Believers often say that the gospel of Jesus is good news. For churchless folks like me though, I’ve never been able to find much to cheer about in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.
But now we’ve got the Gospel of Judas, and it contains some really good news for heretics. Jesus tells Judas that he is the disciple who will exceed all of the others. In short, he’s the only one who got Jesus’ message. As an excellent National Geographic article puts it:
The Judas gospel vividly reflects the struggle waged long ago between the Gnostics and the hierarchical church. In the very first scene Jesus laughs at the disciples for praying to “your god,” meaning the disastrous god who created the world. He compares the disciples to a priest in the temple (almost certainly a reference to the mainstream church), whom he calls “a minister of error” planting “trees without fruit, in my name, in a shameful manner.” He challenges the disciples to look at him and understand what he really is, but they turn away.
This gospel makes considerable sense to me. It says that Judas was being obedient to God’s will, since Jesus needed to die so he could be released from the confining physical body and liberate the genuine soul-Christ inside. It’s mystical rather than theological.
I’ve always wondered why Christians express so much sorrow over the crucifixion. Don’t they believe that Jesus died for our sins? Didn’t the crucifixion need to happen if humanity was to be saved? Wasn’t Judas part of the Big Plan rather than a duplicitous traitor?
True believers won’t look upon Christian dogma any differently now that the Gnostic Gospel of Judas has been released to the world. That’s the nature of true belief: it is impervious to fresh facts. But hopefully the open-minded members of the Christian faithful will study the gospel and consider its implications.
If a personal God exists, and that’s a giant “if,” seemingly He/She/It would be in control of the creation that this being has brought into existence. A clueless impotent God is no god at all, really. So if it is true, as Jesus said, that “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30), it makes sense that God was directing the whole crucifixion drama and wasn’t a passive member of the audience.
This means that Judas’ apparently black-hearted actions were divinely inspired. More generally, blasphemy, heresy, skepticism, and doubt are seen to be an integral aspect of God’s plan for the world (again, assuming that there is a personal God who has plans). The Gospel of Judas points us toward an inclusive and non-judgmental Christianity far removed from the absurd attitude of “the Devil made him do it.”
Gospel of Judas or not, Christianity still doesn’t resonate with me. It is too dependent on distant historical tales that probably never happened and lacks a coherent philosophical foundation. I lean strongly in the mystical direction but still am attracted to a metaphysics that makes sense.
It’s encouraging, though, to see that some early Christians, the Gnostics, had a more enlightened view of Jesus than the canonical gospels present. I can get behind this conception described in the National Geographic piece:
While Christians like Irenaeus stressed that only Jesus, the son of God, was simultaneously human and divine, the Gnostics proposed that ordinary people could be connected to God. Salvation lay in awakening that divine spark within the human spirit and reconnecting with the divine mind.
Amen to that.
[Next day update: Religion scholar Elaine Pagels has an interesting Op-Ed piece in the NY Times today. I’ll share it as a continuation to this post. She makes the point that the Gospel of Jesus and other non-canonical early Christian writings are considered “heretical” now by church authorities. However, it may be that the heretical teachings are closer to Jesus’ original message than the heavily edited New Testament.
This seems to be a general Rule of Heresy: many times, if not most times, a seeming heresy is an attempt to restore the clarity of a spiritual truth that has gotten covered with the mire of institutional dogma. People start to worship what is without rather than what is within and revere abstract concepts rather than direct experience. Viewed in this light, gnostic writings like the Gospel of Judas reflect genuine Christianity, while what passes for Jesus’ teachings today is the counterfeit.]
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