Writings of Yehuda Shabatay   Yehuda Shabatay      List of honorees     Louis Rose Society       Jewishsightseeing home  San Diego Jewish Times

Our Past in Present Tense

The Gospel of Judas

Dr. Yehuda Shabatay                                                                            .
San Diego Jewish Times, April 21, 2006

SAN DIEGO—Recently, the National Geographic Society announced to a group of scholars that a translation of the Gospel of Judas is now available
to all interested. According to Terry Garcia, executive vice president of the Society, the document contains “the most significant ancient non-biblical
text found in the past 60 years.” Even the few quotes published in newspapers to date underline that statement because they shed a completely new
light on the relationship between Judas Iscariot and Jesus and contradict Judas’ characterization that exists in all four Gospels included in the New Testament. As is well known, each evangelist introduces Judas Iscariot — or Yehuda, the man from Keriot, a village in southern Judea — as the betrayer of Jesus. Judas’s personality is the lowest of the low: while he keeps the disciples’ treasury, he steals from it all the time (John 12:6) and finally betrays his master to the Jewish High Priests for 30 pieces of silver (Matthew 26:14-15). He doesn’t care about the poor, he is money hungry, and is influenced by Satan in his deeds (Luke 22:3).

According to John Shelby Spong, a former Episcopal Bishop of Newark, NJ, who now teaches at Harvard and is still a prolific author of highly regarded works on Christianity, the story of Judas is “the ultimate source of anti-Semitism.” In one of his articles, the Rev. Spong points out that “every detail that has been written into Judas’ story has been lifted almost directly out of other betrayal stories in the Hebrew Scriptures.” For example, Joseph was sold for 20 pieces of silver — at his brother, Judah’s advice (Gen. 37:27-28). Another interesting parallel is found in the cycle of stories about King David. It is told there that at some stage David replaced his military chief, Joab, with Amasa. Joab, under the guise of wanting to congratulate his successor, grabbed Amasa’s beard, ostensibly to extend to him a kiss of friendship. But that proved to be a “Judas’s kiss,” because Joab disemboweled Amasa with his sword (2 Sam. 20:9-10). Interestingly, the Acts of the Apostles clearly refers to that story, suggesting that after Judas bought a field with the 30 pieces of silver, he hanged himself. “He burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out” (Acts 1:18, cf. Matt. 27:5).

After Christianity became a separate religion, the Jews were — and in many cases still are — compared to Judas Iscariot. According to James Parker, a British clergyman and historian, the early Church fathers frequently spoke about the Jews’ avarice and neglect of the poor. An even more cruel accusation was made in 1492, a short while before the expulsion of all the Jews from Spain. As Don Isaac Abravanel tried to persuade King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to allow his fellow Jews to stay, by offering a sizeable amount of money to their empty treasury, the Grand Inquisitor, Juan Torquemada burst into the meeting room. “See here the crucifix of our Savior, whom the wretched Judas sold for 30 pieces of silver to his enemies,” he shouted. “If you applaud this action, sell him for a higher price!” Then he put the crucifix in front of the rulers and left. Torquemada won, and the Jews were expelled.

Yet, some Christian scholars have raised probing questions about Judas’s negative portrayal for quite a while. In their opinion, Judas’s undisputed membership in Jesus’s inner circle, and his presence even at the Last Supper, may indicate a different reason for his betrayal, rather than receiving “blood money.” Some have suggested that Judas wanted Jesus to confront the Roman authorities as a political messiah, and that his betrayal was the result of misguided zeal. More recent analysts have interpreted Judas’s action less than a betrayal and more as an attempt to force Jesus and the Jewish authorities into a dialogue. Thus, Jesus may have been “handed over” to those authorities so that he might defend and proclaim his identity as the messiah. (Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, 2000, page 749).

To most scholars’ surprise, the Gospel of Judas comes up with an entirely different, seemingly revolutionary idea. It maintains that Judas was so close to Jesus that, three days before Passover, “Jesus said to him, ‘Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom…’ And then Jesus instructed Judas to go ahead and enable him (i.e., Jesus) to get rid of his physical flesh and thereby liberate the true spiritual self or divine being within him.” While this is contrary to the teachings of present day mainstream Christianity, Karen L. King, a professor of the early history of Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, maintains that the Judas Gospel might reflect the debates that arose in the early centuries. In an interview with The New York Times on April 7, Professor King stated: “You can see how early Christians could say: if Jesus’ death was all part of God’s plan, then Judas’s betrayal was part of God’s plan (too).” This is certainly logical, because there has never been any doubt that Jesus’s birth, public career and death were preordained, yet Judas’s deed was condemned by the Church.

Thus, one can fully understand why the Gospel of Judas was cast out, together with several other gospels by the Church authorities and saved by “heretical” sects, known as the Gnostics (from gnosis — knowledge in Greek). Following the disappearance of those sects, their writings became forgotten — until they were rediscovered in the past seven decades, primarily in Egypt. As more and more of such Gnostic writings come to light, numerous questions arise about the beliefs and practices of Christians in the first three or four centuries of the Common Era.

But Christians are not the only ones who have to face problems presented by archaeological discoveries. We Jews are similarly prompted to reevaluate our understanding of the late Second Temple period since the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and members of both religious groups are still struggling to comprehend the beliefs and the practices of our ancestors in that crucial period of time in which those scrolls were composed. The Gospel of Judas is only one more challenge to all of us interested in our past — a most challenging one, I admit.

Dr. Yehuda Shabatay received rabbinical training in Budapest, a master of jurisprudence degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his doctorate in Hebrew literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. He was engaged in Jewish educational administration over most of his career and now teaches Jewish studies and history at Palomar College and San Diego State University.