In the past few days there has been a great deal of interest in the Gospel of Judas ( see here or, here) which apparently was recently translated into English from the Coptic (ancient Egyptian from around the time of Christ and later). Several of you asked me about it. Here's the little bit that I know about it and some thoughts I've had about it.

Scholars have long known of a so-called Gospel of Judas. Irenaeus of Lyon, a leading Christian churchman of the second century CE, mentioned document around the year 180. He denounced it as heresy. Irenaeus was the leading Christian opponent of a variety of movements in the early church that we now lump together under the term Gnosticism. Much of what we know about the thinking of many Gnostics comes only from Irenaeus' denunciation of them because what became the dominant Christian church destroyed every copy of their writings that it could find. This was true of the Gospel of Judas until a document was discovered in the Egyptian desert in 1970 that apparently is a Coptic translation of the Greek original of the Gospel of Judas. It has now been translated into English and published by the National Geographic Society.

The Gospel of Judas gives a very different view of Judas than do the four canonical Gospels in the New Testament. One key verse reads: "You [Judas] will exceed all of them [the other Disciples, I suppose]. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me [Jesus]." The text also suggests that Jesus gave Judas secret learning or knowledge--in Greek, Gnosis. That's about as much as I can glean about the document from the sparse and superficial press reports available to me. My analysis is therefore limited because it is based on only very limited knowledge of this ancient text.

To understand the Gospel of Judas, we must first understand several things about Gospels generally. Scholars believe that there were at least two dozen Gospels by the second century CE. Only four made the cut into Christian scripture. What follows is true of both the New Testament Gospels and the ones that were left out. Gospel--in Greek euangelion--is an account of the "good news." A Gospel is therefore a particular type of literature. It is not history. It is not biography. It is proclamation, and every Gospel that we know about, including Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, proclaims its author's understanding of just what the Good News of Jesus Christ is. They are therefore theological documents, intended to present an interpretation of how Jesus is Good News more than to present an objective account of his life and sayings. To make the Gospels into history or biography is to read modern, rational concepts that didn't exist before the eighteenth century at the earliest back into a time when authors' purposes in writing were very different than they are today.

Keep in mind therefore that it is very difficult to learn history as we understand it, that is, history "as it actually was," to quote a great German philosopher of history, from Gospels, canonical or non-canonical. A Gospel may contain accurate historical facts, but it is often difficult or impossible to know what in a Gospel is historical and what is not. Contemporary scholars have worked for years to try to get at the history behind the Gospels of the New Testament, and there is much disagreement among them on that question. One general rule is that the older the Gospel, the closer in time to Jesus it is, the more likely it is to reflect historical fact. The oldest Gospel we have, I.e., Mark, is in fact probably the most historically accurate of the Gospels; but accurate is a relative term. Mark too is a theological tract more than a biography or an historical account in the modern sense. I haven't seen a dating of the Gospel of Judas, but because it is so Gnostic (more on that shortly) it seems to me that cannot be much earlier than some time in the second century CE. It is almost certainly later than John, the latest (and most Gnostic) of the canonical Gospels. For that reason alone, there is no reason to think that it is more historical than Mark of the other canonical Gospels. Indeed, it is very likely to be less historical.

Another important fact about Gospels: They are all attributed to Apostles or other important figures in the early church. Matthew and John were Apostles. Mark was supposedly a companion of Paul, as was Luke. Other Gospels that we know of were attributed to the Apostle Peter, the Apostle Thomas, and the Apostle Mary Magdalene--yes, technically she was an Apostle although she's never called one, but I won't go into that now. I use the word "attributed" advisedly. We do not know who actually wrote any of the Gospels. Scholars are certain that they were not written by the prominent figures to whom they are attributed. It was a common practice in the ancient world for authors to attribute their work to some prominent person to draw attention to the work and to give it authority. That sounds dishonest to us, but it wasn't considered dishonest in the ancient world. Thus, in the New Testament, not only were the Gospels not written by the persons to whom they are attributed, some of the letters attributed to Paul were almost certainly not written by him. Ephesians is a good example. Differences of theology and language between Ephesians and the authentic Pauline letters make it quite obvious that it written by someone else. Thus, the attribution of the Gospel of Judas to Judas in no way means that Judas wrote it. Indeed, if the accounts in the canonical Gospels of Judas' suicide are historically accurate, there is virtually no way Judas could have written the Gospel attributed to him. And actually, this document itself doesn't say Judas wrote it. Rather it claims only to be a "secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot." So please don't get the idea that we have a document here that Judas actually wrote.

All Gospels are theological tracts, so we must ask: What is the theology of the Gospel of Judas? I said above that this Gospel is "Gnostic." Gnosticism is a term we apply to a great variety of writings around the second century CE. At the risk of over-simplifying the subject, two characteristics of Gnostic writings are important here. First, Christian Gnosticism taught that Jesus had left a secret teaching with at least some of his Disciples. This secret teaching was supposedly the key to salvation, but it was available only to advanced initiates of a Gnostic group. The news reports about the Gospel of Judas say that it begins with the line I quoted above, namely, "The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot." It also has Jesus say to Judas: "Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. Look, you have been told everything." That indication that the Gospel imparts a secret knowledge tells us right up front that we are dealing with a Gnostic document.

Second, Gnosticism was heavily influenced by Platonic philosophy. That philosophy taught that true reality is spiritual not material. This thinking survives in our language when we call a relationship "Platonic," meaning that it isn't physical. Platonic philosophy considered spirit good and flesh evil. To that way of thinking, humans are spirits, sparks of the divine, trapped or even imprisoned in evil, physical flesh. There are strong hints of this kind of thinking even in the authentic letters of Paul, and it was very widely held in the first and second centuries CE. The early church condemned it as heresy, but echoes of it are found in much Christian thought down to our own day. For those who held this Platonic belief the goal of human life was to free the divine spirit within from the evil physical substance in which it is encased. When this Platonic view of spirit and matter is applied to Jesus it becomes impossible for Jesus actually to have been human. The evil flesh in which he appeared could not be any part of his true self, which, because he was God, had to be purely spiritual. The Gospel of Judas reflects this Gnostic, Platonic thinking as well. In it Jesus says that Judas will "sacrifice the man that clothes me." That can only mean Jesus' physical, fleshly body. That body is not who he is. He really is the divine spirit that is clothed with that body. Jesus' body was no more part of who he was than the shirt I'm wearing as I type this letter is part of who I am. Rather, Jesus' physical body was, to this way of thinking, something foreign and external to who he really was that covered him but was not truly him.

If you understand Jesus this way, it makes sense that he would want to get rid of his body so that his true, divine, spiritual self could be liberated, and he could become who he really was. In this understanding then, it makes perfect sense for Jesus to direct Judas to do what it took to get his body killed. For Gnosticism, this death is not an atonement for sin nor a demonstration of God's love for and solidarity with us but a necessary act for the liberation of the divinity within Jesus. Jesus' direction to Judas in the Gospel of Judas that he "sacrifice" Jesus' body, which everyone is taking to mean betray Jesus to the authorities, thus makes perfect theological sense within the Gnostic mindset. It says nothing, however, about the historical figure Judas Iscariot (if there even was such a person as an historical matter, which some scholars doubt). It says nothing about Jesus' relationship to such a person as an historical matter. It wasn't intended to. It was intended to make a theological point, a Gnostic theological point, and we will do well to remember that fact and not get sidetracked into the inevitable discussions of what this Gospel means for who Judas really was.

The Gospel of Judas is an important historical find, but it is important not for what it tells us about Judas or about Jesus. Rather, it is important for what it tells us about the varieties of Christianity that were current in the early years of the church. Scholars know a great deal most about the diversity of early Christian beliefs today than they did even a couple of decades ago. The translation of the Gospel of Judas can be an important addition to that body of knowledge. It is not an important addition to our historical knowledge of Jesus or of Judas.