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An analysis of The Judas Gospel

Douglas Tennant B.Sc., B.A., CMMIII
Professor Jeff Wilson
RS 260 – The Study of Religion
Wednesday October 7, 2009
An analysis of The Gospel of Judas

            I found The Gospel of Judas in a private bookstore in Orillia in 2007 and bought it for future reference. I had not given it a second thought or even leafed through it until this course assignment required us to analyse a text from our own tradition (Christian) but one with which we were not familiar. I had not read anything from this text until now for, as with several other religious texts, I was intimidated by both its potentially challenging theological and scholarly perspectives. I focused on pages 55-58 of the ancient manuscript that are translated from Coptic (Kasser 42). This portion of the text deals with a conversation between Jesus and Judas, and the highlight is the conclusion of the gospel where Judas betrays and hands Jesus over to the High Priests (Kasser 45).
The extensive footnotes found throughout the translated manuscript provide an incredible array of interpretive insight and information regarding the gospel and proved invaluable regarding the scholarly aspects of the text.  The Gospel of Judas was discovered in the 1970’s but was only translated into English as of 2001 (11, 12). The journey that this ancient writing has taken to arrive in today’s public realm reads like a modern treasure hunter novel (Kasser 69). It is amazing that it has survived at all (Kasser 65) for research.
The Gospel of Judas can be classified as a Sethian Gnostic text (5, 6) and was “[p]robably composed around the middle of the second century, most likely on the basis of earlier ideas and sources” (5). While no particular “author” is cited, it was composed by early Gnostic Christians and sheds light upon not only Judas but also his personal relationship with Jesus (Kasser 5). In this excerpt Judas and Jesus have a conversation like no other that I have read in a religious text. They speak in a very relaxed, personal manner and in a unique fashion highlighted by a laughing Jesus (Kasser 42).
The newly translated gospel (11) from The Gospel of Judas would presumably be of significant scholarly interest to researchers for a number of reasons including but not limited to: (i) the fact that its overall Gnostic perspective is in stark contrast to the orthodox Christian one of Judas; (ii) the uniquely positive and intimate personal relationship that it portrays between Jesus and Judas; (iii) the way Jesus seems to exalt and/or absolve Judas for his traitorous behaviour in order to fulfill Jesus’ path; (iv) the fact that Judas is “vindicated [and] transfigured” (44) and (v) that in relative terms a brand new religious work has been discovered, translated and made available for all sorts of scholarly pursuits.
Based upon some interpretive information from this new Gnostic gospel (The Judas Gospel 16), scholars of the traditional Christian tradition would do well to heed Rodriques’ suggestion that “one needs to be able to explore the unknown religious territory [of The Judas Gospel] with a great degree of subjective involvement and report back on what one has discovered with a high measure of objectivity” (9). There is a significant amount of symbolism, i.e. “stars”, “creatures” and “luminous clouds (The Judas Gospel 42, 44) in the gospel, and scholars who are not well versed in the Gnostic culture/tradition should “try to understand the meaning of symbols that make up a cultural system…by trying to decipher what the symbols mean to the insiders of that culture” as Geertz points out (Rodriques 60).
In The Judas Gospel, Judas is second only to Jesus in importance and is portrayed as an extremely close and personal confident to Jesus (44). A non-Christian tradition scholar would not necessarily have the same appreciation of the significant negative label that Judas carries from the traditional Christian concept of him. Therefore, she would have the advantage of approaching the text with a more objective research perspective.
All scholars must perform objective research; however, researchers from the Christian tradition must recognise that they might carry over or be influenced by the evil and traitorous background associated with Judas and Gnosticism.  In order to deal with this disadvantage, they should strive with a self-conscious attempt at neutrality to lay out what the gospel has to say about the “society, history, culture” (Rodrigues 44, 45) of the Gnostic portrayal of Judas in comparison to that in the Bible. 
Notwithstanding that The Judas Gospel was composed many hundreds of years ago, it has only come into the modern scholarly world very recently. I ponder how much discussion, if not hand wringing and gnashing of teeth, scholarly research will stir up in the world of the Abrahamic religions about it in the coming years.



Works Cited
Rodrigues, Hillary and John S. Harding. Introduction to the Study of Religion. New York:      

            Routledge, 2009.

Kasser, Rodolphe, Marvin Meyer and Gregor Wurst. The Gospel of Judas. Washington: National

Geographical Society, 2006.



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