The CrossCurrents A Catholic Reflects on Faith in Our Times

Bernard F. Swain, Ph.D. www.CrossCurrents.us

Juiced-Up Judas

Holy Week 2006 got off to a rocky start for many Catholics reading Palm Sunday headlines announcing the arrival of a new “Gospel of Judas.” Actually, the document is not really new, nor has it just arrived. Still confusion is inevitable when a document claims Jesus persuaded Judas to betray him.

Here’s the actual news: scholars have now verified the authenticity of a 3^rd or 4^th century document discovered in 1978. It portrays Judas not as a traitor but as Jesus’ co-conspirator.

The phenomenon of text-fragments surfacing after centuries of being lost is nothing new. Since 1945, at least three major archaeological finds have unearthed documents thought to have been lost.

These discoveries have given birth to a whole new field. In addition to “Bible scholars” who study “Sacred Scripture,” we now have scholars of “ancient texts.” The unsettling impact has been to confront people of faith with documents that appear to compete with the books of the Bible itself. One might wonder: whom to believe?

In this case, the controversy is about Judas’ role in the arrest, trial, and execution of Jesus. The effect, of course, is to “juice up” the Passion story at the heart of Holy Week.

This is hardly a novelty: two Lents ago, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” made huge profits by restoring the medieval passion play to public prominence. And next month “The Da Vinci Code” will open to record ticket sales. The success of these movies suggests that, faced with a conflict between Sacred Scriptures and fiction, millions of Christians prefer fiction.

I remember being fascinated with such fictions, and scouring my high school library for novels about the Passion. They enthralled me by rewriting the Gospel accounts with fanciful imaginings about the “secret” roles of Barabbas, Pontius Pilate, Pilate’s wife, Mary Magdalene, or the Roman centurion at the foot of the cross.

I was not alone in my fascination. Martin Scorsese, our most gifted Catholic filmmaker, was inspired to direct movies after his parish priest took him to see “The Robe,” the Cinemascope epic based on the story of that Roman centurion.

When Scorsese made his own Passion movie, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” he showed Jesus convincing Judas to betray him. But Scorsese always made it clear that his “psychological portrait” of Jesus was fiction, using contemporary imagination to fill the Gospels’ gaps.

This desire to fill gaps continues today. But it’s one thing to get new stories from novels or movies; it’s quite another to get them from scholars. So is important to understand why these texts are receiving so much attention.

Scholars who make their living studying the Bible face a particular professional problem. The number of people with degrees in Biblical studies continues to grow every year, but the Bible itself stays the same. The New Testament, in particular, is only some 400 pages in most editions – about the length of an average novel! Yet thousands of scholars compete by pouring over the same passages again and again, looking for something new to say in a field where “publish or perish” is the key to survival.

When a new crop of scholars comes along, the field has already been picked dry. For them, “filling the gaps” in the gospels can mean academic success and scholarly stardom.

Imagine what an opportunity these scholars have whenever archeologists unearth copies of additional ancient documents! Such new finds entice scholars to scoop their rivals by analyzing new texts that go well beyond the New Testament’s 400 pages. For them, these documents are truly “buried treasure.”

Indeed, in the last 50 years, dozens (perhaps hundreds) of scholars have built careers around studying texts which are ancient but have never been considered part of Sacred Scripture. And, of course, by promoting these texts as the equal of Scripture, they also promote themselves.

Frankly, many of these documents are mere fragments, pieces of stories or even pieces of sentences. Scholars must often fill in the gaps of the stories and sentences with their own speculations, “juicing up” the text to enhance its performance as an alternative to the Gospel versions of events. Not surprisingly, this week’s New Yorker called the Judas gospel’s release “uncomfortably hyped.”

Anyway, let’s be clear: these documents were already known to early Christians, and were already rejected in favor of the books we today call the New Testament. This happened through a gradual process beginning about the year 150, when certain texts (the letters of Paul, for example, and the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke) were “canonized” as authentic accounts of Christian belief about the mission, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

It took two centuries more before this “canon” of books was completely determined, but during that time the process established several truths about Christian tradition – truths that all Catholics should keep in mind.

First the Canon was based on the Creed. It was Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyon around 150, who first established the “yardstick” (“canon” is the Greek word for measuring stick) for deciding which books to accept or reject as part of Sacred Scripture. For him, the fundamental test was whether a text conformed to the established beliefs of the Christian church:

The church, though dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith: it believes in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth and the sea and all things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets the dispensations of God, the advents, the birth from a virgin, the passion, the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven in the flesh of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Second, this means that our Bible is a product of the Church (not the other way around)—so our beliefs as Church determine what texts we accept. To let texts determine our beliefs is getting it backwards. No text is as close to Jesus as the oral testimony his disciples passed on to the first generations of Christians.

Third, the texts which were later rejected failed to meet the Church’s “yardstick” in several ways. They were written too long after Jesus to be considered reliable compared to the established, canonical texts (all of which were available within 100 years of Jesus’ death). Their versions of gospel stories conflicted with the consensus beliefs of the community. And they often injected alien notions from Graeco-Roman culture that competed with the worldview of Judaism and the growing Christian community.

Fourth, the “Gospel of Judas” exhibits all these difficulties. It dates from the 3^rd or 4^th century—at least 200 years after the earliest gospels! The conspiracy between Jesus and Judas is based on the need to “free” Jesus from his body – a denial of Christian belief in Jesus’ human nature. And the document is rooted in the Gnostic movement, which rejected the both the God of the Old Testament and the goodness of creation.

Of course, it is fascinating to see National Geographic plastering the “Gospel of Judas” all over its cover, it website, and its cable channel. But the document contains nothing new, so any talk of “turning Christianity on its head” or triggering a “crisis of faith” is pure hype. This is “Judas on steroids”: a story enhanced by the love of conspiracy, by a foreign philosophy, and by the exotic appeal of ancient texts as “buried treasure.”

My analogy with steroids is deliberate. We’re entering a baseball season when authentic records are being jeopardized by athletes whose performance was artificially enhanced. Most real fans plan to stick with the authentic records. As we enter Easter season, facing similar challenges to the authentic Christian records by “gospels” juiced-up as “the greatest discovery of the century,” we believers should stick to the authentic records too.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2006

Send Your Comments and Questions to bfswain@juno.com

Dr. Swain’s opinions do not represent the views of this parish or any other official body.

Bernie Swain has devoted more than 30 years to adult spiritual formation in dioceses in the US, Canada, and France. Since 1991 he has maintained a private practice as trainer, teacher, and consultant to leaders in parishes and other religious organizations. He holds degrees in theology and political science from Holy Cross, Harvard, The University of Paris, and The University of Chicago.

His writings include Liberating Leadership (Harper & Row, 1986) and more than 200 articles in periodicals such as The National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal, The Miami Herald, The Catholic Free Press, The Pilot, Harvard Theological Review, and Liturgy.

A lifelong layperson, he lives in Boston with his wife and three children. Visit his website at:

http://www.CrossCurrents.us

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