Rewriting history
The apocryphal Gospel of Judas tells us nothing new about Jesus, says David V Barrett
28 March 2008

When the battered, bruised and abused folios of the Gospel of Judas were first revealed to the world a couple of years ago, scholars immediately made it clear that the work wasn't written by Judas himself. The codex, originally a leather-bound book, is third or fourth century; its text is written in a dialect of Coptic, almost certainly translated from a Greek original. But when does the original text date from?

The Church Father Irenaeus mentioned a Gospel of Judas in his work Against Heresies around AD 180; if this is the same work, then it was written before then. But how early might it have been?

Simon Gathercole shows that the Gospel of Judas uses phraseology in several places suggesting its author was familiar with Matthew's Gospel, which was probably written c AD 80. It refers to church structures and practices which are second century rather than first; and its Gnostic theological concepts are also second century. The likelihood, he says, is that it probably dates to AD 140-180.

That would obviously be very late for a traditional gospel about the life of Jesus but, as with most of the Gnostic gospels, that is not its purpose. "On its own terms, the Gospel of Judas actually has very little to do with Jesus per se, and everything to do with the heavenly knowledge he reveals," Gathercole says.

There have been several books on the Gospel of Judas in the last two years. This one is particularly useful for having the full text, with a very detailed commentary, in its long central chapter.

To summarise the Gospel succinctly is difficult, because so much of the background of Gnostic beliefs and mythology would need to be explained.

Indeed, a considerable chunk of the Gospel is a monologue purportedly by Jesus relating a complex version of the Gnostic creation myth.

The Gospel is in part a polemic against what became the standard version of Christianity, attacking the ignorant and sinful disciples who are portrayed, says Gathercole, as a false foundation for the mainstream Church. Jesus condemns them as corrupt and false, saying "they have shamefully planted fruitless trees in my name".

The section probably of most interest and relevance to orthodox Christians is where Jesus, having criticised the other disciples, effectively tells Judas that betraying him is a good thing to do: "But you will be greater than them all. For you will sacrifice the man who carries me about." In other words Jesus's spirit will be released from its bodily imprisonment (a standard Gnostic idea) through Judas's actions.

If we can't learn anything new about the real Jesus, or even about Judas, from this gospel, what can we learn from it? That's where this book, subtitled Rewriting Early Christianity, becomes somewhat confusing.

Having established clearly that the Gospel of Judas helps demonstrate the widely differing varieties of Christianity that existed little more than a century after the death of Jesus, Gathercole suddenly reverses his stance, attacking two influential Early Church scholars, Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels, for saying much the same thing. Attacking each other is what scholars do, but Gathercole seems to be either misunderstanding, misinterpreting or perhaps even misrepresenting their views. He asks, for example, how Ehrman can say that the group that became orthodox Christianity "rewrote the history" while accepting that the canonical gospels are the earliest extant portraits of Jesus. But he ignores Ehrman's point, clearly expounded throughout his books, that the gospels show unmistakeable signs of later editing to bring them into line with what became Christian orthodoxy.

In his final chapter Gathercole, a lecturer in New Testament studies at the University of Cambridge, examines the Gnostic theology of the Gospel of Judas in the light of mainstream Christian theology, and finds the former seriously lacking: a loveless belief based on a loveless Jesus.

"It is abundantly clear that the work reflects the bitter struggle over the identity of Jesus in that period," he says. But he concludes that "it does not tell us anything that we did not already know" about that period - a dismissal strangely at odds with most other scholars in the field.

The Gospel of Judas
by Simon Gathercole, Oxford University Press £16.99