Jesus, Judas, and the DaVinci Code

There has been much hullabaloo lately about the discovery of a document called the “Gospel of Judas” in which Jesus is said to have ordered Judas Iscariot to betray him in order to carry out the plan for man’s salvation. For those who believe the biblical version of Christ’s death, there is little to worry about. The “Gospel of Judas” has no more historical value than the documents on which Dan Brown based his historically shaky book, “The DaVinci Code.”

The “Gospel of Judas” is part of a group of documents discovered three decades ago in Egypt. It is similar some documents discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. The Nag Hammadi documents consisted of writings by early Christians and included “The Gospel of Thomas,” “The Gospel of Philip,” the “Gospel of Truth” and other gospels. Because those gospels’ were similar to the teachings of certain early Christians who are today called “Gnostics,” modern scholars call them the “Gnostic Gospels.”

Gnosticism is the name we give today to an ancient religious movement of people that rejected the world and the human body as corrupt, believed that the soul of man was a spark of divinity trapped in a human body, and relied upon secret knowledge of mystical facts to obtain release of the soul. The Gnostics did not believe that Jesus, as the Son of God, actually died on the cross or arose from the dead. They believed that the resurrection occurred only in people’s dreams.

The Gnostics had an elitist idea of Christianity in which only a very few of the cognoscente could actually achieve knowledge of the truth of Jesus. This is exemplified by the “Gospel of Judas” in which Jesus called Judas aside and entrusted him with special knowledge in order to arrange for Judas to betray him. The early church, especially leaders like Tertullian and Irenaeus, condemned the teaching of Gnostics, and declared their writings to be heretical. The early church fathers refused to include any of the Gnostic gospels in the official cannon of the Bible, with the possible exception of the Gospel of John which has some Gnostic-type sayings in it.

In “The DaVinci Code,” Dan Brown seems to rely on some of the Gnostic Gospels for the dubious proposition that Jesus married Mary Magdalen and had children by her. The Gnostic “Gospel of Philip” says that Christ loved Mary Magdalen more than the other disciples and used to kiss her often. It does not say he married her or had children by her. I believe that this Gospel had no historical basis and was a pipe dream of some writer who had no knowledge of the life of Jesus. The canonical Bible says very little about Mary Magdalen, and there is no basis for the claim that she was Jesus’ wife or, for that matter, that she was a harlot as the Church has sometimes maintained.

One reason to doubt the historical authenticity of the Gnostic Gospels is that they were written long after the death of Jesus. Scholars believe that they could not have been written earlier than 120 A.D. and were probably written much later than that. The “Gospel of Judas” appears to have been written in the second century. The recent translation that has now received so much publicity was a later copy written about 300 A.D. Although the Gnostic Gospels may have reflected some ancient oral traditions, they often seem quite fantastic.

The canonical Gospels adopted by the Church were written much closer in time to the life of Jesus. Many leading scholars maintain that the Gospels were not written by the disciples of Jesus and Paul. The Gospel of Mark was the first written Gospel, and the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were based upon the Gospel of Mark. The Gospel of Mark was composed somewhere between the late 60s and 70 A.D. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke were composed around 70-100 A.D. by authors who combined and edited Mark with other material, including a collection of Jesus’ sayings which are sometimes called “Q.” The Gospel of John was written separately from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (the “synoptic” Gospels) and is quite different in content, tone, and writing style. It was most likely composed after 85 AD by several authors who had not witnessed Jesus during his life.

All three synoptic Gospels discuss the resurrection of Jesus, but some scholars have questioned whether the early writers of those Gospels actually wrote the stories of the resurrection. Originally, the Gospel of Mark ended at Chapter16:8. That is the part where the women find the empty tomb and are told by a “young man” that Jesus has risen. Scholars assert that the part of the Gospel after that, in which Jesus appears to various people, was added by later writers who wanted to supply authenticity to the story of Jesus’ resurrection. The resurrection stories in Matthew and Luke are based on the story in Mark and were probably written much later than the gospels themselves.