Last week I posted about going to a talk on the Gospel of Judas by Elaine Pagels. It was a fascinating talk on something that I have never read. I have recently started reading The Forbidden Gospels Blog by Dr. April DeConick of Rice University. She has a book that is coming out very soon that contests the meaning of the Gospel of Judas. It makes me want to read the book by Pagels/King and the book by DeConick.

The Forbidden Gospels Blog: The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says

“I didn’t find the sublime Judas, at least not in Coptic. What I found were a series of English translation choices made by the National Geographic team, choices that permitted a different Judas to emerge in the English translation than in the Coptic original. Judas was not only not sublime, he was far more demonic than any Judas I know in any other piece of early Christian literature, Gnostic or otherwise.”

DeConick contends that the Gospel of Judas is not about a “good” Judas, or even a “poor old” Judas. It is a gospel parody about a “demon” Judas written by a particular group of Gnostic Christians known as the Sethians who lived in the second century CE. The purpose of the text was to criticize “mainstream” or apostolic Christianity from the point of view of these Gnostic Christians, especially their doctrine of atonement, their Eucharistic practices, and their creedal faith which they claimed to have inherited from the twelve disciples.

Audio from the Lecture (mp3 - 46mb)

I was lucky enough to attend Dr. Pagel’s lecture on the Gospel of Judas. It was a fascinating and informative talk. Here are some of my observations from the lecture. Pagels has just published a new book on this Gospel with Karen King, entitled Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity. I have not read the book, nor the Gospel of Judas.

While I have read some of Pagel’s work, most specifically, Beyond Belief, I have never heard her in person. She is a very effective speaker, humor and wit with are intermixed with history and background to illuminate her points, she approaches the audience on the popular level and does not talk above their heads. While some of her popular works are criticized for being sensational at times, she is very disarming in her approach - she does not start out shocking the audience with grandiose claims. Instead, Pagels introduced the text and presented 4 problems that she found contained within it and then lead the audience to the answers she came to during her research.

The talk centered around the Gospel of Judas, a repressed gospel dating to the early days of Christianity. Dating is always and estimate. The manuscript that we have was found in upper Egypt and written in Coptic. Most likely the manuscript was from a monastery in the region and dates to somewhere in the fourth century(300-400 CE). It seems to be a translation of a much earlier text, somewhere in the second century (100-200 CE). She did a good job introducing to the audience the issues surrounding the Gnostics, how the term “Gnosticism” is not a good category, but a convenient one that really does not do them justice. There are groups of Christians that deviate from what would become Orthodox views, but to categorize this very messy group as Gnostics is misleading and inaccurate.

To Pagels, the text seems to center around a dispute between Judas and the other Apostles and the topic of martyrdom. While I don’t have the texts that she was working with (see below for the NG translation), I’ll do my best to reproduce what she was talking about. The gospel opens with Jesus ridiculing the Twelve for how they were worshiping. The twelve get angry at Jesus and in response, he challenges them to stand before him. Only Judas is able to stand before Jesus and Jesus rewards him with teachings. The Twelve have dreams about people sacrificing children on an altar. Jesus explains that the people doing the sacrificing are the Twelve. Judas has had another dream, this one shows how he is different from the others. I don’t remember much else about it - see the audio for more.

Pagels looks at this text not as a window into the lives of Jesus and the Twelve, but as a window into the controversies in the early church, most specifically, the one about Martyrdom. She thinks it reflects, in part, a voice standing against “eager martyrdom.” A conception had spread that one should seek out being killed for Christ rather than fleeing to another city, like the Gospel of Luke would suggest. Instead, the best death a Christian could have is to be killed for the cause. The people behind the Gospel of Judas were concerned about this, thinking that this is not the way Jesus wanted us to live because God values life, not death, so we should not actively seek death.

That was the main gist of her presentation. It was more a look into the history of the Early Church than anything else, and for that, I throughly enjoyed the talk. Please see the MP3 for the audio of the lecture.

I’ll have the audio up later. See below for the audio

Resources:

• National Geographic Translation of the Gospel of Judas (PDF)
• Audio from the Lecture (mp3 - 46mb)