By: Josef Angelo Quero and Marcel Lawrence Emil Agpasa
For more than two thousand years, the Catholic Church has stood against the whips and lashes of time. It has endured countless issues against its doctrines and teachings. For more than two millennia, we have been taught of the same thing…
Who is Judas?
The name itself sends a wicked feel. Judas Iscariot. It has been equated to treachery and deceit. For many centuries, Judas has been the world’s most hated figure. He has been portrayed as an evil incarnate forever damned to burn in hell. Judas Iscariot – the apostle who pawned Jesus to His death.
With the advent of the discovery of an ancient leather-bound book in Egypt Garden of Gethsemane
Mystic Secret
When the Church was young, early Christians preached in groups to spread the Word of God. There were no standard Gospel (“good news”) to teach that time. Things got worse when Roman soldiers started persecuting those who had professed as Christians. During those daunting days, the Christian community was in massive disarray. Different sects of Christianity emerged, each having its own versions of Christ’s teachings and contradicting one another’s interpretation. Some of them: the would-be Catholics and the Gnostics.
Gnostics propose a more abstract belief: that salvation can be achieved by achieving gnosis or secret knowledge. It suggests that each man holds a divine spark within him that needs to be freed from the material body, and that one can attain divine perfection or reach heaven by deciphering the mystic teachings of Jesus Christ. They suggest the ultimate key to salvation is by self-activating the ‘latent God’ within every soul to a path to self-mastery and spiritual enlightenment. Hence, Gnostics were in no need of priests nor bishops.
This view bothered the early Church leaders. It spelled confusion among followers of conventional Christianity which had gained rapid spread over Asia Minor and the entire Mediterranean and had won the heart of the Roman Empire .
Survival of the Simplest
Then came Saint Irenaeus to the rescue. As a Church Father in 180 A.D., he severely denounced the teachings of Gnosticism, proclaiming that it was a dangerous doctrine never to be read by any righteous Catholic. He was then given the ultimate task of saving a very confused and threatened Church: to choose the righteous gospels that would take the Bible center stage.
Irenaeus had to make sure the selected gospels would not raise questions among its believers. After a private conclave, he declared “there are four gospels and only four… like the four directions of the wind… four corners of the earth…” Since then, the rest of the Gnostic gospels were discarded, burned and banned. And thus started the fame of brothers Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
But the Gospel of Judas refused to fade into eternity. After almost 1800 years from hiding, it had finally seen the light of day.
The Bombshell Unearthed
History has repeated itself. In 1896, the Gospel of Mary shocked the world. Then in Upper Egypt in 1945, a peasant accidentally discovered the Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of 12 ancient leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar. It contained the Gnostic Gospels like the Gospel of Philip, Thomas, Truth, the Egyptians, and other apocalyptic writings. Two years later, two shepherds accidentally uncovered the “Dead Sea Scrolls” in a cave in Wadi Qumran in Israel
And finally in 1978, near the Egyptian Nile River
Then Judas’ devastating journey began. After having been found by chance, sold twice and stolen once, little by little the pages of the Gospel of Judas slowly turned to fragments, the remaining pages bore many unrecognizable traces of blank ink. About 15% of the whole texts were completely wiped out from history but the remaining texts were just enough to finally redeem Judas from mankind’s mockery…
Fragments of the lost Gospel of Judas were subjected to a very precise time test, a test that measured when these ancient papyri had been made. The result? Radiocarbon dating revealed the papyri dated back 50 years before or after 200 A.D. – the years when the early Church was still beginning. There is thus no doubt. The Gospel is an authentic ancient artifact.
What’s with this gospel that so got into the nerves of Catholic conservatives? At long last, the world is ready to hold the secrets of the Judas Gospel.
The Gospel of A Hero
In the Gospel of Judas, the author reverses the story of Jesus’ betrayal. Judas is not a traitor. Instead, he is the greatest among the apostles and the closest to Jesus Christ. He is cursed and envied by the other disciples.
The Judas Gospel unfolds with an opening remark “This is the secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke to Judas three days before he celebrated the Passover.” Jesus then is described not as the authoritative preacher. He does not speak of sin and repentance. Instead, he presents himself as a guide for his followers to spiritual understanding (gnosis). It portrays Jesus among the disciples as a child who laughs a great deal.
A disturbing revelation by Christ was again made known. In the gospel, the twelve apostles see a vision: they saw a great house with an altar; near it were twelve priests; and the twelve were receiving many cattle as sacrifice to the altar; people around them were doing evil deeds. In response, Jesus very bluntly says to them, “Those you have seen receiving the offerings at the altar—that is who you are. That is the god you serve, and you are those twelve men you have seen. The cattle you have seen brought for sacrifice are the many people you lead astray before that altar.”
Is Jesus Christ predicting the future of the early Church? Did it mean then that that the 2.2 billion Christians worldwide are actually being led astray?
The Divine Revelations
Then, in another occasion, Jesus divulges an Apocalyptic message. He compares the human race to the “unperishable race”, which would be the only race to remain throughout eternity. Jesus says the human race and even the angels shall be destroyed, and only those who shall attain divinity will be spared.
Jesus also explains to Judas a very mystical Gnostic theme that Matthew and the other three gospels fail to mention – cosmogony. In Judas’ Gospel, Jesus narrates the entire process of Creation! From the Supreme God, the great angel Autogenes is created, He soon creates another league of angels (“aeons”) to aid Him. They create the luminaries who are to govern portions of the Universe. Figures like 6, 12, 72 and 360 are used to define the orderliness of creation. Then from the perfect aeons it branches out to Saklas and Nebro, then to Seth and Adamas until the “accidental creation” of the human race.
At the night of the Passover, Jesus and his apostles are talking. Judas shares his vision: he was being stoned, cursed and hated by the twelve apostles. He was hated by the entire world. In reply, Jesus reveals that Judas will have to make the ultimate sacrifice to release Jesus from the physical body that wraps him. Jesus says, “You will be greater than them all, for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.”
The passage reveals a very deep-seated philosophy of early Gnosticism. It speaks of the doctrine of reincarnation! Jesus shows how the body is likened to clothing which the soul wears and removes in a given lifetime. For the Gnostics, the body is just a material vehicle which the soul uses for self-expression and self-perfection. In the end, if the soul has gained divine perfection through gnosis, the prison body must then be shed off. Jesus’ death would then signal the completion of Christ’s mission as a preacher of Gnostic truth.
Thus, in the Gospel of Judas, Jesus arranges his own death and asks his brother Judas to hand him over the Romans. Judas obeyed.
A Sudden Ending
The Gospel of Judas abruptly ends with Judas receiving the coins from the high priests, as Jesus is handed down to the Romans. In a few hours, the Christ’s ever-celebrated Passion-Death-Resurrection mantra would commence.
The author of the Gospel of Judas might have aimed to rehabilitate Judas’ identity in history. Throughout the gospel, the author assumed a very angry mood. He was despising the disciples…
Perhaps Judas might have foreseen that his unlikely obedience would turn him from the great traitor we know to the greatest hero in history. His ultimate sacrifice could sound the death knell to his life-sentence. If it be true, then he is not to be ridiculed but to be thanked.
The Gospel of Judas and the other Gnostic gospels are but reminders for us to reassess what we have as Christians. It is no more a question of whether the Gospel is authentic or not, but rather it is a question of faith.
We may never know who exactly wrote these gospels and why they were written. But their existence does not entirely mean that they are the absolute truth. They may be false. They may be true. But we do know one thing. We still have our own free will to choose what to believe in.
Judas had his…
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