Now getting publicity, known about for some time. A team has spent years restoring one of the earliest surviving Bible related texts including a copy of the Gospel of Judas. Judas tells his side - that Jesus asked him to betray Him to complete His Father's work and shed his earthly body. The National Geographic connection could make this a big Easter story.
At least one scholar said the new manuscript does not contain anything dramatic that would change or undermine traditional understanding of the Bible. James M. Robinson, a retired professor of Coptic studies at Claremont Graduate University, was the general editor of the English edition of the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of Gnostic documents discovered in Egypt in 1945.
"Correctly understood, there's nothing undermining about the Gospel of Judas," Mr. Robinson said in a telephone interview. He said that the New Testament gospels of John and Mark both contain passages that suggest that Jesus not only picked Judas to betray him, but actually encouraged Judas to hand him over to those he knew would crucify him.
Mr. Robinson's book, "The Secrets of Judas: The Story of the Misunderstood Disciple and his Lost Gospel" (Harper San Francisco, April 2006), predicts the contents of the Gospel of Judas based on his knowledge of Gnostic and Coptic texts, even though he was not part of the team of researchers working on the document.
Warning, the Claremont Graduate University is a hotbed of radical conservatism in politics. On the other hand, Robinson's work is attacked by status quo church conservatives. You might want to consider Dr. Robinson's remarks in that light although I am not that familiar with his work except his editing of the The Nag Hammadi Library in English.
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"Maybe if Judas can be 'rehabilitated,' then perhaps some of those old issues could be set aside," said Marvin Meyer, a bible scholar at Chapman University and an expert on the Judas gospel who will appear on tonight's National Geographic program.
"If you take away Judas as the bad guy, it is one step back from blaming all the Jews," Rabbi Schiffman said. "It could have led to less anti-Semitism." But, he emphasized, "it would not have eliminated anti-Semitism."
Anti-Semitism's Muse
Without Judas, History Might Have Hijacked Another Villain
By DAVID GIBSON
IN churches around the world today, Christians will hear the familiar story of Christ's Passion that begins Holy Week: the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the betrayal at the hands of Judas Iscariot, the death on the cross.
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Karen Bleier/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images
ENIGMATIC Jesus and Judas in a depiction from a National Geographic display.
In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal (April 7, 2006) But in the publication last week of what is described as an ancient text called the Gospel of Judas, Judas is portrayed not as the treacherous apostle but rather as a hero of the Easter story who helps fulfill salvation history by betraying his beloved Jesus at the messiah's own bidding.
A feast for theological debate, surely, but after centuries of Christian rancor and persecution directed at Jews, much of it magnified through the lens of a caricatured Judas, a question of history arises, too. Would the terrible legacy of anti-Semitism have been different had a text like the Gospel of Judas been in the Christian canon from the start? If, in effect, the "bad Judas" were not in the picture?
Jewish and Christian scholars agree that the dynamic of early Christianity — a Jewish sect that failed to win over its own people — almost guaranteed a divorce with all the bitterness of a family feud. At first, Jewish authorities had the upper hand. But very quickly, as the Romans waged war against the Jews and as Christianity drew huge numbers of converts from the Gentile world, the tables turned, and Christians became the dominant camp. Even as a powerful force, however, Christian believers often adopted the victim's posture and took every opportunity to batter the increasingly beleaguered Jews.
In this campaign, Judas Iscariot became the perfect foil.
"Every great hero story needs a great villain, and Judas serves that literary purpose," said the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author who was a theological adviser last year to the Off-Broadway play "The Last Days of Judas Iscariot."
It didn't take some Christian apologists long to discover that. In the second century, a bishop, Papias, was already relating a legend that Judas ended his days so bloated he could not see out of his swollen eyes and could not walk down a wide road. Papias wrote that Judas stank and urinated pus and worms, and was so immobile he was crushed by a chariot. By the Middle Ages, the ugly archetype of Judas as the personification of Judaism began to take hold: a hunched figure with a large nose and red hair who would do anything for money, including betray Christians. Dante cast Judas into the lowest ring of his "Inferno," and the Passion plays that became part of the Holy Week traditions often showed Judas being tormented in hell by demons. (The Roman Catholic Church never officially pronounced on the eternal fate of Judas.)
But scholars say it can be dangerous to overplay the role of Judas in the history of anti-Semitism because it might obscure the underlying causes of tensions between Christians and Jews. Even if Judas is erased from the Passion narratives, there are many more passages in the New Testament that foes of Judaism can seize on.
Erasing Judas "would change the iconography but it would not change the problem of anti-Judaism in a general sense," said Amy-Jill Levine, a professor of New Testament studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and an adviser to National Geographic for its television account of the research it sponsored on the Judas papyrus. "Even if you turn Judas into a hero he is still just one character," Ms. Levine said. "The Passion narratives are much more complex."
Ms. Levine and others say that gospel passages like the famous "blood cry" of Matthew 27:25 were initially far more responsible for Christian animus against Jews than was the figure of Judas.
Rabbi Lawrence Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and an expert on early Christianity, notes that in the canonical Gospel of John, Jesus urges Judas to carry out his betrayal without delay so that God's will might be done: "What you are going to do, do quickly." It is much the same message as that in the Judas gospel.
If the account in John had been dominant through Christian history, rather than the gospel accounts that condemn Judas, Rabbi Schiffman said, "then that would have led to interpretations in which one of the bigger Christian symbols of anti-Semitism would have been removed."
Still, scholars also suspect that if Judas as the great traitor hadn't existed, Christians would probably have invented someone like him to legitimate the messy process of their religious separation from Judaism. The likeliest candidate for an alternative Jewish bad guy, they say, would be Caiaphas, the high priest who handed Jesus over to Pontius Pilate and the Romans. "You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish," Caiaphas says in John.
In the end, whoever wound up shouldering the role of the Passion's villain, experts say that it would have had little effect on the course of history between these sibling religions. But those same experts also believe that the current debates provoked by the Judas gospel, while not undoing a painful history, could help Christian-Jewish relations now and in the future.
"Maybe if Judas can be 'rehabilitated,' then perhaps some of those old issues could be set aside," said Marvin Meyer, a bible scholar at Chapman University and an expert on the Judas gospel who will appear on tonight's National Geographic program.
"If you take away Judas as the bad guy, it is one step back from blaming all the Jews," Rabbi Schiffman said. "It could have led to less anti-Semitism." But, he emphasized, "it would not have eliminated anti-Semitism."
David Gibson writes frequently about religion. His latest book, on Pope Benedict XVI, will be published in the fall.
Like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi discoveries, this latest 'gospel' increases the amount of new scriptural material only available in modern times, making the traditional concept of 'canonical scriptures' untenable and any claims of understanding founded upon them both incomplete and always questionable.
What might 'Christianity' look like if all these resources were available from the beginning? Check this link: www.energon.uklinux.net
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