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The great wheel of history always turns, if slowly, and so, at last, the ultimate betrayer, Judas Iscariot himself, comes around again for another inspection, a potential record-clearing moment occasioned by the publication of “The Gospel of Judas” (National Geographic; $22), a very ancient, though not actually contemporary, rendering of Jesus, as seen by the man who ratted him out. Written in Coptic, and found, three decades ago, within a papyrus codex that contains other non-canonic writing, the manuscript has known a bizarre Calvary of its own—including a papyrus-damaging sixteen-year residence in a safe-deposit box in Hicksville, New York—and has only now been edited and translated into English by an international group of scholars, each of whom has provided his own commentary. The event feels uncomfortably hyped; there is an accompanying book, “The Lost Gospel: The Quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot” (National Geographic; $27), by Herbert Krosney, devoted to the tale of the Gospel’s rediscovery and sale, an all too human story suggesting, once again, that Mammon’s servant problem is more easily solved than that other master’s. Still, it is a genuine occasion, offering much to think about for believer and doubter alike.
Known to exist since the second century, this “Gospel of Judas” is, in one way, simply another of the Gnostic Gospels, like those found at Nag Hammadi, in Egypt, sixty years ago: unorthodox Christian documents, written by, or at least circulated within, communities of eccentric faith that flourished in the first and second centuries. These Gospels play with a series of variations on Christian belief: the irredeemable corruption of the world we live in, the hidden truth that the Old Testament God who created it was an ignorant or malevolent demiurge, and Jesus’ essence as a being of pure spirit, an emissary from another and higher realm. What makes this second-century Gnostic Gospel different is, perhaps, the extreme aggression of its heresy; it represents “Christianity turned on its head,” in the words of one commentator, the religious historian Bart D. Ehrman, by making the villain in the story the hero. Its editors think that its significance is enormous (“one of the greatest discoveries of the century”), and right out of Dan Brown; the Krosney book quotes an American scholar saying that “it could create a crisis of faith.”
It certainly makes for odd bedside reading. “The Gospel of Judas” isn’t actually a gospel by Judas, or, really, a gospel at all in the sense that we might expect: an account of the life of Jesus, from birth to death and rebirth. It is, instead, a mystical riff on a life already assumed to be familiar. It begins just before Jesus’ last Passover in Jerusalem, as the disciples are offering a prayer to God over the dinner table. Watching them, Jesus laughs. “Why are you laughing at us?” the nettled disciples ask, and Jesus says that he is laughing not at them but at their strange idea of pleasing their God. (One of the unnerving things about the new Gospel is that Jesus, who never laughs in the canonic Gospels, is constantly laughing in this one, and it’s obviously one of those sardonic, significant, how-little-you-know laughs, like the laugh of the ruler of a dubious planet on “Star Trek.”)
The disciples are furious at Jesus’ condescension, except for Judas, who thinks he knows what the laughter signifies. “I know who you are and where you have come from,” Judas says, standing before him. “You are from the immortal realm of Barbelo.” Apparently startled by his insight, Jesus tells Judas, “Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the Kingdom.”
The true mystery, as Jesus unveils it, is that, out beyond the stars, there exists a divine, blessed realm, free of the materiality of this earthly one. This is the realm of Barbelo, a name that gnostics gave the celestial Mother, who lives there with, among others, her progeny, a good God awkwardly called the Self-Generated One. Jesus, it turns out, is not the son of the Old Testament God, whose retinue includes a rebellious creator known as Yaldabaoth, but an avatar of Adam’s third son, Seth. His mission is to show those lucky members of mankind who still have a “Sethian” spark the way back to the blessed realm. Jesus, we learn, was laughing at the disciples’ prayer because it was directed at their God, the Old Testament God, who is really no friend of mankind but, rather, the cause of its suffering.
What gives “The Gospel of Judas” a peculiar pathos is the sacrificial role that Judas must play in the divine story. Jesus is going back to Barbelo, and to get there he must “sacrifice the man that clothes me”; that is, his mortal body. The only way to do this is to accept his own death, and he urges Judas to become the agent of it. (Presumably, self-slaughter would not get him back.) But Judas has reason to worry that if he obeys his Lord he will be stuck with a bad reputation forever. “In a vision,” he says, “I saw myself as the twelve disciples were stoning me.” Jesus assures him that though “you will be cursed by the other generations . . . you will come to rule over them.” At the end, he supplies Judas with a beatific vision of a luminous cloud, and, in this Gospel’s one truly poetic note, tells him, “Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. The star that leads the way is your star.” Judas accepts the bargain—temporal libel in exchange for eternal luminosity—and agrees to turn Jesus over to the high priests. The Gospel’s very last lines have an extraordinarily modern feeling of Hemingwayesque understatement, achieved perhaps inadvertently, by textual omission: “They approached Judas and said to him, ‘What are you doing here? You are Jesus’ disciple.’ Judas answered them as they wished. And he received some money and handed him over to them.”
The conundrums that produced this Gospel are long familiar: if Christ is a full member of the Godhead and divine, how could he possibly be “betrayed,” and since his death is, anyway, the pivot point of human redemption, how could he be peeved at Judas, the agent who brought it about? In “The Gospel of Judas,” all problems are solved by making the Christ a pure spirit, and the Crucifixion his necessary, and presumably painless, crossing over. (The situation, really, is very like that at the end of “The Little Prince,” where the snake, like Judas, has to be persuaded to bite the celestial visitor in order to send him back, once again, to his star. And the last image of that book, too, is the single lonely personal star.)
Obviously, “The Gospel of Judas” appears at a time of a new fashion, not to say rage, for “alternate” Gospels and revisionist retellings of the Jesus story. These are not the egalitarian, feminist versions of the story that were among the first fruits of the Nag Hammadi discovery. Instead, the new obsession is to introduce, or reintroduce, into Christianity something hidden, strange, and cultic—to reveal a deliberately suppressed story. And yet an odd double rhythm is at work. By making the Gospel story more occult, one also drains it of its cosmic significance; making it more mysterious makes it less mystical. (If Dan Brown or the authors of “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” are right—and they aren’t—then Jesus is reduced from the Cosmic Overlord to the founder of a minor line of Merovingian despots.) “The Gospel of Judas” turns Christianity into a mystery cult—Jesus at one point describes to Judas the highly bureaucratic organization of the immortal realm, enumerating hundreds of luminaries—but robs it of its ethical content. Jesus’ message in the new Gospel is entirely supernatural. You don’t have to love thy neighbor; just seek your star. The Gospel of Judas is, in this way, the dead opposite of the now much talked of Gospel of Jefferson, the edition prepared by the third President, in which all the miracles and magic stuff are deleted, and what is left is the ethical teaching.
Orthodox Christians will point out, correctly, that there is no new “challenge” to the Church in the Judas Gospel, much less a crisis of faith. This is an ancient heresy, dealt with firmly, not to say brutally, throughout Church history. The finding of the new Gospel, though obviously remarkable as a bit of textual history, no more challenges the basis of the Church’s faith than the discovery of a document from the nineteenth century written in Ohio and defending King George would be a challenge to the basis of American democracy. There are no new beliefs, no new arguments, and certainly no new evidence in the papyrus that would cause anyone to doubt who did not doubt before.
Yet the Judas Gospel is an eye-opener anyway. First, because it is useful to be reminded, in a time of renewed fundamentalism, that religions actually have no fundament: that the inerrant texts and unchallenged holies of any faith are the work of men and time. Any orthodoxy is the snapshot of a moment. That the Church has long had answers to gnosticism, in all its varieties, does not mean that gnosticism was always doomed to heresy. Bart D. Ehrman has recently written, touchingly and convincingly, of his own migration away from a fundamentalist Christianity on the basis of an increasing understanding of how time-contingent and man-made the foundational Gospels really are. As Borges once suggested, had Alexandria, where gnosticism flourished, triumphed rather than Rome, we would have had a Dante making poetry out of the realm of Barbelo.
And then the new Gospel casts a spell—for sympathetic freethinkers, especially—because it reminds us of the literary strength of the canonic Gospels, exactly for their marriage of the celestial and the commonplace. We want a bit of Hicksville and a bit of Heaven in our sacred texts, matter and man and magic together. Simply as editors, the early Church fathers did a fine job of leaving the strong stories in and the weird ones out. The orthodox canon gives us a Christ who is convincing as a character in a way that this Gnostic one is not: angry and impatient and ethically engaged, easily exasperated at the limitations and nagging of his dim disciples and dimmer family relations, brilliantly concrete in his parables and human in his pain. Whether one agrees with Jefferson that this man lived, taught, and died, or with St. Paul that he lived and died and was born again, it is hard not to prefer him to the Jesus of the new Gospel, with his stage laughter and significant winks and coded messages. Making Judas more human makes Jesus oddly less so, less a man with a divine and horrible burden than one more know-it-all with a nimbus. As metaphor or truth, we’re sticking with the old story. Give us that old-time religion—but, to borrow a phrase from St. Augustine, maybe not quite yet.
