“I Know Who You Are and Where You Have Come From. You Are From the Immortal Realm."

Yesterday was Gospel of Judas day, the public release of the third-century Gnostic text that has every early-church pundit scrambling for airtime like it was the Da Vinci Code all over again.

Is it an authentic Gospel? Yes.

Did it really happen? No. To be fair, Mark didn't happen either. Deal with it.

If it didn't happen, does it matter? I think so. It's not just insight into theological puzzling in the third century, I think there is some Wisdom here. Of course one reading is not going to do it; I'm looking forward to some time of reflection and absorption.

When he approached his disciples, gathered together and seated and offering a prayer of thanksgiving over the bread, he laughed.

The disciples said to him, “Master, why are you laughing at our prayer of thanksgiving? We have done what is right.”

He answered and said to them, “I am not laughing at you. You are not doing this because of your own will but because it is through this that your god will be praised.”

This gentle chastisement is I think a great lesson. The disciples here are not offering a eucharist, a thanks-giving, because they are not truly thankful. The root of the word is charis, grace (which is why they call it "saying grace") and Grace is not present here. They are, essentially, hedging their bets, trying to please God by going through the motions. Instead of acting through the heart, through the will, they are merely trying to appease some third-party entity, likely out of either rote or some fear of retribution for omission. The Master laughs at how pointless this is; the disciples here are monkeys at typewriters, bashing at keys with little hope of resultant meaning.

But God caused gnosis to be given to Adam and those with him, so that the kings of chaos and the underworld might not lord it over them.

This is from a riff on cosmogeny strikingly similar to that of The Apocryphon of John, which itself is a later Christianization of the Hermetic Poimandres. And of course the line that jumps up and down and says "I'm a Gnostic text!"

But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.

And the payoff. If the crucifixion and resurrection are Divine Plan, then Judas' betrayal is the fulcrum on which all of it rests.

The most interesting part in all of this is the delegation and institutionalization of the role of the Slayer in this myth. In earlier forms it is the Brother who is the Nemesis of the Hero; see how the sociopolitical milieu dictates that in this version, the Nemesis is part of an overarching mechanism of persecution: Judas, the Romans, Pilate – not one character, but an entire kosmos of characters. Judas is the earthly "brother" of Jesus just as Lucifer is the heavenly brother of Michael, but the Judaean backdrop of the story requires that Judas have an entourage including a cohort (100 soldiers), an angry mob, and the entire Sanhedrin.

The New York times has a PDF of excerpts here, and there is a very good National Geographic resource here.

Enjoy.