Judas and Jesus - BFF?

I just finished reading a translation of the Gospel of Judas and the accompanying commentaries and articles by Meyer, Ehrman and others (Washington: National Georaphic, 2006). The Gospel of Judas appears within a 66 page long book called the Codex Tchacos. In the last several years, The Codex was brought to the attention of scholars after being acquired by the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in 2000.

Reading the second or third century writings, often labeled “Gnostic” by scholars, such as the Nag Hammadi writings discovered in the 1940s, can be very bewildering. This document claims to be Jesus’ own secret discussion (a dialogue gospel) with a disciple, and the content of Jesus’ teaching is very philosophically dualistic and quite different than what is encountered in the gospels of the New Testament.

In comparison to some of the other “Gnostic” writings such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Codex Tchacos is “run of the mill” in many respects. The dualism of the Gospel of Judas, in which there is a bad material realm and a perfect spiritual realm with sparks of the perfect realm trapped in inferior human bodies, is characteristic of most of the Nag Hammadi writings. Likewise common in these Christian intellectual circles is the notion that the God who sent the Christ to bring knowledge of these circumstances is not the same god (or angel) that created the material realm (our visible world). Many of Jesus’ teachings to Judas in this book reflect this worldview that was common to at least a minority of early Christian intellectuals in the second and third centuries.

Even with some familiarity with other Gnostic writings, there is something very odd about this writing. We have many examples of “Gnostic” authors presenting the secret teachings of Jesus in the form of a dialogue between the Christ and one of the disciples, with different authors choosing different apostles as their subject. Still what is absolutely astounding, in some ways, is the choice of Judas Iscariot as the favorite of Jesus! There seems to be no precedent for choosing Judas Iscariot, who “betrayed” Jesus, as the favorite disciple who received the secret revelation of the Savior.

In fact, this gospel presents Jesus as commending Judas for an action that was usually interpreted by other Christian authors as out-right betrayal (even though it could also be seen as “within God’s plan” that it took place in the view of many early Christians — Jesus death was necessary, in other words). The passage in question, which needs some training in gnosticism to interpret, goes as follows:

“Judas said to Jesus, ‘Look, what will those who have been baptized in your name do?’ Jesus said, ‘Truly I say [to you], this baptism [. . . ] my name [– about nine lines missing –] to me. Truly [I] say to you, Judas, [those who] offer sacrifices to Saklas [. . .] God [– three lines missing –] everything that is evil. But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me’” (trans by Kasser, Meyer and Wurst, pp.42-43).

It doesn’t help that large portions of this section are missing, but what is clear is that Jesus speaks positively of Judas’ future act of betraying Jesus, of “sacrific[ing] the man that clothes [Jesus]”. How sacrificing Jesus human body (”the man”) through betrayal can be a positive thing is only understandable once one realizes that this author’s worldview is the thoroughly dualistic one of spirit vs. matter mentioned above, in which the material realm, especially our bodies, are a prison from which one wants to escape. In fact, the material world around us is created by an inferior being or angel or demiurge, here called “Saklas”, not by the God who sent the Christ, in the view of this and other “Gnostic” authors. (In some “Gnostic” writings, this creator god plays a role similar to the role that the rebel angel Satan plays in the worldview of other early Christians). In other words, Judas helps Jesus by assisting in the elimination of this material body or prison and, therefore, the spirit’s return to the perfect spiritual realm of the God who sent Christ. This act of returning to one’s proper place as part of the perfect spiritual realm is, in itself, the salvation that Jesus achieves and that other spiritual sparks trapped within human bodies, other perfect Adams, will likewise achieve by receiving the secret “knowledge” (gnosis, hence gnosticism) that Jesus brings concerning the nature of reality in the view of this particular author.

Some of the Gnostic Gospels can be interesting reads, although it doesn’t take long to realize why they were never included in the canon. The Gospel of Judas seems to be one of the weakest in the whole lot.