Betraying The Gospel of Judas

Today's big story in religion is the unveiling of The Gospel of Judas, a 1,700 year-old Coptic document that purports to record a secret conversation between Jesus and Judas, where Jesus asks Judas to betray him. The text was actually dug up in Egypt in the 1970's, but, somehow, ended up in a New York City bank safe-deposit box until it was recently restored and translated (National Geographic will soon print and sell copies). Is this copy of The Gospel of Judas really as old as 300 A.D.? Yes, probably. Does this mean we have to seriously re-evaluate what really happened on the night that Jesus was betrayed? Well, not exactly. First, it must be conceded that this Gospel was probably written well before 300 A.D. If the idea that Jesus asked Judas to stage a betrayal sounds familiar, it might be because you saw Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ in the late 1980's, which portrays such a scene. We've actually known about this claim for a long time- since 180 A.D., in fact, since that's the rough publication date of a rebuttal of The Gospel of Judas written by a church leader named Irenaeus. So, through Irenaeus, we've actually had second-hand quotes of The Gospel of Judas for a long time. Today's announcement really only qualifies as news because now we have the full text of the work, and not just quotations. So, despite the tone of some of today's headlines, nothing earth-shattering has come to light. Orthdox Christianity dealt with this book and moved on quite a while ago -- just over 1,800 years ago, to be exact.
But the real reason why we don't need to seriously reconsider what the New Testament says about Jesus having been genuinely betrayed by Judas is that The Gospel of Judas is still a very late occuring document compared to especially the synoptic Gospels (Mathhew, Mark, and Luke), which were written about 100 years earlier. Unfortunatley, today's coverage of the story suggests that we should equally weight the Gospel of Judas alongside the New Testament sources, if not give it even greater weight. But on what grounds? That 100 year gap just yawns too wide. More importantly, The Gospel of Judas bears all the marks of full-blown Gnostic Chrisitanity, a melding of various Greek and Near-Eastern religious elements with the Christianity of the New Testament -- and no one has shown evidence that this advanced form of Gnosticism existed until well into the the second century. The fact that Jesus asks to be killed in order to be freed from the prison of bodily existence is classic Gnostic anti-materialism, but this was not a religious perspective that existed in first-century Palestine. The Gospel of Judas presents us with an alternative Jesus alright, but not a Jesus that likely has much to do with the Jesus of Nazareth.