The New York Review of Books

Of the many works promising new insight into Christian origins, much was made two years ago of the Gospel of Judas, an early Christian text highlighting the figure of Judas, the betrayer of Jesus. The National Geographic Society’s publication of the gospel—the first since it was discovered in Egypt in the 1970s—received thoughtful reviews in this and other literary journals,¹ and stimulated further discussion.² Two works devoted to it have appeared in the last year. Elaine Pagels, of Princeton, and Karen King, of Harvard, both serious contributors to the study of ancient Christianity, combine forces in their new book, aimed at a popular audience. Bart Ehrman, a prolific writer who has done much to popularize scholarship on the history of the early Church, and who also had a hand in the original publication, has written another accessible book.

The Gospel of Judas is part of the body of Christian literature from the second and third centuries that reflects the intense debate among followers of Jesus. Christians argued over what they should think about themselves, the God whom they worshiped, the fate that lay in store for them, the significance of Christ, and the means by which they were to reach their heavenly goal. The faction that won these debates promoted its own version of the history of the times and suppressed dissenting voices. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, who lived in the second century, was one leader who vociferously favored centralizing the Church hierarchy and banning unacceptable texts. “Irenaeus and his fellow bishops,” write Pagels and King,

…decided that the marks of the “true Church” were to be creed, clergy, and canon. Irenaeus was among the first to insist that all true Christians must confess the same things, joining together to say a common creed that states what all believe. He also divided the churches between bishops and priests, and “the laity”…arguing that the latter must “obey the priests that are in the church,” and receive baptism and eucharist only at the hands of bishops and priests he called “orthodox.”

Pagels and King explain that the texts approved of by Irenaeus and other Church leaders tended to be

those that helped him and other bishops consolidate scattered groups of Jesus’s followers into what he and certain other bishops envisioned as a single, united organization…. The diverse range of Christian teachings that they denounced as “heresy” could be antithetical to the consolidation of the church under the bishops’ authority.³

The victors in the debates over the canon continued to mention their former opponents, but only as marginalized heretics whose story could be appended to the narrative of Christianity’s triumphal march. The official account of the Church’s development viewed alternative voices as expressing the views of a misguided minority, craven followers of contemporary culture, profligate sinners, or worse.

Although the suppressed voices have long aroused fascination, interest in them grew in the last century when a number of manuscripts written by the losers in the ancient ecclesial battles was discovered. Among them were the early scriptures of the Mandeans, a sect that venerated John the Baptist rather than Jesus, practiced baptismal rituals, and elaborated a complex theology of salvation. (Its members survived until recently in the marshes of southern Iraq.) The find stimulated scholars to speculate about the antiquity of the sect and its possible influence on early Christianity. Just after World War II, new manuscript discoveries further enriched the discussion. The most important was a cache of codices (books as opposed to scrolls) uncovered in 1945 near the village of Nag Hammadi, in Egypt. The thirteen ancient tomes found there contained some fifty-two tractates, a few previously known, and many unknown. Most of them gave voice to the losing sides in those early Christian debates. The entire discovery was soon labeled “Gnostic,” echoing a term of opprobrium used by ancient polemicists against their ecclesial adversaries.

Although at least one sect may have styled itself “the Gnostics” (“the Knowers”), referring to a secret knowledge, the notion that this broad label accurately applies to all the marginalized early Christian sects has been heavily criticized among contemporary scholars. Early Christians whose perspectives fell from favor represented a wide spectrum of views and social groups. Karen King is a leading critic of an imprecise use of the label “gnostic.” The much more pragmatic Ehrman continues to argue that it is useful, on grounds that esoteric knowledge was indeed important to the religious thinking revealed in the texts.

Since their initial publication, the Nag Hammadi texts have continued to attract scholarly and popular attention, teaching us much about second- and third-century Christian circles, Gnostic and otherwise; the Gospel of Judas is an illuminating addition to them. It is part of the fourth-century codex called Tchacos (named after the Swiss dealer who bought it in 2000), which contains three other marginalized Christian texts. It is written on papyrus leaves, in Coptic (also the language of the Nag Hammadi texts). The late form of the Egyptian language written in a script inspired by Greek, Coptic was used from late antiquity through the Islamic period and is the basis for the liturgical language of today’s Egyptian Church. Similar in appearance to the Nag Hammadi texts, the codex consists largely of a translation of works written originally in Greek during the second and third centuries CE.

The Gospel of Judas can be dated even more narrowly, since a version of it figures in the writing of Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, who composed the first major surviving “heresiology,” or account of heretical theologies and groups, around 180 CE. This five-volume work concentrated on the “Gnostics” active in ancient Gaul, catalogued their beliefs, and criticized their theology and practice. Since it was known to Irenaeus, the Gospel of Judas must have been written earlier, perhaps in the second quarter of the second century.

Scholars became aware of the codex containing the Gospel of Judas some two decades ago.⁴ After much intrigue and many misadventures, well documented by Herbert Krosney and again in detail by Ehrman, the text finally came to light in 2006 and was made available in the preliminary edition noted above. The text is now available to all scholars in the form of high-resolution facsimiles on the National Geographic Society Web site.⁵

Pagels and King, on the one hand, and Ehrman on the other take different approaches. Pagels and King have written a reflection on the Gospel of Judas with a carefully proposed thesis about the major direction of the text, a new translation (by King), and notes illuminating the more obscure passages. Ehrman has made a broader study, with more detailed exploration of background issues, such as the differing portraits of Jesus and Judas in canonical and noncanonical Christian literature, and extended reflections on the relationship of the Gospel of Judas to various works of Christian and Jewish literature. Pagels and King concentrate on what they take to be the text’s most distinctive claims; Ehrman offers a much broader but very informative account.

Pagels and King have both made significant scholarly and popular contributions to the study of early Christian dissidents, Pagels writing on the Gnostic Gospels in general and the Gospel of Thomas in particular,⁶ and King exploring the Gospel of Mary and the Apocryphon of John,⁷ both finding serious voices articulating visions of Christian truth alternative to what became orthodoxy. Like their earlier efforts, the current analysis offers genuine insights, from the point of view of the defeated factions, into the struggles of the early Church.

King and Pagels quickly dismiss any hopes that the Gospel of Judas might offer information about the historical Judas. A central theme of the Gospel of Judas is that Jesus knew what Judas intended and encouraged him to go ahead; and, like Ehrman, Pagels and King point out that Judas’ intention and Jesus’ encouragement of him had already been suggested in the Gospel of John. Both John and the Gospel of Judas accept a picture of Jesus as someone with preternatural or supernatural powers of insight. John’s Jesus goes to his destiny, to do the mysterious will of the Father, in full knowledge of what awaits him. But for John, Judas is seen as possessed by Satan, and as doing his bidding, not as performing a good deed.

The Gospel of Judas offers what initially appears to be a more positive view of Judas’ action. By handing over the body of Jesus to the high priests, Judas enabled the heavenly, spiritual Christ to return to the transcendent realm whence he came. Nonetheless, there remain ambiguities in the portrait of the apostle.⁸ For Pagels and King, the Gospel of Judas shows little interest in the actual historical events surrounding Jesus’ death that so intrigue some modern writers. Instead, it focuses on the meaning of the death of Jesus and the institutional ways in which it is commemorated.

Within the brief story that describes Judas handing over Jesus, the Gospel of Judas offers a series of quite disparate episodes. In the most dramatic of these, the twelve apostles recount to Jesus a dream in which they observe priests, in what seems to be the Temple of Jerusalem, performing sacrifices while engaging in criminal acts, including the sacrifice of their own wives and children and having homosexual sex. Jesus identifies those priests with the apostles themselves. The interpreted dream is a rather transparent allegory criticizing the Church hierarchy and subtly deriding the comparisons some bishops and presbyters made between themselves and the priests in the Jerusalem Temple in order to vindicate their own positions of authority.

An early example of such a comparison is in the First Epistle of Clement, a tract attributed to a first-century leader of the Christian community in Rome. In this letter, in which the senior members of the Roman Church intervene in a dispute in the Church at Corinth, the writer, who favors the established hierarchy, argues for proper order in worship: “We should do everything the Master has commanded us to perform in an orderly way and at appointed times.” To support his point, the writer refers to the hierarchy prevailing in the Temple: “For special liturgical rites have been assigned to the high priest, and a special place has been designated for the regular priests, and special ministries are established for the Levites. The lay person is assigned to matters enjoined on the laity.”⁹ The argument implicitly connects the bishops and elders of the Church to the priests and Levites of the Jerusalem Temple (notwithstanding the Church’s repudiation of the Jewish practice of sacrifice). The connection was destined for a long life in Catholic Christianity, but many in the early Church, including the author of the Gospel of Judas, objected to it.

The development of a Christian “priesthood” and “high priesthood” accompanied the elaboration of a formal liturgy, and it may be no accident that the earliest evidence of the use of priestly imagery to describe Christian leaders occurs in Rome. The use of liturgy and the definition, by Irenaeus and others, of those who performed it as priests have no precedents in the texts of the New Testament, but marked a development of the Church in its second and third generations. The account of the apostles’ dream in the Gospel of Judas mocks these new developments, criticizing Church leaders who interpreted the Eucharistic ritual as a sacrifice to be administered by a priestly class. In another pointed episode in the Gospel of Judas, Jesus comes upon his disciples while they are “offering…thanks” and breaking bread, i.e., performing a Eucharistic liturgy. He laughs at them, as he does at other instances of the disciples’ foolishness, telling them that what they were doing served an inferior deity, “their ‘God.’”