DeConick writes:
My take away from the Gospel of Judas is that Christian Gnostics were a big part of the Christian movement and had developed sophisticated forms of Christianity that were at odds (even violently) with catholic or apostolic Christianity (precursor to Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy). The Gnostics who wrote the Gospel of Judas thought that the concept of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice to God for the atonement of sins was horrid. Absolutely and fundamentally wrong.
These Gnostics thought that sacrifice to gods of any kind was sacrifice to demons. So they were criticizing the catholics of their time for their central doctrine (atonement) and practice (eucharist or communion meal when Jesus’ body and blood were sacrificed on the church altar weekly and eaten). The demon Judas was responsible for this horrific act and the twelve disciples were responsible for teaching Christians to believe that this demonic act was really for the worship of God. The Gnostics thought the true God hated sacrifices.
The Mystery of the Betrayal between the New Testament and the Gospel of Judas”. Here is an excerpt from this article:
Unbounded by the New Testament authors’ portrayal of an evil Judas, being at a safe distance from the historical event, and also having a very different understanding of death in general – and the (apparent) death of Jesus in particular (cf. 56.19-20) – the author of the Gospel of Judas took a different route to try and explain Judas’ character and motives. This author reasoned that Judas could not be that bad as he contributed to salvation and he also opposed the proto-orthodox. While my enemy’s enemy is not always necessarily my friend, he may have some good points. Further, our author reasoned, in order to initiate salvation, Judas had to know something about the gnostic world (as opposed to the proto-orthodox), and this knowledge could have been provided by no one other than Jesus himself….The other disciples, cattle no less than the cattle they lead astray on the altar (39.25-8), were not even worthy of consideration and now ignorantly blame everything on Judas. The author of the gospel added a finishing touch changing Judas’ aftermath: since he was not evil, gruesome death did not seem apt. On the contrary, he could even be imagined as the first ‘internal’ martyr, as the first to feel the violence of the proto-orthodox church. Thus he did not burst open by falling in his own field as in Acts, much less did he hang himself as in Matthew, but was rather stoned by the other disciples (44.26–45.1), only to eventually become their ruler….The writer of this gospel tried to tackle a question that, as we have seen, very few other early Christians had dared to address directly. While Paul could only ascribe Jesus’ ‘handing over’ to Jesus himself (Gal 2.10) or to God (Rom 8.32), and Mark’s gospel still faintly stresses the ambiguity of Judas and his actions (Mark 14.21), later proto-orthodox Christian tradition almost unequivocally accentuated Judas’ iniquity and his dismal aftermath to preposterous dimensions, as though exaggeration or shouting the loudest might successfully banish any intimidating ambiguity. The author of the Gospel of Judas, on the other hand, apparently had the integrity to acknowledge directly that without Judas’ betrayal there would have been no salvation and to inquire how this was possible without recasting the Judas affair as ‘a divine trick at the unfortunate cost of a human individual’. The solution our author provided to this ‘mystery of the betrayal’ may be judged to be either a modest success or a glorious failure. But at least they tried.
Charles W. Hedrick writes in the Bible Review (“The 34 Gospels: Diversity and Division Among the Earliest Christians”):
In sum, in addition to the four canonical gospels, we have four complete noncanonicals, seven fragmentary, four known from quotations and two hypothetically recovered for a total of 21 gospels from the first two centuries, and we know that others existed in the early period. I am confident more of them will be found. For example, I have seen photos of several pages from a Coptic text entitled “The Gospel of Judas” that recently surfaced on the antiquities market.
Tixeront, tranlsated by Raemers, states (A Handbook of Patrology, p. 67): “Besides these Gospels, we know that there once existed a Gospel of Bartholomew, a Gospel of Thaddeus, mentioned in the decree of Pope Gelasius, and a Gospel of Judas Iscariot in use among the Cainites and spoken of by St. Irenaeus (i, 31, 1).”
Here is the Roberts-Donaldson translation of this section from Irenaeus:
Others again declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to themselves. On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator, yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.
H.-C. Puech and Beate Blatz write (New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1, p. 387):
Dating: the Gospel of Judas was of course composed before 180, the date at which it is mentioned for the first time by Irenaeus in adv. Haer. If it is in fact a Cainite work, and if this sect – assuming it was an independent gnostic group – was constituted in part, as has sometimes been asserted, in dependence on the doctrine of Marcion, the apocryphon can scarcely have been composed before the middle of the 2nd century. This would, however, be to build on weak arguments. At most we may be inclined to suspect a date between 130 and 170 or thereabouts.
It remains to be seen whether any manuscripts to be published might correspond to the Gospel of Judas mentioned by Irenaeus of Lyons.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-gospel-of-judas-says-about-the-betrayal-of-jesus
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