The English translation is up as .pdf, courtesy of National Geographic. I expect that, as with all popular discussions of ancient religious texts and the societies that used them, there will be loads of confusion and misinformation about Judas itself, the other nan-canonical gospels, the canonical ones, and the early church. This very low signal to noise ratio means that the casual observer will stand a chance of having less accurate views after the public discussion than before. Witness the video exchange posted here. I have spent several years sifting through as much discussion on early Christian writings, the Bible, and related issues as I could - doing my best to sift the wheat from the BS. I hope that my tiny contribution to the discussion of the Gospel of Judas will break the trend, and provide more clarity than confusion. None of this is original, but I cannot source each statement individually - it's memory work from a large body of reading. Some of this will already be familiar to you, some may not be.

First - the Gospel of Judas is a gnostic text. The news headlines make much of the fact that this Gospel portrays Judas as a friend and helper to Jesus - his betrayal as a favor done at Jesus' request. Honestly, this is not such big news. The gnostic sect of Christianity from which this text emerged believed in variations on the theme that Christ's divinity was purely spirit, that a fleshly body he may once have carried was impure. The idea that he may have wished for assistance in ridding himself of "the man that clothes me" (to quote the newly found Gospel) would not have seemed unusual at all to Gnostic Christians of the 2nd century. Also, this account lends little credence to the notion that things really happened this way. It doesn't even lend much credence to the notion that Judas Iscariot was a real person, rather than a literary or traditional figure. This book was most likely written after 130 CE/AD and carries much less significance for piecing together the actual history of events surrounding the life of Jesus than earlier writings do. What it does tell us is a little more about the state of Gnostic Christianity in the 2nd century - a time not far removed from the beginnings of the Christian religion. Scholars already know quite a bit about the Gnostic sect, but the public is only dimly aware of its existence, by and large. The "church" - that is to say the "orthodox" church of the 2nd century - that other sect of Christians were already denouncing gnosticism as heresy. 2,000 years later, most people aware of Gnosticism at all regard it as a fringe group and a heresy against the "known facts". This is only partly true. On the one hand as I will discuss below, "orthodox" Christians (meaning, that group which later became Catholic and protestant Christianity) do have legitimate arguments to make that their gospels and other writings are older, and closer to the beliefs of the original Christian church than what we now know of the gnostics'. However - a) this may or may not have been true at the time, and b) the gnostics were very widespread and influential - they were not a "fringe" group, but a collection of very main-stream believers of that time.

This brings us to the second question - which is more faithful to the *first* Christian's views - gnostic beliefs or orthodox ones? Offhand, my guess - and I think the best guess of most people who are educated on the issue is a qualified verdict in favor of the orthodox tradition. The earliest Christian writings still preserved are among the epistles of Paul. The epistles of Paul are, of course, carried in the canonical Bible, and in some cases carry polemics against certain beliefs that gnostics might later have adopted. Furthermore, Paul carries the first documented mention of orthodox beliefs on soteriology - the means of Christ's salvation. On the other hand, many aspects of Paul's writing are at the root of ongoing controversy over what kind of picture Paul had of Christ - as a physical person, with a physical death and resurrection, or as a being of pure spirit. The latter is the defining characteristic of gnosticisim - that the divine must be spirit. The former, the defining characteristic of second century orthodoxy - that Christ was both fully human and fully divine, a doctrine that continues to carry much weight in the modern Christian church. The fact that Paul discusses the life of Jesus none at all makes it difficult to rule out - and easy to entertain the possibility - that Paul was influenced by beliefs that later came to prominence within the Gnostic sects.

It is only within the canonical Gospels that the defining characteristics of orthodox-not-gnostic doctrine are first established. They were written no earlier than 60 CE/AD. Among the canonical Gospels, the synoptics - Mark, Matthew, and Luke - are the earliest. If they are to be viewed as defining a doctrine of history, rather than a literary myth, then they clearly show that a form of orthodoxy contrary to gnostic notions existed at this time - earlier than any definitively Gnostic text has been found to exist. This is not enough to show definitively that the traditions that preceded the synoptics were more consistent with orthodoxy than gnosticism in the doctrines that distinguish the two, but it is a hint that orthodoxy may have the stronger claim to priority.

Where it becomes truly interesting is that, after the synoptics, there followed closely on their heels the Gospels of John and Thomas, at roughly the same time - around 100 CE/AD. John is a canonical, and in it's modern form is very clearly orthodox in tone. Thomas was a gnostic text. It is to gnosticism what the synoptics are to orthodoxy - the first text clearly committed to the distinctive doctrines of that sect. (To bring us back to the subject of Judas for a moment, we know with certainty that the Gospel of Judas was originally composed no more than 80 years after the date I suggest for John and Thomas, because of a detailed reference made to it in a letter from St. Iraneus.) Going back to John - as I mentioned, in its modern form, it is clearly committed to orthodoxy. But this may not have been the case in its earliest forms! This is too much to go into in this short post, but I recommend this paper on the topic. Suffice it to say that while the synoptic, canonical Gospels give priority to orthodoxy, there is ample evidence that the doctrinal seeds of gnosticism existed practically simultaneously, and probably within the same group of believers that produced them. In other words, before gnosticism became heretical, by the time of Iraneus, it's notions were common enough that they probably influenced some of what we read in our orthodox canon.

It is important to realize that much of what we find in the Gospel of Judas, and certainly in other 2nd through 4th century gnostic writings represents later developments of gnosticism, but we should not lose sight of the fact that orthodoxy cannot claim exclusive priority - and that the traditions which gnosticism grew out of, some of which were later discarded by the orthodox church, were among the same set of traditions which led to orthodoxy. In other words, neither set of doctrines is "original" to the Christian community, but each represents an innovation which followed after the first Christians accepted the new religion. As a consequence, both are important for trying to understand what the first Christians really believed, but neither provides an easy, concise answer either to what they believed, or what "really happened". It's going to take some work.

And that's all I have time for today, but I will return to this subject when and if I can.