Reading Judas by King Karen L. & Pagels Elaine

Author:King, Karen L. & Pagels, Elaine [King, Karen L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, Inc.
Published: 2007-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

A T THE BEGINNING of this essay on the Gospel of Judas, we asked what hope the author offers to redeem his anger. Have we found that hope, that vision? The Gospel of Judas is a hard text to read, not only because of its strange language of numbers and aeons, alien names, and breaks in the text but because of the strident anger that impels the author to mock and denounce those seeking meaning in the unjust execution and torture of friends and family. Sometimes his tone sounds cruelly offhand in its use of anti-Jewish and homophobic invective—accusing presumably Jewish priests before the Temple of murder and same-sex relations, seemingly with no concern for how such throwaway lines of conventional polemic can harm people.

Yet in spite of his anger, Judas ’s writer evokes a vision of “the most radiant conditions to inhabit”—a great and luminous temple of vibrant greenery in a place far from all the civilized evils of moral chaos and memory’s oblivion—a glorious dream, especially for those who live in dry lands occupied and ruled by Roman legions. The measure of this gospel lies, as Heaney suggests, in its power to transform. Is there a transformative light in these pages? Not many early Christians, it would seem, found that here—except perhaps for those who copied this gospel and, as rumor has it, carefully preserved it in a limestone box, hidden away in a cave, guarded for centuries only by the dead. For the rest, the Gospel of Judas remained a path not taken, its horror of bodies tortured in God’s name cast aside in favor of bright and unyielding stories of heroes who died for the faith.

We cannot understand this gospel—cannot read it as “good news”—apart from those circumstances of its time and place, apart from Roman persecution and the painful controversies it ignited. Recalling these things allows us to feel some empathy with this Christian, his grief, his anger, perhaps even his insistence on divine punishment as he imagines handing church leaders over to the path of death he feels they had chosen for themselves when they decided to worship a vengeful god. Like all moral texts, the Gospel of Judas might lead us to ask where we stand in our world of polarized religious violence. But that sympathy, and even that self-reflection, may not be enough; the luminous vision might be too shaded by anger and revenge to transform. Or perhaps not.

This long-hidden text now takes its place with such sources as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary of Magdala . The Gospel of Judas, far from being bizarre and marginal as we initially suspected, leads us right into the center of the debates about what Christianity would become. Like the other recently recovered texts, the Gospel of Judas helps give us a more detailed, complex, and above all more human account of the history of Christianity than anyone could have ever written without them. When we go on to place more

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