The Lost Gospel of Judas: Separating Fact from Fiction

by Stanley E. Porter, Gordon L. Heath

With the discovery of the "Gospel of Judas" came an outpouring of hyperbolic language, both negative and positive. Alongside the overwhelming opinions of historians and scholars was the quiet bewilderment of people who simply weren't sure what to think -- confusion that wasn't helped by vast media attention. In "The Lost Gospel of Judas," Stanley Porter and Gordon Heath attempt to set the record straight. They begin with a look at the initial responses to the announcement of the gospel's existence, then provide a brief history of Judas himself as seen in the New Testament and in church history, and of Gnostic philosophy.

Further sections consider other recent textual finds and examine the discovery, content, and authenticity of the gospel. They also delve into the relationship this new gospel has with the New Testament canon and contemplate the "Lucky Winner" theory of canonical history.

"The Lost Gospel of Judas" sifts through all the evidence, presenting the results with more than enough scholarship to be respected and enough clarity to be easily understood.

135 pages, Paperback

First published February 23, 2007

About the author

Stanley E. Porter (PhD, University of Sheffield) is president, dean, and professor of New Testament, and Roy A. Hope Chair in Christian Wolrdview at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario. He has authored or edited dozens of books, including How We Got the New Testament and Fundamentals of New Testament Greek.

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little book is a reply to the challenge posed by "The Gospel of Judas." This extra-canonical "gospel," a Gnostic document written in Coptic, probably dates from the fourth century, although it is possibly a translation of an earlier Greek writing. It purports to reinterpret in a more positive light the role played by Judas in the events surrounding the suffering and death of Jesus Christ.

The authors do a good job putting The Gospel of Judas in context for the non-specialist but interested reader. They explain some very basic facts, such as what Gnosticism was and why it was such a problem for the early church, whether this relatively recent find is genuine or a forgery, and whether it is really as ground-breaking as the media hype claimed.

The authors give convincing arguments that, although the Gospel of Judas is likely to be genuine, it is only one of a number of revisionist writings that borrow a somewhat low-profile or even peripheral figure from the New Testament and use him or her to retell and reinterpret the biblical narrative. Contemporary scholars who are mistrustful of orthodox Christianity gravitate toward such documents because they can be used to bolster the questionable theory of one "official" version of Christianity which dominated and systematically extinguished all the other versions as well as their extra-canonical "scriptures". However, a careful analysis of the Gospel of Judas shows that it is not really compatible with this kind of conspiracy theory.

[Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

For decades at least, popular culture has been periodically excited by discoveries of various ancient Gnostic writings, as sensationalized press and TV accounts eagerly proclaim that each of these discredits the very foundations of traditional Christianity; the Gospel of Judas is the most recent of these. The mythos is fueled by fiction and movies such as The Da Vinci Code and The Gnostic Secret, which hordes of readers imagine are fact-based. Many people are understandably confused by the whole thing, and wish they had some solid facts. This book is an attempt to provide those facts, and put them in an evidence-based, serious historical perspective.

Porter is a New Testament scholar, and Heath a historian of Christianity, at McMaster Divinity College, Canada's premier evangelical seminary; both are well-respected and competent academics in their fields. Here, though, they're intentionally writing for ordinary laypeople, so their presentation is short and simple (though they do use footnotes), presupposing no special knowledge of the subject. After introducing the controversial and hyped splash made in popular media by the 2006 release of the translated text of the Gospel of Judas, they set the document in the broader context of Gnosticism as a whole, and give a thumbnail sketch of that movement. As they note, that task is complicated by the fact that there were many varied Gnostic sects, though they had some basic ideas and attitudes in common; a root idea of all Gnostics, though, is the idea that "the physical or material was something evil that needed to be escaped from; only the spiritual was good." They also note that this is based on the ideas of Plato (actually, though they don't trace it that far, this strand of thought antedates Plato; it was introduced into Greek philosophy centuries earlier by Pythagoras, who had traveled in India and returned with many Hindu ideas) though they don't indicate how pervasive this mindset was among educated Greek-speakers in the Hellenistic era. (The writings of Paul and John both explicitly combat heretical ideas in the first-century Church that are clearly proto-Gnostic; and the mainstream strand of Christianity that became the Catholic and Orthodox churches, while never going as far as the Gnostics, absorbed a lot of this attitude, as evidenced by the steadily mounting glorification, in the early Christian centuries, of celibacy, asceticism and monasticism, and comments such as Clement of Alexandria's serious assertion that Jesus never had a bowel movement because that would have compromised his divinity. But Porter and Heath don't deal with those facets of the subject.)

Our authors then discuss the first mention of a Gospel of Judas, by Irenaeus late in the 2nd century, who associates it with a Gnostic sect called the Cainites; they go on to summarize the few other extant Patristic references to the Cainites or to the document. (They point out that there is no evidence that the work Irenaeus and Epiphanius mention is necessarily the same one as the recently discovered text, but in their chapter summary they seem to assume that it is. This is one of several features of the book that indicate rather hasty composition, without careful proofreading; obviously, that's a negative feature.) This is followed by a brief discussion of the finding of the manuscript itself, mostly to set it in the context of the extensive discoveries of papyrus documents in Egypt and Palestine, beginning in the late 1800s. One chapter summarizes and explains the content of the Gospel of Judas.

Finally, the remaining four chapters, broadly speaking, deal with the significance of the document (which they contextualize clearly as part of the Gnostic tradition of "rehabilitation literature" of marginal or disparaged Biblical figures), if any, for our confidence in the validity of traditional Christian faith. (The authors particularly critique Bart Ehrman's revisionist claim that the Gnostic interpretation of Christianity is just as legitimate as the traditional one.) Probably their weakest argument is the assertion that the cumulative evidence of extensive correspondences of elements in the Gospel of Judas with elements in the canonical Gospels proves or suggests literary dependence on the latter; one could just as well argue that they simply share a common source in Christian tradition. But in toto, they make a cogent and convincing case that, first, the real question is not (as postmodernist philosophy would ask), what would I personally like for Jesus' teaching to have been? but rather, what does objectively evaluated historical evidence suggest that his teaching actually was? --and, second, that every line of evidence we have tends to confirm that the canonical New Testament, and the mainstream tradition of the Church, much more faithfully represent Jesus' teachings than the later Gnostic writings (which even Ehrman recognizes date from no earlier than the 2nd century). The latter, on the other hand, reflect a radical rejection, not only of the original Christian preaching and teaching, but of the entire Old Testament foundation that Jesus built upon.

As noted above, this book does have its flaws of hasty composition and occasionally weak argumentation. A few sentences read clumsily, and there is a minor factual error when the authors say that James the brother of Jesus is not mentioned in the canonical Gospels (he is mentioned in Mark 6:3). The brevity of the text (120 p., plus the two indexes and the bibliography) means that this is not a source for an in-depth view of the subject and its related issues --though the two- page list of "Selected Reading" points the reader to sources that would provide an in-depth education in New Testament background. But it certainly is a good starting point for interested laypeople who want a basic framework for evaluating the extravagant claims being made for the Gnostics in some popular media. (There have been a spate of other books written that seek to do the same thing, and also from an evangelical perspective; but I've read only this one.)