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Friday, April 07, 2006
Gospel of Judas
From the NY Times:
An early Christian manuscript, including the only known text of what is known as the Gospel of Judas, has surfaced after 1,700 years. The text gives new insights into the relationship of Jesus and the disciple who betrayed him, scholars reported today. In this version, Jesus asked Judas, as a close friend, to sell him out to the authorities, telling Judas he will "exceed" the other disciples by doing so.
I like this bit:
"The codex has been authenticated as a genuine work of ancient Christian apocryphal literature," Mr. Garcia said, citing extensive tests of radiocarbon dating, ink analysis and multispectral imaging and studies of the script and linguistic style.
There’s something Proustian in the idea that all apocrypha ages into genuineness. (All these old people looking so dignified.) Or possibly I’m very wrong about that. But the notion that nothing exceeds like excess is so Zizekian that, in the Event, I must implore Adam Kotsko to discuss this textual revelation. But it’s so Philip K Dick that we must allow non-Zizekians to have their fun as well. Excerpts here [pdf].
You’ve got to love the story for the names, which seem to me vaguely Pynchonesque:
It moldered in a safe-deposit box at a bank in Hicksville, N. Y., for 16 years before being bought in 2000 by a Zurich dealer, Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos. The manuscript was given the name Codex Tchacos.
But Nussberger-Tchacos actually sounds more Daniel Pinkwater. (Because Nussberger tchacos could be a Mexican-style snack food invented by an eccentric Jew.)
Comments
This may be authentic, but it seems like every couple of years there is a biblical artifact that surfaces which purports to shake up biblical scholarship and only later turns out to have been faked. (Remember the box that was supposed to have held the remains of Jesus’s brother?)
This just smells fishy. A litle too remarkable and the kind of thing “Da Vinci Code” enthusiasts like to latch on to. Of course, had I been around when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, I might have said the same thing then, as well.
Looking over it briefly, it strikes me as a fairly typical Gnostic text. I’m sure there is going to be a ton of conspiracy-theory stuff about how the church suppressed this poor document, how narrow-minded, they’re afraid of the truth, etc., but I would like to remind everyone briefly that Gnosticism is stupid. You can see that in this present text: all this nonsense of Adamas and the twelve rulers and on and on in moronic speculations. Labelling Gnosticism as a heresy was one of the best choices the Church ever made.
For those interested, you can find a few more translated bits here (scroll down about halfway).
I agree with Adam that the text looks like a typical Gnostic one. For the rest, with its haughty distinction between Gnostic writing and, say, the church-approved Book of Revelations, I’ll put it down to the usual inadvertant self-parody.
Also some interesting commentary here: it’s by a modern-day Gnostic, but he doesn’t claim that the “Gospel” dates from the first century, or is historically true. He agrees with Adam about the content, though not (of course) on its evaluation: “Speaking as a Gnostic, however, it’s almost a formulaic repetition of your general Sethian Gnostic text (Secret Book of John, etc.), with Judas’ role as the major twist.”
Apocalyptic is not the same as Gnosticism. Revelation isn’t my favorite book of the Bible by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ll still (haughtily) take it over the Gospel of Judas any day.
On another topic in this thread: I’m not sure of the motivation behind a forgery, aside from the sheer joy of pulling off a hoax. It doesn’t seem that there’s much to be gained by faking a third-century apocryphal gospel that is obviously Gnostic in character.
I didn’t say that apocalyptic is the same as Gnosticism—but if your criterion is the presence of “moronic speculations”, it fails. (By the way, you might want to read some of Berube’s thoughts about describing what you disagree with as moronic).
I wouldn’t be surprised if it were an actual third-century text; the Gnostics wrote a lot. I do think it will cause a greater stir than most such texts simply because it is focussed on Judas and on the approval of his betrayal. Since Christianity formally adopted the Greek ideas of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence, that has to have been something that a good number of worshipers have wondered about.
Insofar as apocalyptic literature is mainly about using coded language to refer to actual world-historical events, it’s not just moronic speculation. (I mean actual events that happened before the person was writing—for instance, the history of empires in the second half of the book of Daniel.) And the genuine speculations in Revelation do not strike me as being even nearly as moronic as this stuff of the multiple levels of gods in the pleroma.... But I’m not going to do apologetics. John asked me for a comment, I gave one. I have done my duty.
(If you could keep your advice about proper conversational etiquette to yourself from now on, that would be a lot better.)
Given the recent interest here in “the monolith”, I’m surprised that no one has commented on this bit:
“Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton who specializes in studies of the Gnostics, said in a statement, ‘These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion, and demonstrating how diverse — and fascinating — the early Christian movement really was.’”
The myth of a monolithic religion? I’d guess that even people who don’t know much about this part of history still know that there were heretics. It sounds like this use of “monolith” is about the same as most others.
Not that there are any grounds to think it is a fake—but if you tried to do a pastische of a Gnostic scripture, it seems like “The Gospel of Judas” is pretty much what you’d get.
I like the part where Jesus turns to Judas and goes, “Let’s talk about this later, after these bozos are off worshipping their demigod.”
I suppose you’re right about the text’s Gnosticism. I’m no expert on it, but when Jesus says something like
“The souls of every human generation will die. When these people, however, have completed the time of the kingdom and the spirit leaves them, their bodies will die but their bodies will die but their souls will be alive, and they will be taken up.”
that does sounds pretty Gnostic. I guess I just get uneasy when stuff like this pops up, because most people don’t understand how the modern Biblical canon came to be (i.e., it’s not a conspiracy to hide the children of Christ). I guess I’m actually mostly concerned about secularists who don’t understand this, because they seem to be the ones who would potentially misuse and misinterpret the existence of such a text.
A religious person could misuse, too, of course, but someone who believes in the Bible as a divine document would be more likely to simply dismiss the Gospel of Judas as heretical (which, technically, it is) and be done with it. Clearly, that’s not the best course of action for scholarship, but I think it’s ultimately less culturally damaging than an ignorant secularist using the Gospel of Judas to say something like “See, here’s more evidence of the Bible not being divine...Oh, and by the way, Christianity is stupid.” Of course, I doubt an ignorant secularist would do this in any systematic way, but it would reinforce old stereotypes that one holds.
None of this should discourage Biblical scholars from studying the Gospel, of course. I guess a best case scenario would be for scholars to use this discovery as a way of explaining to people a little bit about the history of Biblical documents, which would help both believers and secularists alike.
Or maybe I’m reading into this too much. But, with all of the media attention this is currrently getting, I just hope people will take the time to understand what the Gospel of Judas actually is and not just add it to (for believers) a list of things to ignore or (for secularists) a list of things that reinforce their hatred of Christianity (i.e., “The Da Vinci Code").
A disclaimer: By no means do all believers or all secularists fall into the above mentioned categories. Of course you knew that, but I don’t want angry e-mails from anyone.
It strikes me as equally outré, personally. I wish that had been better timed with my teaching of “Three Versions of Judas,” though.
Just a second! Rich’s non-sequitur led me astray: the fact that the church might have been wrong about including Revelation in the canon has no bearing on whether they were right to exclude Gnostic texts. Early catholicism didn’t have to be right about everything to be right about this particular thing! Brilliant. My argument stands.
Not that there are any grounds to think it is a fake—but if you tried to do a pastische of a Gnostic scripture, it seems like “The Gospel of Judas” is pretty much what you’d get.
I like the part where Jesus turns to Judas and goes, “Let’s talk about this later, after the fools are off worshipping the demigod.”
I was wondering if you’d pick that up. It’s certainly better than saying that Revelation is OK because it’s in part the use of coded language to refer to historical events, while the Gnostic texts don’t get that apology because implicitly they are not using coded language to refer to historical events.
I tend to think that Gnostic texts were rejected, it not merely for political reasons, because of ideas like “it’s best to free yourself from your physical body” or “God is within each of us”, not because of any early church aversion to mystical speculation. But you can choose to celebrate that it worked out that way for this case, of course.
Rich, This is the kind of thing that confirms your place on my list of arch-enemies.
Anyway, yes, the substantive content of Gnostic doctrines such as you were citing was a worse problem than the formal issues. But part of the apologetic technique was to simply state what the speculative doctrine was and say, “Man, isn’t this stupid?” We don’t appear to have many counter-apologetics where the Gnostics poked fun at Revelation (or the near contender for the canon, the Shepherd of Hermas), probably because they didn’t need to do apologetics. This New Age stuff seems to be pretty popular in every age.
You’re always coming up with an arch-something, Adam K. I guess that’s just how your mind works. I don’t consider you to be my enemy, btw.
Anyway, since the church wiped out the Gnostics, no, the Gnostics didn’t really get to develop an attack on those parts of standard doctrine that they would have considered to be moronic, nor did they need to develop apologetics along the lines of your “coded history” one for the parts of their mystical speculation that might have survived into their own canonical texts, had they ever gotten to choose a canon.
I was waiting for someone to bring in Borges (he wrote it better anyway).
Gnosticism, and particularly Marcionitism, were going concerns for much longer than is normally assumed. Had they seen any need to do apologetics, they had plenty of time to do so. In fact, all the heresies lasted far beyond the time when they were supposedly “defeated” by the forces of orthodoxy. I was saying that as the more self-assured group, they would not have felt the need for apologetics.
As for the “coded history” idea, that is not apologetics—it is an agreed-upon thing among scholars that apocalyptic literature often refers to contemporary events in coded language, before then moving on to talk about future events (which would then, of course, be speculation).
Couldn’t have been better timed with my reading Brelich’s The Work of Betrayal (as noted in my own elsewhere, last para current post). But as to the Relevationary aspect, there’s a certain eschatology implicit in:
Jesus answered and said, “You will become the thirteenth, and you will be cursed by the other generations—and you will come to rule over them. In the last days they will curse your ascent [47] to the holy [generation]."
Even the Vatican has advocates raising the devil about this ... I’d say it’s a sign.