material world as a loan, but the Angel Gabriel grants spirits to the “great generation,” those uncontaminated by the flesh. Salvation, as we have seen, is to be freed from the material world so that the true spirit may ascend back to its point of origin. Jesus’ betrayal becomes the prototype for this ascent. Judas is the Hero who betrays him so that his immortal soul may be released to the highest heaven.
Learning from Heresy
We return to Karl Barth’s insight that we must learn from the heretics. Gnosticism addresses the problem of evil. How could a good God create a world of suffering, pain and death? Their answer? He didn’t. A second god, a lesser god, even a bad god made the material world. Moreover, death is good – it releases the soul of the elect from the evil body and returns it to its heavenly origin. But however attractive this system may be (Christian Science is a modern edition as well as some forms of Hinduism and Eastern Mysticism), it is heresy.
Gnosticism creates a permanently broken universe, ripped in half by a false spirituality. It denies creation and history and turns salvation into a spiritual mind-game. It severs Jesus from his Jewish roots and his Jewish context. He is no longer the Messianic King and the Suffering Servant of the Lord. He is a Being from outer space and while the Gnostics claim otherwise, a Being from outer space with information never saved anyone. The problem of evil is too deep and profound. We are not just ignorant of our true origin. We are lost, sunk in sin, rebellious, self-consumed and subject to God’s wrath and the devil’s kingdom. We don’t simply need information. We need deliverance – both from Satan and from divine judgment against our sin. We also don’t need to deny the body, but to restore the body. Our final healing won’t be in a flight to another world. Our final healing will be with the resurrection of our bodies, incorruptible and fully conformed to Jesus at his glorious return.
Mircea Eliade (in Cosmos and History) observes that ancient people organized their religions to escape “the terror of history.” They were constantly threatened by barbarians coming over the walls, plagues, floods, famine and drought. Their response was to stop history by escaping into an ideal world of myth or philosophy. Gnosticism, and specifically The Gospel of Judas, does exactly that. But there is one exception to this universal rule: Israel. The Jews, rather than escaping the “terror of history,” were forced to face the terror head on. They became the first real historical people because they saw in the very “terror of history” the hand of the Living God.
Rather than denying the body, Jesus affirms the body. Rather than destroying the body, Jesus heals the body as well as the soul. We must never escape our physical world into an ideal spiritual world. We are of the earth and destined for the new heavens and the new earth in which righteousness dwells. Jesus took on our own flesh and blood to become fully human like us. In his Incarnation he affirmed the body. In his healing ministry he restored the body. In his resurrection he transformed the body and we follow in his train. So we learn by comparing Jesus and Gnosticism that the answer to our physical pain is not denial or flight, but his kingdom ministry. He alone heals the sick and casts out demons and empowers his church to do the same. As much of the church has done historically (See Francis MacNutt, The Almost Perfect Crime: How the Church Almost Killed the Ministry of Healing), we must never surrender Jesus’ healing ministry for today.
Modern medicine is impossible apart from a Biblical worldview that affirms the value of the body and the physical life. But beyond what Western science can do, stands the healing power of God. Jesus calls us to pray for the sick and heal them in his name. When we give up on this ministry, Gnosticism is our only alternative. We either heal the body or we depreciate the body and resign ourselves to sickness and pain (and even demons). These are the alternative answers to sickness and pain. Gnosticism is the negative witness to the need for healing. Rather than denial or writing people off as un-elect, we extend the mercy of Jesus in the power of the Spirit. Demons will go. At times, eyes will even be opened and lepers cleansed. Along with these “signs and wonders” all of us will get better as we pray for God’s healing to flow into our lives.
Gnosticism escapes this world. Christ embraces this world. Gnosticism creates a prideful elect. Christ re-creates a redeemed humanity. Gnosticism guards its secrets. Christ proclaims his secret: the kingdom his here; salvation is offered to the nations. Gnosticism has nothing to say about the care for this planet in the midst of ecological decay. Christ has everything to say – he is Creator, Preserver and Redeemer of this planet and the cosmos.
The Gospel of Judas reveals the longing of the human heart to be special, elect and share divine secrets for a pure and eternal destiny. But this longing is not fulfilled in illumination. It is fulfilled in redemption – from the heart of the Creator God given in his Son. The Father is home. The door is open. Come on in!
|
|
|
First Response 
