The Gospel of Judas

I’ve recently been reading the Gospel of Judas—mainly because people have been asking for my views on the document. This ancient text is fairly new as far as scholars are concerned, since it was only recovered as recently as 1971, and the fact that we have it at all is pretty amazing. With all the current buzz surrounding lost books and lost gospels (kick-started by Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code) it was obvious that the media were going to zero in on this gospel, and they did so as sensationally as they could (well, sensationalism sells). The angle was that Judas was not really a villain at all, but a very devout man who was doing God’s will; history has misjudged him.

That is the viewpoint of the gospel.

However, this isn’t a new idea to New Testament scholars. Let’s consider the options, The Gospel of Judas first. In this ancient gospel, Jesus tells Judas, ‘You shall be cursed for generations…for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.’ The ‘man that clothes me’ bit is pretty standard Gnostic and Docetist stuff, but applied to Judas it is striking. What it means is that Jesus, as a spiritual being, was in human form but the time had come for him to shed that body, so Judas was doing Jesus’ will by doing a deal with the priests. The detail that Judas was paid by the priests to deliver Jesus is not disputed in the gospel. It also means that Judas delivered Jesus to ensure his own salvation.

I have always had a problem with this kind of Jesus, and for this reason don’t find most of the non-canonical (not in the bible) gospels exciting.

But the traditional dogma that Jesus died for our sins (as a kind of sacrifice) has never convinced me either. For if that is true, then again Judas is doing what Jesus wants him to do. And if Judas knows that he is doing Jesus’ will, then why do the biblical gospels say he was filled with despair and killed himself? On the other hand, if he was doing Jesus’ will, but didn’t know it, then he was mightily abused—and I don’t believe that either.

The docetist view would be that, since Jesus was never really human anyway, it didn’t matter delivering him to the authorities, for he wouldn’t actually suffer, even if he appeared to. With this view any Jesus worth knowing about disappears completely, so I won’t go any further with this one.

There are three other possibilities, all of them treating Jesus as fully human and not as a god-man (what is what I personally believe). The first two of these are rooted in the notion that Judas was a zealot or at least some kind of freedom-fighter, and that he acted to either stir Jesus into action or to provoke a popular uprising through his arrest. That nothing happened except that his Teacher was crucified drove him to despair and suicide.

There is a last view though. This is an economic one, and is what I have over the years come to conclude. I think Jesus died because he threatened big business in much the same way that Columbian Presidents who act against the drug barons in their country also get wiped out. During the Jewish Passover, thousands—some scholars say at least a million—of people went to Jerusalem. They were expected to pay Temple taxes and offer sacrifices. The Temple tax had to be paid in Temple money, and the priests made a huge profit through changing Roman money for Temple coins. The priests also made a huge profit from selling the animals offered for sacrifice. Jesus came along and upset the money-changers’ tables and set loose the sacrificial animals, saying ‘The Temple (my father’s House) has become a den of thieves.’ This was a move extremely popular with the crowds, but provoked the priests’ anger because it threatened their lucrative business. So they made an arrangement to have him killed. Maybe Judas thought Jesus would escape, as he had done in the past, or maybe he was promised something else by the priests, I don’t know. But Jesus died, and Judas realised his mistake too late.

Apocalypse now

This week, when strong winds were howling like banshees along the ridges of Swaziland’s mountains, it was easy to believe that the world is heading for an apocalypse. Certainly the pub-pundits and media-watchers have been arguing that the end is coming—‘Israel will trigger it’, ‘Muslims are looking for it’, The price of oil is getting so high that soon we’ll all be walking’, ‘AIDS is going to wipe us out anyway’—there are many doomsayers abroad these days.

But until Sauron has the Ring, and while Harry is alive, there’s still hope.

Away from home, something truly wonderful is happening in the world. For example, in the home of the free, President Bush is rejuvenating the nation: against himself, of course. Bruce Springsteen won a standing ovation for his recent updating of the folkie classic, How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live? and Neil Young’s new raucous sing-along anthem is entitled Let’s Impeach The President, accusing Mr Bush of lying, spying, hijacking religion and bringing back racism. Wonderful stuff.

I only wish the same could be said of Swaziland’s populist response to the times in which we live. With two-thirds of the nation living hand-to-mouth and facing extinction from HIV, our local culture is flying from reality as fast as possible. We are living in Sugar Candy Mountain Time. We have new million-Emalangeni churches, we have ‘apostles’ and ‘bishops, ‘we have victory crusades and almost every week we have new gospel albums. But at what cost? The message is, ‘Don’t worry about the sorry life we’re living here, there’s another life waiting for you in heaven.’ But singing the wonders of a heavenly life is little use to a family facing starvation: where is the victory in an empty belly? Jesus began his ministry by making a choice to align himself with John the Baptist. He heard the call from that wild voice by the river Jordan: ‘He who has two shirts give one to him who has none; he who has food, let him share it with those who are starving… flee corruption… and avoid violence.’ This is what it means to be down by the river.

Our secular response is escapist too: a plethora of DJs, replete with the dance rhythms of r n b bedroom confessionals, or chronicles of thug life on the streets of an SA township or a New York ghetto, played loud in dark rooms full of smoke and booze. The message here is to forget the misery of your daily life for a few hours by getting completely out of your head in a club or bar.

This is our Apocalypse now—living in a world clearly out of control but full of people running away from the problems rather than embracing the painful change needed to confront them.

The doomsayers are right—as long as we continue to refuse to stand up and be counted. The world is in a mess: Apocalypse now is a result of the human choices we have made and continue to make each and every day.

But we humans aren’t really as big as we think we are, and natural events like this week’s strong winds come along every now and then and cut us down to size. Such events remind us that there is always an alternative world beyond the pettiness of our tunnel thinking. For example, just think how we could radically change our world by each of us spending a small half hour each day to be still and meditate on peace and our relationships with each other and the environment in which we live. Instead of wanting to rip each other off, we could learn to share; instead of getting angry because things aren’t done our way, we could learn to accept different points of view; instead of hating each other because of differences in the colours of our skins or the educations we’ve been privileged to get or the amount of money we earn, we could learn to value the differences that make up our multi-valued world. This might be Apocalypse now, but it doesn’t have to be: we can all of us help to make a change.