Bart Ehrman, the Gospel of Judas, and the Revolution That Was Not, or Why the Headlines of Last Spring Have All Faded Away

By John D. Lierman, University of Sioux Falls

Last April, a new Gospel made headlines in hundreds of newspapers worldwide.[1]  Media excitement over the Gospel of Judas was predictable.  Not only did it sport connections with Jesus’ most notorious disciple, it was published by the widely respected National Geographic Society.  Subsequently, Professor Bart D. Ehrman published The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed.  Ehrman had been brought in as a consultant by the National Geographic Society to authenticate the new Gospel and determine its likely importance.  He claims the Gospel of Judas means nothing less than a revolution in our understanding of early Christianity.

In our canonical Gospels, Judas appears a great fool and traitor, a man Jesus welcomed as one of his closest companions, but who rewarded that trust by handing Jesus over to his enemies, bringing about his death.  By contrast, in the new Gospel, Judas is neither a fool nor a traitor.  At any rate, that is what Ehrman would have us believe.  In Ehrman’s words, “In the Gospel of Judas, he is the closest disciple to Christ, the only one who understands his teachings, and the one who does his will. ... The discovery of this Gospel marks a turning point in the history of the Christian understanding of Judas.”[2]  In this paper we will examine the merits of this claim.

Before we do that, we should clear up some possible misunderstandings about the Gospel of Judas.  First, no one thinks the author of the new Gospel had access to inside information about Judas Iscariot.  This includes Ehrman, who prizes the Gospel of Judas for other reasons.  The Gospel of Judas does not claim to be written by Judas nor even by anyone who knew Judas, and no one thinks it was.  In fact, the Gospel of Judas was probably written after A.D. 150, more than one hundred years after Judas’s death.  All scholars acknowledge the Gospel of Judas to be completely worthless as a source of historical insight on the lives of Judas and Jesus.

If nobody thinks the Gospel of Judas sheds any light whatsoever on Judas and Jesus, why did its publication attract so much interest? As the above quote makes clear, Ehrman does not claim that the Gospel of Judas changes the Christian understanding of Judas.  Instead, he claims it changes the history of the Christian understanding of Judas.  But Judas is only interesting because of his relationship to Jesus.  If we have misread what second-century Christians thought about Judas, then we have also misunderstood what they thought of Jesus.  And if we have misunderstood what the earliest Christians thought of Jesus, it calls into question what Christians think about Jesus now.  That is what Ehrman finds so exciting about the Gospel of Judas.

In this review, I will not do most of the things book reviewers do, like outline the contents of Ehrman’s book or select a few minor points with which to quibble.  I will not discuss who should or should not buy the book.  I will, however, orient non-expert readers to the intellectual landscape in which Ehrman’s claim about “turning points” makes sense.  I will explain how a solitary fourth-century copy of a mid-second century text can be reckoned of equal importance with mid- and late-first century texts (the canonical Gospels) attested in hundreds of early copies and thousands of later New Testament manuscripts.  I will also say a little about why the Gospel of Judas does not mark much of a turning point in our understanding of anything and why it certainly does not rewrite the history of Christianity.  I believe that Ehrman has reasons of his own for lunging at the idea that the Gospel of Judas radically alters our understanding of early Christianity, which have colored his judgment and led him astray.  In fact, the Gospel of Judas does not do anything of the kind, and major scholars are now coming forward to say so.

Ehrman is such a lucid writer that any reader could easily understand and appreciate his work.  Despite my disagreement with his larger thesis, I must admit that Ehrman explains well what the Bible says about Judas, as well as what the biblical writers think about Jesus.  His discussion of Gnosticism is clear and accessible to non-experts.  But his reading of the Gospel of Judas has been unduly influenced by the agenda of his life’s work, an agenda visible in nearly every scrap of his published writing, which is to debunk the Christianity in which he no longer believes.

Judas Meets the Press  

Media coverage of the Gospel of Judas certainly gave the impression its revelations were explosive.  News was formally released in an April 2006 National Geographic television special and subsequent media coverage was intense—for an obscure Gnostic Gospel.  But the publication had been timed for maximum impact at Easter, which helped garner coverage in the mainstream press.  The subject matter helped, too.  For anyone with personal or professional interest in the Bible, a new Gospel that differs significantly from the received tradition about Jesus and his followers is bigger than Brangelina’s baby.  Most enticing of all is the idea of stumbling onto something that proves Christianity wrong.

Popular interest in the Gospel of Judas was mostly just another instance of the publicity that erupts around any supposed debunking of Christianity.  Several prominent debunking efforts have appeared during the past decade or two.  The common theme running through most of them is the idea that much of what we think of as Christianity, including the instruction of the apostle Paul and the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the canonical Gospels, stems not from Jesus, but rather from church leaders anxious to validate their own teachings or, more cynically, merely to preserve their influential positions in the Christian movement.  Sensationalist authors bank on ideas like these.  For example, Dan Brown, author of the preposterous Da Vinci Code, owes both fame and fortune to popular fascination with the notion that the entire Christian faith is an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the Roman Catholic Church to prop up Vatican power.

Popular suspicion of orthodox deception is stoaked not only by sensationalist media coverage of hoax theories, but also by academic pursuit of the same general thesis.  Many academics maintain that the apostles and other church leaders were either confidence men who duped their followers into believing distortions and lies about Jesus or ruthless operators with no greater ambition than extending their personal power.  These church leaders include the writers of the Gospels.  Over the last one hundred years, research on the historical Jesus has been dominated by an agenda which assumes the canonical evangelists, occasionally excepting Mark, wrote as much to conceal and distort the truth about Jesus as to reveal and transmit it.  For example, Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar regarded all sayings of Jesus recorded in the New Testament as “guilty until proven innocent,”[3] that is, as pious fabrications attributed to Jesus by people who should have known better—and probably did.  Few were surprised when the Jesus Seminar declared the biblical Gospels almost entirely fictional.  Their conclusions were written into their opening premises.

In many academic circles, therefore, it would be inaccurate to say that scholars of the historical Jesus—scholars who try to determine what we can say about Jesus as a historical figure—aim merely to be fair and balanced when considering the canonical Gospels alongside other ancient documents about what Jesus said and did.  Frequently, it would be more accurate to assume nearly the opposite.  Academic study of the historical Jesus often tends to disregard the canonical sources and prioritize other, more obscure writings.  Some scholars seem to feel a need to overcome centuries of preferential treatment accorded to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul by adopting a kind of affirmative action program in favor of non-canonical sources.  Sources for the study of Jesus promoting an orthodox Christian appraisal of him are handicapped from the start.

Lest this sound like so much special pleading by someone with a conservative axe to grind, recall that nearly everyone, including nearly all skeptics, agrees that the New Testament gives us our earliest sources on Jesus.  An early date does not automatically make historical sources accurate, but it means that they stand closer to the events they narrate, and that usually implies greater accuracy.  For example, someone who records his experiences during the Iraq War five years after returning home will probably pen clearer, more accurate recollections than a comrade writing a memoir fifty years later.  Similarly, earlier sources on the life of Jesus should ordinarily be more reliable than much later sources, which should incline us to give more weight to the New Testament Gospels than to texts composed in the second century.

Recall also that one of the main objections offered against taking the canonical writers seriously is that when biblical authors write about Jesus they are not dispassionately neutral and non-committal, but are instead testifying about what they actually believe.  So Ehrman insists, “When early Christians told stories about the followers of Jesus, even his betrayer, they did so in light of their own views, perspectives, and theological investments.”[4]  If all he meant were what his bare words express, it would hardly be controversial.  I regularly remind my students that the Gospels are not so much history as testimony.  The Gospel writers want to persuade their readers of something.  They want them to believe in Jesus as they do (John 20:31), or be more confident of what they have been taught about Jesus (Luke 1:4), or simply repent and believe the good news (Mark 1:15).  But such aims and such confidence do not make them untrustworthy.  If someone testifies about something, their believing their own testimony does not make it false.  Ehrman’s statement is troubling because he means “early Christians told stories ... in light of their own views, perspectives, and theological investments,”—and therefore they cannot be trusted.

Two possible outlooks result from this sort of skepticism.  The first is an agnosticism of despair, in which scholars, recognizing that the canonical Gospels were written by Christians (or sometimes just the wrong sort of Christians) instead of neutral reporters—and therefore cannot be trusted—give up on ever knowing anything about Jesus.  In extreme cases, scholars give up believing Jesus even existed, simply because the people who wrote about Jesus were already Christians when they wrote.

The second possible outlook can be summarized as “anything but the Bible.”  This outlook dismisses the biblical materials as orthodox propaganda and replaces them with a hodgepodge of extrabiblical writings on Jesus.  Such writings abound since, within a few decades of the first Easter, Jesus was already a figure renowned around the Mediterranean world.  By the mid-second century, at the time the Gospel of Judas was probably written, Jesus was famous.

In this period all sorts of writings about him emerged, some clearly Christian and others with less obvious pedigrees.  Just because Jesus was famous does not mean he was well understood, and many of these writings evince a great deal of creativity.  Writers speculatively filled in gaps in Jesus’ life, especially his childhood and the “dark” years before he emerged into the public eye, with entertaining tales like the one about the boy Jesus turning his playmates into birds (and back again), and the one about the cross of Jesus talking and walking around after the crucifixion.  Distrust of the sincerity or reliability of New Testament sources leads scholars to place the canonical Gospels on the same footing as second-century apocryphal Gospels featuring playful stories like these.  At times, one suspects an ulterior motive in these scholars, perhaps a simple desire to make the canonical Gospels “silly by association” with the patently fanciful legends that arose years later.

This predilection for prioritizing non-biblical accounts about Jesus goes quite a long way toward explaining the reception accorded the Gospel of Judas.  It is, of course, difficult to conceive of any climate of inquiry that would not be fascinated by newly published texts that shed light on ancient Christianity.  But triumphal predictions among supposedly sober-minded scholars that—at long last—the pins would be kicked out from underneath the Christian edifice, and gleeful chops-licking in anticipation of the great crash of Christianity’s fall say a great deal about why people are so interested in the Gospel of Judas.  We are dealing with more than historical interest.  In his reflection on the Gospel of Judas, N. T. Wright muses of what so many today passionately want to believe, “and, it seems, passionately want to disbelieve.”[5]  Such passion explains why a text like the Gospel of Judas is not merely interesting but exciting.  It seems that some scholars are excited by “reasons to disbelieve.”

Though I criticize the suspicious intellectual climate in which much historical Jesus research is done, I do not mean to give the impression that people resist what the Bible claims about Jesus only out of unreasonable obstinacy, perversity, or even the inspiration of demons.  Too many Christians have taken that easy path, responding to critics of the faith with smugness and self-satisfaction, without seriously considering the objections critics raise.  Much of what the Bible tells us about Jesus is hard to believe.  Even those who accept what the Bible says recognize enormous holes in the Bible’s account of the life of Jesus.  The four evangelists seem to have been interested mainly in the last week of Jesus’ life, and the reports even of that week are sketchy at best.  Moreover, many who seriously study the biblical accounts of Jesus soon find the four Gospels are not always easily reconciled.  I have no space here to wade into discussion of specific puzzles, but for many, including me, it is troubling to be puzzled by the Bible.  As a perplexed friend of mine once said, the problem is not that we cannot harmonize the accounts of Jesus in the four Gospels; the problem is that we have to.

From Faith to Doubt, and Then Back to Faith  

This seems to be precisely what turned Bart Ehrman from an evangelical to an opponent of orthodoxy.  Ehrman became a Christian as a teenager and was nurtured in a very conservative version of Christian belief.  He appears to have been a fundamentalist.  He began his undergraduate work at Moody Bible Institute before moving on to Wheaton College, both bastions of conservative Christianity.  He eventually finished up with a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary where, among other things, he studied textual criticism.

Textual criticism is not “criticism” in the everyday sense.  It is the study of how hundreds of ancient manuscripts of the Bible witness to the text used in modern Bible translations.  On the whole, I find textual criticism thrilling, because I am able to see for myself how, before the age of the printing press, Christians preserved the scriptures from generation to generation in laboriously prepared handwritten copies.  Yet textual criticism also alerts me to the hazards intrinsic to the copying process, which inevitably yield occasional mistakes.  Textual critics call these mistakes “variants,” and in the extant manuscripts of the New Testament, there are probably thousands of variants.

That sounds serious until one remembers that we possess hundreds of New Testament manuscripts and that the variants arising from the copying process are sprinkled almost randomly throughout them.  The sheer number of available manuscripts and the fact that variants are distributed so haphazardly through them are what enable textual critics to solve the variant problem.  We could illustrate the solution to the variant problem by using the example of a modern church of one hundred people.  Being a tech-savvy church, each member relies on an e-Bible on a personal computer.  But PCs are susceptible to viruses, and one day a virus strikes, inserting random alterations—variants—in the Bibles.  Once the virus is eliminated, how will the church weed out all these variants and get back to the original biblical text?  With no difficulty.  They will all boot up their e-Bibles, and wherever one has a variant reading, the agreement of the other ninety-nine will point the way to the correct reading.  Sometimes one will have variant A, another will have variant B, and a third will have variant C.  But the other ninety-seven will agree, pointing to the true reading.  In this way, the church will ferret out thousands of variant readings that have crept into their Bibles and restore the original text.

That is very much how textual criticism works.  Variants are usually quite small.  The vast majority, on the order of eighty or ninety percent, involve just a letter or one syllable of a word and can be cleared up easily.[6]  The actual procedure is naturally a great deal more complicated than my example, and any real textual critics who read this will cringe.  For example, textual critics never settle for simple “majority rules.”  Older manuscripts, because they are closer to the originals, have more “votes” than later ones.  Higher quality manuscripts are weighted more heavily than ones that look amateurish or sloppy.  But the sheer number of New Testament manuscripts makes the whole process work almost as smoothly as my illustration.  Variants rarely cluster into one verse in such quantity that the original reading comes into serious question.  But textual critics have developed procedures for analyzing thorny problems, and doubt persists about the original reading of the text in very few places in the New Testament.

Bart Ehrman, however, found textual criticism corrosive to faith.  Recalling his undergraduate days he writes, “Those of us at Moody believed that the Bible was absolutely inerrant in its very words.”[7]  Then last spring he recalled the moment of crisis: “I thought God had inspired the words inerrantly.  But when I examined the historical texts, I realized the words had not been preserved inerrantly, and it would have been no greater miracle to preserve them than to inspire them in the first place.”[8]  Ehrman’s theology could not accommodate the findings of textual criticism.  Specifically, having begun by viewing the Bible as inerrantly inspired, he could not cope with finding it had then been errantly transmitted.  The awakening to the historical reality of errant transmission has troubled many Christians, but in Ehrman’s case, it triggered a cascade reaction that resulted in the failure of his faith.

The problem is most acute if one conceives of the Bible as not just God’s word, but God’s words.  In another place Ehrman puts it like this:

For me, though, this was a compelling problem.  It was the words of scripture themselves that God had inspired.  Surely we have to know what those words were if we want to know how he had communicated to us, since the very words were his words, and having some other words (those inadvertently or intentionally created by scribes) didn’t help us much if we want to know His words.[9]

The logic is cruel and relentless, and the conclusion ineluctable.  Once the first domino goes, the last will eventually fall.  Whenever faith stands on nothing more than certainty that the Bible in the believer’s hands contains “the very words” of God, it is vulnerable to whatever threatens that certainty.

Young Ehrman had cherished the Bible in his hands as a magical book, supernaturally perfect in every way, preternaturally preserved through the ages.  If he was like many more conservative Christians, he probably ascribed such perfection to his English translation, not the Greek and Hebrew original, without ever realizing how odd that is.  He probably made silly mistakes while copying out Bible verses to tape beside his desk, but never pondered what this implied about the transmission of the Bible from antiquity, via countless handwritten copies, let alone what it might imply about the nature of the Bible in the first place.  Consequently, when the wrecking ball of textual criticism began to swing, he was totally unprepared.

I think I understand the path that took Ehrman from Moody Bible Institute to where he is today, a self-proclaimed agnostic and relentless critic of conservative, orthodox Christianity.  I became a Christian when very young, attended a Christian high school, and went to a conservative, alternative church.  (It was a house church, back before house churches were cool; now everyone does house churches, so I am back under a steeple.)  Although I did not attend a Christian college, I still got serious theological training during my four years in Campus Crusade for Christ.  I received advanced theological training at the quite conservative Trinity Evangelical Divinity School where, of all places, my own crisis came.

I differ from Ehrman in that textual criticism was immensely rewarding to my faith and actually strengthened my confidence in the Bible and the Christians who preserved it for millennia.  But like Ehrman, in my own study I eventually hit one too many Bible difficulties, at which point the magical view of the Bible just could no longer hold.  For Ehrman, the final straw was Mark 2:25-26.[10]  According to Mark, Jesus said that when Abiathar was the high priest David entered the tabernacle and ate the sanctified bread.  In 1 Samuel 21:1-10, however, this takes place while Abimelech, the father of Abiathar, is high priest.  Let us not bother now with how anyone handles this.  I am sure that for Ehrman, as for the friend I mentioned earlier, the problem lies not in dealing with the anomaly, but merely in having to.  Some people can go their whole lives untroubled by this or that discrepancy (whether real or only apparent) in the Bible.  For others, though, something eventually snaps.

At any rate, that is what happened to me.  I no longer recall exactly what problem I noticed.  All I know is that it was a truly minor foible, but when it confronted me, I couldn’t make it go away.  Then suddenly the great quantity of other biblical anomalies I had come across during my previous studies pressed in on me.  My exaltation of the Bible as a magically perfect book, on which I had literally based my faith, evaporated.  For months I tried to re-form my position without success.  The next few years were exceedingly grim.  When I reflect on those years, I understand why Ehrman took refuge in agnosticism.

Ehrman describes himself as agnostic, but at least one truth claim seems safe from that trackless miasma of doubt: the claim that Christianity is wrong.  About that he seems pretty certain, nor does he hesitate to say so.  I understand that, too.  One reaction I had to my sudden re-appraisal of the Bible was the urge to lash out bitterly at the view I had once held.  It would have been psychologically satisfying to do so.

Ehrman’s Quest  

To go in a twinkle from the utter certainty of fundamentalism to the bottomless doubt of agnosticism horrifies the soul.  Even those bred to it find true agnosticism nearly impossible to live out.  But for anyone who has experienced the satisfaction of certainty—whether real or illusory—the empty horror of existential doubt cannot long be borne.  Someone sinking in such emptiness may be terribly attracted to fashion a kind of solid ground in “certainty about doubt” and preach it as vigorously as he once preached the equally oxymoronic “certainty of faith.”  I suspect that is what Ehrman is doing.  After the loss of fundamentalism, to be certain about anything comes as a relief, even if it is certainty about what to be uncertain about.  That is why Ehrman keeps publishing books that hammer away at his former faith.[11]  The more bitterly he criticizes it, the better he feels about where he is now.

I struggle with similar feelings, but I have taken a different path than Ehrman.  One of my most important influences during the darkest days was Harold O. J. Brown.  Brown calls inerrancy a “doxological doctrine.”  He has explained to me more than once that right-thinking Christians do not build their faith on certainty derived from an inerrant Bible, as if the inerrancy of scripture were a “first principle” on which the other truths of the faith stand or fall.  Brown is firmly inerrantist, but he maintains that if inerrancy comes into a statement of faith, it comes in last.  After placing faith in Christ and his resurrection, after embracing teachings he brought about God our Father, after pondering truths about God the rest of the Bible teaches, one may finally affirm inerrancy in praise of what God has done in inspiring scripture.  But one does not affirm inerrancy first as the axiom from which the rest of the faith derives.

The error I had committed, and the error I think Ehrman committed, was treating faith as if it were certainty.  Certainty requires knowledge, specifically scientific knowledge.  For people like I used to be, that knowledge consists of inerrant data culled from the Bible.  If that data can no longer be obtained, certainty moves out of reach.  At that point, since faith can no longer be mistaken for certainty, a Christian has to choose between a life built on faith and one built on uncertainty.  Having endured the bleakness of many dark days, I seek to build a faith that is true faith, not a peculiar kind of confessional positivism that treats the Bible as a cache of “theological data.”  I no longer build my faith on the axiom of an inerrant Bible.  No one should.  Faith begins with the proclamation of a risen Jesus, which was going on long before the first book of the New Testament was written.

The revolution in Ehrman’s life set him on a quest to prove that early Christianity, understood in the usual sense of an organized, unified body of believers, never really existed.  Ehrman’s early Christianity amounts to a kind of Wild West of faith, in which the label “Christian” comfortably covered an astonishing breadth of belief and opinion.  Out of that utopically accepting, uncritical, and mutually affirming time, Ehrman concedes one particular set of beliefs would emerge as orthodox, but this took place by happenstance at best and by brute force at worst.  The worst, Ehrman says, is most likely what happened.  So the rise of orthodoxy had nothing to do with what is true.  Actually, the Church Fathers were smug “heresy hunters,”[12] who intolerantly suppressed the perfectly Christian beliefs of a competing group called the Gnostics.[13]  The Church Fathers labeled as “nefarious”[14] heresy what they saw as a threat to themselves personally, or perhaps simply did not understand.[15]  The Christianity of the past two millennia, in Ehrman’s view, is therefore simply a fraud.

Ehrman’s suspicion that the canonical scriptures are propaganda explains why he was so receptive to an alternative image of Judas.  For Ehrman, the canonical portrait of Judas is the product of a conspiracy by church leaders to suppress the truth about Jesus and replace it with a view of Jesus they preferred.  They suppressed the Gospel of Judas as part of that revisionist program.  What attracts Ehrman to the re-discovered Gospel of Judas is that it promises an end run around the presentation of Jesus offered in the New Testament.

At this point, I have discussed nearly everything about Ehrman’s book except what it is ostensibly about.  I say “ostensibly,” because Ehrman is mainly concerned about the things that we have been discussing thus far.  This can be seen in the final chapter of The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, “The Gospel of Judas in Perspective,” where Ehrman summarizes what he sees as the implications of this new-found Gospel: the falseness of orthodoxy; the arbitrary political forces that led to the canonical Gospels being deemed orthodox and the Gospel of Judas being deemed heretical; how what we think of as orthodoxy is nothing more than an “opinion” (Ehrman insists on this repeatedly);[16] and the implication that we have no good reason for believing Mark’s version of Jesus rather than the Gospel of Judas’.  It is all up for grabs.

Since Ehrman bases so much on the Gospel of Judas, we should look to see if it actually does what he thinks it does.

Judas in the Gospel of Judas  

The Gospel of Judas records conversations among Jesus and his disciples during Passion Week.  It says almost nothing about the life of Jesus prior to Passion Week and includes no passion narrative, the sine qua non of the canonical Gospels.  As in the canonical Gospels, Jesus is a teacher, but here Jesus’ most important teachings go to Judas alone.  The bulk of the Gospel is given to esoteric—even bizarre—teachings that Jesus imparts to Judas privately.  The Gospel of Judas is thus not like the canonical Gospels.  Many Bible readers would probably object to it being called a Gospel at all, though it bears that title in the manuscript in which it was found.

All scholars agree that the Gospel of Judas arose from within the Gnostic movement and shares the Gnostic worldview.  Gnosticism was a religious movement of the second-century Mediterranean world.  It is simplest to think of Gnostics as polytheists with the proviso that they did believe in one ultimate Deity.  All gods and other divine beings derive their existence from the one, true Deity.

The key to understanding Gnosticism is its view of creation.  In Gnostic thinking, the creation of the world was a rough-and-tumble affair.  The true, ultimate God had virtually nothing to do with creation, which was instead the unauthorized work of one or more lesser beings, who managed to botch the job.  This botchery explains why the created world contains both evil and suffering.

The crucial twist in the Gnostic creation story, however, comes when the minor deities who make the human race accidentally fold bits of divine spirit into it.  Their mistake encases these “divine sparks” in nasty, mundane flesh and cuts them off from their true home in the divine sphere with their father, the ultimate, true God.  Not all human beings possess divine sparks; most are soulless flesh and blood, little better than animals.  Hidden among these mere earthlings, however, are individuals who, unbeknownst to themselves, have a divine spirit trapped within.  Their true home, as pure, non-embodied spirits, is with God in the heavens.

Gnosticism addresses the plight of these lost souls by supplying them with the arcane knowledge they need to realize their true identity.  After death, armed with this knowledge, they can leave their bodies behind and make their way back to their home with God.  In Gnosticism, knowledge is all that is required to be saved out of this world.  Simply by learning the truth about themselves, the lucky individuals who actually have souls (the “divine spark”) are enabled at death to return to the divine being.  For example, in Gospel of Judas 56:17-21, Jesus predicts his betrayal by Judas with the words, “You will exceed all of them.  For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.”[17]  This statement perfectly captures the Gnostic ideal of a self-aware “divine spark” anticipating its liberation from the brute human being in which it is encased.

Since salvation comes through knowledge, Gnostics wait for a messenger, not a savior.  Gnostic hope focuses on an emissary sent by the true God to bring saving knowledge to divine souls trapped in the material world.  Some Gnostics saw Jesus as that messenger.  For them, Jesus’ mission consisted of nothing more than simply to pass on secret knowledge to those among his followers who possessed “divine sparks” and therefore stood to benefit from such knowledge.  In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus gives the secret knowledge to Judas.  As we shall see, this turns out to be deeply ironic.

The Gospel of Judas ends with the betrayal and arrest of Jesus.  Of course, from a Gnostic point of view, the “betrayal” could be seen as an act of enlightened obedience, since by bringing about his death it enabled the divine spark that is the true Jesus to escape his useless and demeaning human body, and return to the spirit world.  This may be why the Gospel of Judas contains no passion narrative and is certainly why it contains no mention of resurrection.  The Gospel of Judas comes from a point of view that would have seen resurrection, involving as it does the restoration of corporeal rather than spiritual life, as a great tragedy.  The National Geographic translation of Gospel of Judas, published with accompanying commentary by Ehrman, adopts this view of Judas and his betrayal of Jesus, a view we will now scrutinize.

The Truth About the Gospel of Judas  

Typical of popular coverage of the publication of the Gospel of Judas is the synopsis published by Time.  Notice how closely the report follows the line taken by Ehrman, even borrowing elements of his myth of Christian origins:

For centuries, Christian tradition has painted Judas Iscariot as the ultimate sellout.  But a 1700-year-old papyrus copy of a document called the Gospel of Judas, unveiled by the National Geographic Society last week and previewed in TIME (Feb. 27 issue), presents a radically different view.  Authored no later than the 2nd century by Christians whose beliefs were later deemed heretical, the gospel portrays Judas as his favored disciple and says his role in “sacrificing” Jesus’ physical being (“the man that clothes me”) elevates him above other Apostles.  Most scholars see Judas less as a competitor to the biblical canon today than as one of the philosophies wiped out as the church established orthodoxy.[18]

As already stated, Ehrman’s book takes a similar tack: The Gospel of Judas overturns the received portrait of Judas as either a bungler, a fool, a traitor, or all of the above. In the Gospel of Judas, Judas is the only truly enlightened follower of Jesus, the only one who truly understands him.

As mentioned earlier, the most obvious payoff would be that if the Gospel of Judas is right, Christians have completely misunderstood Jesus for two thousand years.  But Ehrman’s argument is not so simple, and we should not miss his actual point.  Ehrman’s point is that if very many Christians in the second century believed the Gospel of Judas’ version of Jesus (and Judas), then obviously early Christianity was very diverse.  Actually, it was beyond diverse.  It would seem to have been so marvelously open-minded about even its core beliefs that it could contain within itself mutually contradictory ideas about creation, God, and Jesus.  In his words,

This text gives us additional hard evidence that Christianity in the early centuries of the church was remarkably diverse.  There were many forms of Christianity, and the boundaries between these Christian groups were not hard and fast.[19]

And if the first Christians were so open-minded and diverse, with “other points of view passionately and reverently espoused by people who called themselves Christian,”[20] then should we not follow their open-minded example?  Should we not return to those halcyon days of easygoing, diverse Christianity and throw off the restrictive girdle of orthodoxy foisted on us by one arrogant group that “decided what would be right”?[21]

Unfortunately, Ehrman’s take on the Gospel of Judas relies on the English translation published last spring.  The discovery of the Gospel of Judas occurred in Egypt, and it is written in Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language.  National Geographic assembled a team of Coptologists to publish the Gospel, but the most competent two, Rodolphe Kasser and Gregor Wurst, mainly labored at reconstructing the Coptic text.  Marvin Meyer was the member of the editorial team responsible for the English translation.  Ehrman, who was not involved in the translation and freely admits he is not a Coptologist,[22] has had to rely on Meyer’s rendering.

In the Meyer translation, Judas appears as the only disciple who understands Jesus, the only disciple capable, by virtue of possessing within him a divine spark, of comprehending Jesus’ message.  Ehrman’s perspective on the significance of the Gospel of Judas depends on this view of Judas.  Once the new Gospel finally was published, however, Coptologists all over the world could see for themselves what it said, and many of the foremost began to dispute this finding.  Quite simply, Meyer’s translation appears to have been compromised by the atmosphere of scholarly skepticism discussed above and the passion to disbelieve identified by N. T. Wright.

This became clear at the 2006 meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Washington, D.C., where a special session on November 19 discussed the Gospel of Judas.  The panelists at that session were Elaine Pagels, Karen King, Marvin Meyer, Craig Evans, and John Turner.  All these scholars are recognized experts on Gnosticism or the Coptic language.  Pagels and Evans, like Ehrman, had already been involved with the Gospel of Judas as consultants called on by National Geographic to assess the new Gospel’s importance.

Serious questions about the Meyer translation began to emerge with the presentation by the fourth panelist, Craig Evans.  Evans called attention to concerns brought by Professor Louis Painchaud, a world-class Coptologist and scholar of Gnosticism, who unfortunately was not present at the meeting.  Painchaud believes that the translation team led by Meyer has completely misunderstood the depiction of Judas in the Gospel of Judas.  According to Painchaud, in the new Gospel Judas appears as the greatest fool of all, not as the sole disciple to understand Jesus, one whose betrayal of Jesus stems from his utter failure to understand, not from his greater insight.  When Jesus says, “You will exceed all of them.  For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me,” the emphasis lies on “man.”  Gnostics abhorred Jewish sacrificial ritual for its sheer physicality, and the point of Jesus’ remark is that where other Jews sacrifice mere animals, Judas will sacrifice a man.  Judas will thus become the pinnacle of materialist folly, not a paragon of spiritual wisdom.[23]

After Evans offered his remarks, the fifth panelist, John Turner, rose.  Turner is the most accomplished Coptologist of the five on the SBL panel.  In his remarks, he sharply criticized the Meyer translation and Ehrman’s interpretation of it as “deeply misleading.”[24]  After he spoke, no one present defended Meyer, including Meyer himself, who of course was sitting right there.  To the contrary, first Birger Pearson, then other Coptologists in the audience, rose to ratify and elaborate the criticisms.  Meyer, Pagels, and King sat silently, offering no rebuttals.  The sense was that the criticism was well-founded.  The essence of the case made by Turner, and those who spoke during open discussion afterward, is that where Meyer and Ehrman supposed the Gospel of Judas to make Judas especially exalted, he is actually especially cursed.

Turner’s analysis is too learned and extensive to be set forth here in its entirety.  Instead, a few exemplary problems Turner identifies in the National Geographic edition, telling most directly on its portrayal of Judas, must suffice.  First, when the Gospel of Judas refers to a coming “kingdom”[25] in which Judas may have a share, Meyer’s translation implies this kingdom is a good thing, something like the kingdom of heaven in the canonical Gospels.  Turner points out, however, that the coming kingdom in the Gospel of Judas is not the glorious and good kingdom of God, but rather the “kingdom of Saklas.”  Saklas is the name given in the Gospel of Judas to the fumbling, rebellious sub-deity who, in Gnostic thought, created this world.  The arrival of his kingdom is anything but good news.  In fact in Gospel of Judas 35:27 and 46:13, the coming of the kingdom of Saklas is bad news for Judas, who will lament it.[26]  In the Gospel of Judas, poor Judas is doomed.

Second, as noted earlier, the Gospel of Judas narrates private teaching Judas receives from Jesus.  We said earlier that this would turn out to be ironic, but the editors of the National Geographic publication seem to have assumed that this privilege means that Judas is an exemplary disciple, destined for greatness.  Meyer accordingly mistranslates Judas’ reply to Jesus as “What good is it that I have received it?  For you have set me apart for that generation,” (46:15-18).  Turner corrects this to, “What advantage have I gained, since you have set me apart from that (holy) generation?”  In other words, the National Geographic edition of the Gospel of Judas gives Judas a blessed destiny, where the original Coptic text actually curses him.[27]  In this new Gospel, part of the tragedy of Judas is that he betrays Jesus even after receiving from him the secret knowledge of Gnosticism.  The traitor’s enlightenment only serves to deepen his guilt.

Third, in the Kasser-Meyer-Wurst edition Jesus says to Judas, “In the last days they will curse your ascent to the holy generation” (46:24-25).  This sounds very promising, given that Gnostic salvation consisted of leaving this world behind and ascending to the heavenly sphere.  Unfortunately, this rosy prediction stands on a faulty reconstruction of the text, which was damaged in this section.  In the forthcoming critical edition of the Gospel of Judas, the line has already been corrected to read that Judas “will not ascend to the holy generation.”[28]  Thus, within the Gnostic worldview the Gospel of Judas assumes, Judas possesses no divine spark, and he is not exalted above his fellow disciples or even above his fellow Jews.  Again, it is more bad news for Judas.

Last, concerning the crucial passage for Ehrman’s view, Gospel of Judas 56:17-21, where Jesus says that Judas “will exceed them all because he will sacrifice the human that carries me (Jesus) about,”[29] Turner writes,

the context implies that Judas will exceed them in doing evil, not something beneficial.  Nowhere does the text make any statement about the salvific benefit of enabling Jesus’ ascent by freeing him from his mortal coil.  Elsewhere in the text, Jesus freely ascends to the divine realm whenever he wishes.  ... Jesus merely acknowledges that, like all who sacrifice to Saklas, Judas’ errant star has predestined him to hand Jesus over to his enemies.[30]

Even in the National Geographic translation, Jesus does not clearly ask Judas to betray him, but merely predicts that he will.  Turner observes, “If anything, it associates Judas’ act of handing over Jesus with sacrificial service to the god of this world and hence with ‘everything that is evil’ (56:17).”[31]  Again, the Gospel of Judas links Judas with the corruption of the material world, not the immaterial, Gnostic ideal.

Turner offers the best summation of the perspective of the Gospel of Judas on Judas Iscariot.  He writes,

The fact is that Judas’ destiny as portrayed in the Gospel of Judas appears to be doomed, not blessed.  All along, Judas has been led astray by his own star, whose erroneous character is emphasized throughout this text. Indeed the entire revelation dialogue between Judas and the laughing Jesus is an exercise in irony: Judas’ special insight and knowledge of the truth will do him no good; ... Judas will be in a state of eternal lament when he becomes aware that membership in the holy generation is forever beyond his reach.[32]

Turner concludes, “Poor Judas! ... He has also learned the secrets of the divine world and the holy generation, but all to no avail, for he will not enter it.”[33]  In the final analysis, the Gospel of Judas magnifies the foolish guilt of Judas Iscariot.  It does not diminish it.  The delicious irony of Judas in the Gospel of Judas is that he is most enlightened, and therefore twice damned.

Conclusion  

So the Gospel of Judas turns out to be something of a dud.  Publicity, evidently driven in part by hopes of bigger profits, disguised the truth for a time, but clearly the Gospel of Judas should never have been controversial at all.  The Gospel of Judas is neither a heretical rehabilitation of Judas, nor the sad truth about a misunderstood hero.  Rather, the evaluation of Judas Iscariot in the Gospel of Judas is boringly consistent with what Christians have generally believed about Judas all along.

Unfortunately for Ehrman, while its portrayal of Judas is consistent with Christian ideas about the lapsed apostle, the actual teaching in the Gospel of Judas appears not even remotely Christian.  If the church rejected the Gospel of Judas, it did so because it rejected all Gnostic teachings as incompatible with the message taught by Jesus and the apostles and handed down in the public teachings of the church.  The second century indeed witnessed Gnostics and Christians in contact and controversy, and aspects of Gnostic teaching appear to have held some attraction for Christians, especially educated ones.  But Gnosticism was not just another, equally valid version of Christianity, and Christian rejection of texts like the Gospel of Judas can be explained without resort to the overbearing ecclesiastical apparatus Ehrman postulates.  Minimal adherence to the core of the Christian confession would have sufficed to rule the Gospel of Judas out of bounds.

The Gospel of Judas is merely an imaginative and entertaining tale of what Jesus might have said to his betrayer—had Jesus been a second-century Gnostic sage who despised nearly everything that Christians in the second century practiced and believed.  It was probably written precisely to express contempt for orthodox Christian teaching, stemming from late second-century polemics against “those Christian groups that insisted on the necessity of Christ’s death for salvation, and that his being handed over for execution was determined, not by the stars, but by the foreknowledge and plan of the supreme God.”[34]  In other words, the Gospel of Judas is a thoroughly Gnostic text written to attack the teachings of orthodox Christianity, teachings built on the theology of Paul and the other New Testament writers, who saw the death and resurrection of Jesus as the very center of God’s plan for Jesus.

The Gospel of Judas made headlines because of whispers that it subverted early Christian orthodoxy.  Actually, it confirms the strength of that orthodoxy in the mid-second century A.D., by showing how alien Gnostic teaching is to what Christians believed.  Biographically, the Gospel of Judas gives us a Judas Iscariot who is the same betrayer we thought he was, but with guilt magnified by possession of saving knowledge that cannot save him.  He is not the misunderstood hero Ehrman supposed him to be.  Historically, the Gospel of Judas witnesses to a hard, sharp fracture line between recognizably Christian orthodoxy and equally obvious Gnostic precepts, not to the vague plurality of Christian beliefs Ehrman envisions.  That is why it heralds no revolution in our understanding of early Christianity.

Endnotes:

1   Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst, eds., with François Gaudard, The Gospel of Judas (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2006).  Kasser and Wurst reassembled the manuscript, which had been badly damaged, but neither had a significant role in preparing the English translation, for which Meyer had primary responsibility.

2   Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 52; after this, cited simply as “Ehrman.”

3   I heard Robert Funk use these words at a New Testament seminar in Cambridge in autumn 1998.

4   Ehrman, 44.

5   N. T. Wright, Judas and the Gospel of Jesus: Have We Missed the Truth About Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2006), 26.

6   Two or three larger variants are retained in modern Bible texts because they are such familiar passages, but most Bible editors will put them in brackets so that the reader can be aware of their doubtful status.  The most common example is Mark 16:9-20, which probably was not part of the original text of Mark’s Gospel, but was added to smooth out the ending of Mark’s Gospel soon after it was published.

7   Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 12, quoted in Craig A. Evans, Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2006), 27.

8   Alan Cooperman, “The Bible’s Beginnings: Rare Fragments on Display at the Smithsonian Reveal the Evolution of Scripture,” The Charlotte Observer (October 28, 2006): 1E, 8E.

9   Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 5, quoted in Evans, Fabricating Jesus, 27.

10   Reported in Evans, Fabricating Jesus, 30-31.

11   Books like The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (1993); Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (2003); The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (with Bruce Metzger, 2005); and his best-seller Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005).

12   A pejorative he employs repeatedly, sometimes modified to “feisty heresy hunters,” e.g. 54, 64, 65, 110, 134, Cf. “wildly imaginative,” 57.

13   This involves a truly laughable appraisal of Gnosticism, on which see below.

14   One of Ehrman’s favorite words: e.g., 56, 57, 65 (twice), 134, probably more.

15   Ehrman, 61.

16   E.g., 175 especially, also 174, 178.

17   The number before the colon is a page number, not a chapter number.  The reference indicates on what page of the manuscript this saying is found.  Since the Gospel of Judas is the next to last text in its codex (book), it has high page numbers.  The numbers after the colon are line numbers, and thus the reference is to page 56, lines 17-21.

18   David Van Biema, “Judas: Friend or Foe,” Time (April 17, 2006): 22.

19   Ehrman 179-180.

20   Ehrman, 174; note how sweetly Ehrman fondles his Gnostics, in contrast to the orthodox Fathers, with whom he is all sharp elbows and ready sneers.

21   Ehrman, 174 and 175.

22   Ehrman, 5; full disclosure: I do not know a word of Coptic.

23   Craig A. Evans, “On the Gospel of Judas: A Caution and a Suggestion” (Unpublished paper read November 19, 2006, in Washington, D.C. at the Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism section of the Society of Biblical Literature).  I am grateful to Dr. Evans for supplying me with the text of his remarks.  It is quite likely that the Gospel of Judas carries a strain of anti-Semitism, though that is not germane to the present discussion.

24   John D. Turner, “The Place of the Gospel of Judas in Sethian Tradition” (Unpublished paper read November 19, 2006, in Washington, D.C. at the Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism section of the Society of Biblical Literature), 1.  I am grateful to Dr. Turner for supplying me with the text of his remarks.  Page numbers refer to his paper.  Turner’s paper will be appearing in a forthcoming book on the Gospel of Judas in Brill’s Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies series.

25   Gospel of Judas 35:25; 43:18; 45:26; 46:13.

26   Turner, 1.

27   Turner, 1.

28   Turner, 1.

29   Here using Turner’s rendering.

30   Turner, 2.  The remark about the “errant star” concerns an astrological strain in Gnostic thinking, which also appears in the Gospel of Judas.

31   Turner, 4.  This would be a possible instance of anti-Semitism in the Gospel of Judas, which mocks Jewish sacrificial religion.

32   Turner, 4.

33   Turner, 4.

34   Turner, 4.