[Dialogue] Judas Gospel Spong's Yawn

[KroegerD at aol.com]

April 26, 2006 
The Gospel of Judas - A  Hyped Insignificance

“Calculated sensationalism and scholarly complicity” were the words Peter  
Steinfels of the New York Times used to describe it. “Consciously misleading”  
were the words applied to the story by Professor James M. Robinson of 
Claremont  Graduate University. What was the subject of these quotations? It was the  
‘newly-discovered’ Gospel of Judas presented during Holy Week by the 
National  Geographic Magazine with a great public relations campaign, designed to  
titillate the insatiable media with a seasonal religious story. The reason for  
the hot promo one liners was quite simply to build the audience for a National 
 Geographic Television Documentary scheduled for the Monday before Easter. 
The  press releases talked of “rehabilitating Judas,” calling this a story “
that  could challenge our deepest beliefs,” destined to create “a crisis of faith
” by  turning “tradition on its head.” One can only hope that these words 
served  National Geographic Magazine’s purpose well. They certainly did not 
serve well  either truth or scholarship.  
The ‘discovery’ of the Gospel of Judas actually occurred years ago. It was a 
 3rd century copy of a 2nd century Gnostic work. Scholars, while not having a 
 full text until recently, have long known of its existence since it was 
quoted,  usually with dismissive contempt, by several of the 2nd century “fathers 
of the  Church.” This gospel probably tells us something of the flavor of life 
in the  Christian Church about 100-175 years after the death of Jesus. It 
also may have  helped to establish the point that Professor Bart Ehrman of the 
University of  North Carolina, has emphasized in recent books, which is that the 
picture of  single-minded unity in the early generations of the Christian 
movement is  absolutely not so. The defenders of traditional Christianity like to 
pretend  that there was always one true faith that reached back to Jesus and 
the  apostles. The study of Christian beginnings reveals that to be only a 
pious  fiction.  
Some greeted this ‘discovery’ with the hope that it might help to dispel the 
 anti-Semitism that rises so significantly from the figure of Judas. That 
hope  was dashed if they bothered to read the text for it describes the God of 
the  Hebrews as a “despised deity,” who created an “evil world.” To seek to 
drive a  wedge between the God of the Jews, who was portrayed as dark and 
sinister, and  the God of Jesus, who was thought of as light and goodness, was the 
theme found  in the writings of a 2nd century Christian named Marcion. However, 
about the  year 140 C. E., the Church had condemned Marcion and his writings 
as heretical.  The Gospel of Judas appears to have been influenced by Marcion. 
I was amazed  that reputable news media like PBS’s Nightly News with Jim 
Lehrer made this  story a feature in its hour long newscast; that the New York 
Times made it a  front page story on a slow Saturday, and that Bloomberg Radio 
called me the next  day for an interview. Why was this non-event being treated 
as a great discovery,  I wondered? The only real story line was the eagerness 
to believe in its  importance.  
Recently, there has been great interest in the general public about the  
so-called rejected gospels. That interest has been fanned significantly by Dan  
Brown’s blockbuster novel, “The Da Vinci Code.” In that book, Brown builds a  
conspiracy theory into his plot seeking to show that the books that make up the 
 canonical New Testament were chosen as late as the 4th century in order to  
promote a particular agenda on the part of the church’s hierarchy. Perhaps,  
Brown implied, the omitted books held the key to new insights. “The Da Vinci  
Code” is a wonderfully exciting well-written piece of fiction that, like many  
historical novels, deals with a period of history and with characters that  
actually lived. Yet Brown makes no claim that he is writing history. The fact is 
 that long before the 4th century the books that now form the canonical New  
Testament had been pretty well established. Furthermore a look at most of the  
rejected gospels will reveal that they are not only later creations, but are  
also filled with fanciful details and miraculous, supernatural stories. They  
were written to excite the imagination of their readers in the same way that  
“The Da Vinci Code” was written. There is no question that what came to be  
called ‘traditional Christianity’ opposed and defeated the Gnostic teachings  
during the 2nd Christian century and the Gnostic Gospels reflect this 
tension.  That debate, however, was far more about church order and authority than it 
was  about ideas and history.  
The New Testament was essentially completed in the 1st Christian century, and 
 some of the controversies marking the Christian Church at that time are 
quite  evident in its pages. For instance, the early Christological debate is 
reflected  in Mark and John. In Mark, Jesus becomes the Son of God at his baptism 
by the  outpouring of the Holy Spirit. In John, the idea of Jesus as a 
pre-existent  being enters the tradition when the ‘logos,’ the ‘word of God’ spoken 
in  creation becomes enfleshed in the Jesus of history. Mark presents Jesus 
as a  God-infused human life while John portrays him as an invading deity. That 
debate  as to whether in Jesus the human became divine or the divine became 
human would  go on until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 C.E declared both to 
be true. There  is also a battle in the New Testament between Paul and the 
author of the Epistle  of James, who contradicts Paul’s understanding of salvation 
by faith alone. The  New Testament is thus not free of conflicts but none of 
them ever reached the  excommunicating levels of tension that marked the later 
conflict between  traditional Christianity and Gnosticism in the 2nd century. 
Because the  ‘Traditional Christians’ won that battle, our view of 
Gnosticism was distorted,  since we knew of their writings only through the work of its 
Christian critics.  The discovery of the Gnostic gospels from 1945 on has 
helped to put that  conflict into a better perspective.  
A great part of the reason that I greeted this ‘discovery’ of the Gospel of  
Judas with a huge yawn is that in my book, “Liberating the Gospels: Reading 
the  Bible with Jewish Eyes,” written in 1996, I had argued for an even more 
radical  understanding of Judas than the one included in the canonical gospels. 
The  Gospel of Judas only seeks to restore Judas’ reputation from those 
earlier  gospels. I contend that there never was a figure in history whose name was 
Judas  Iscariot who needed to be rehabilitated. My study has convinced me that 
Judas  was a creation of the second generation of Christians designed 
primarily to  shift the blame for the death of Jesus from the Romans to the Jews. The 
pressure  driving this creation of Judas came from the war between the Romans 
and the Jews  beginning in 66 C.E. and ending at Masada in 73 C.E. The 
crucial event in that  war was the destruction of Jerusalem and the razing of the 
Temple in 70 C.E.  Roman hostility against the Orthodox Jews, who they blamed 
for initiating this  war, was overwhelming. The Christians, who at this time 
were primarily Jewish,  needed a way to separate themselves from the Temple 
authorities and to reach out  to the Romans. To vilify a representative Jew, who 
had the name of the whole  nation, Judah or Judas, while exonerating the Roman 
procurator, Pontius Pilate,  accomplished exactly that. So Pilate was portrayed 
in the gospels, written  either during or after that war, as washing his 
hands and proclaiming himself  innocent of the blood of this man, while the Jewish 
authorities were portrayed  as accepting the blame for Jesus’ death and 
suggesting that it was appropriate  to pass that blame on to their children. This 
shift is clearly shown when the  gospels themselves are read in order.  
Adding data to the idea of Judas being a created symbol, we note that the  
concept of betrayal enters the Christian story in the writing of Paul in the  
mid-fifties some 15 years before the first gospel was written. Paul’s word  
literally meant “handed over,” an action that might include betrayal but does  
not necessarily do so. Paul, however, never identified this handing over of  
Jesus with one of the twelve. Indeed, just a few chapters later in this same  
epistle, Paul wrote that the Risen Christ appeared to ‘the twelve.’ Judas was  
clearly part of his Easter vision, an idea that is inconceivable if he had been 
 the traitor. Matthew, who says that the risen Christ appeared only to ‘the  
eleven,’ also says that Judas had hanged himself before the crucifixion  
occurred. Once that seed of doubt about Judas’s historicity is sown, then the  
narratives that constitute the betrayal story can be looked at to see if there  is 
another source for their content. For those who know the Hebrew Scriptures,  
almost every detail in the Judas story can be found in earlier biblical 
betrayal  stories. The 30 pieces of silver as the price of betrayal, for example, as 
well  as the hurling of that silver back into the Temple come out of II 
Zechariah  (11:12,13). The idea that the traitor was one who broke bread at Jesus’ 
table,  reflects the story of Ahithophel and King David. When Ahithophel’s 
treachery was  discovered, he went out and hanged himself (II Sam. 17: 24, and 
Psalm 41:9). The  kiss of the traitor comes out of the story of Joab and Amasa 
(II Sam. 20:9). The  idea that a member of a band of twelve betrayed one of its 
own is found in the  story of Joseph and his brothers from the book of 
Genesis (Gen:37:26). It is  worth noting that in that story the one who decides to 
get money for betraying  Joseph is named Judah or Judas. Keep in mind that the 
first story of Jesus’  passion, written by Mark, is not based on eye witness 
accounts but is drawn  primarily from Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. All of these 
things cast doubt on the  historicity of Judas.  
If Judas was not even a figure of history then a 3rd century copy of a 2nd  
century fantasy that offers a new possibility about this man’s motives might be 
 of minor historical interest but it is of no great significance. That was 
when  it became obvious that the ‘discovery’ of the Judas Gospel, released 
right  before Holy Week was manipulative. The media bit. The story made a Holy 
Week  splash. It will now fade into the obscurity that it deserves.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Ewing103 via the Internet writes: 
A Sunday school kid once asked his teacher, “What I would like is more data  
about God!” I totally accept your concept of God as that “in whom we live and 
 move and have our being.” But what do we have to say about ideas such as 
that in  the Psalm that says: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present 
help in  times of trouble”?Dear Ewing103,
I often wonder why human beings assume that the human brain can understand  
the nature of God. Can the brain of a horse understand the nature of humanity?  
The Greek philosopher, Xenophanes, was surely correct when he observed, “If  
horses had Gods, they would look like horses.” 
So I do not confuse that nature of God with the language of worship. It is  
the language of worship that the psalmist is articulating. That is a language 
of  human wish and human desire. It is love language, excessive, poetic, 
yearning.  One does not literalize the language of worship or the language of love. 
One of  the deepest human desires that we human beings have is to know that we 
are not  alone in this vast and frightening universe. We yearn to believe 
that there is  one who is not subject to our weaknesses, who is with us as our 
protector. If  that is the reality on which you base your life, however, you 
cannot escape  passive dependency. If there is no protective power then we shake 
like a bowl  full of Jell-o. Therefore, we pray as if all depends on God and 
we live as if  all depends on us.  
That is where worship leads us because we finally realize that we live in God 
 and God lives in us. I commend this pathway to you. 
John Shelby Spong 
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