Judas Iscariot’s Gospel
I watched this morning the National Geographic’s new documentary, The Gospel of Judas. It’s a fascinating subject, to say the least, and the discovery of the artifact will surely raise a lively debate among many Christian communities. But most importantly, it will dramatically affect Christianity’s view of Judas, who is one of the most reviled characters in history. The New York Times has an excerpt of The Gospel of Judas.
The 1700-year-old gospel written in papyrus portrays Judas not as a betrayer but as a willing collaborator and Jesus’s closest ally. The gospel claims that it was Judas who understood best among the twelve apostles the nature of Christ’s mission and his need to be freed from his human body in order to fulfill the prophecy. On the night of the Last Supper, Judas received instructions from his Rabbi to hand him to the Roman authorities; doing so would place the beleaguered apostle above his peers in the eyes of his Lord. However, human history has a different valuation for Iscariot’s actions which reverberated throughout the ages.
The NGS documentary follows the trail of the gospel’s discovery at a burial cave in Egypt in 1978 by a farmer. The document reached the hands of an Egyptian antiquities dealer who lost it to thieves but eventually recovered it a few years later. In 1982, not knowing the religious significance of the codex, he tried to sell it to a team of experts in Coptic language who didn’t agree to pay for his asking price of $3 million. Failing to sell the codex, the trader stored the document inside a a bank vault in New York where it languished for 16 years and slowly degenerated into dust. In 2002, another collector bought the codex for the same price that the 1982 experts were only willing to offer– $300 thousand. After years of arduously putting together the tiny pieces of the document, 15% of which had already crumbled into dust, another team composed of scholars in the fields of Coptic, Gnostic and Physics traced the authenticity of the document through radiocarbon dating and deciphered the writings.
The documentary feature tries to explain why Judas became the embodiment of things that the Western world viewed as negative among Jews and asserts the reasons why there are only four gospels in the New Testament when in fact as many as thirty gospels exist.
The feature is fascinating, if nothing else, and makes for an interesting topic of conversation among Christians. Unless, of course, one is debating with a hard-headed believer whose knowledge is one that is firmly confined to the teachings of whatever sect or group he belongs to.
Related links:
Gospel of Judas (Wikipedia)
Gospel of Judas inspires awe, wrath
