The Gospel of Judas by David Brakke;

Author:David Brakke; [Brakke, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

COMMENTS

This passage contains the heart of the gospel’s polemic against rival Christian communities. The author accuses other Christians of worshiping the wrong god in the name of Jesus: he depicts their worship as sacrificial and led by individuals who claim to be both priests and (by implication) the followers of or successors to the original disciples. This polemic finds its context in the second century, when several Christian sources, most connected in some way with Rome, used the vocabulary of eucharist and sacrifice to characterize their worship and/or way of life and claimed that Christian leaders were the successors of the apostles and were or resembled priests. Whether or not the authors who deployed such rhetoric intended to identify their eucharist of bread and wine as a sacrifice offered to god in connection with Jesus’s death, it could certainly be interpreted that way, and our author appears to have done so (Introduction IV.C). In this scene the author builds his polemic on a dream reported by the disciples, which includes acts of immorality that Jews traditionally attributed to false or idolatrous worship and specifically to bad priests (38.1–39.3). Jesus interprets the dream on two levels: first, as referring to the practice of the disciples or, rather, to the practice of contemporary groups that the author associates with the disciples (39.7–40.2), and, second, as referring to a cosmic and eschatological scene of sacrifice and judgment (40.2–26). Jesus then urges the disciples to desist from their sacrificial practices, which are in vain (41.1–9).

The scene opens in a way that obscures its temporal location and introduces the theme of shame. Jesus comes to the disciples “on another day,” which indicates a third appearance but does not require that it occurs on the day following the second appearance. The disciples announce that they have had multiple “great dreams” and that they saw Jesus in one. The single dream that they narrate seems likely to be the one in which they saw Jesus; otherwise, why report this fact? Probably the disciples equate the name that they saw with Jesus himself, for Jesus identifies the name as his (Schwarz 2012, 75). What the disciples saw was a dream (rasou, possibly onar as in Matt 1:20 etc.), not a vision (horama) as Judas will later see (44.17–18). Judas sees something real, an event that will happen and a building that exists but that he will not enter, while what the disciples see is symbolic and requires explanation. The disciples and Judas both describe their dreams or vision as “great,” a grandiose claim probably meant to portray them as self-important. Although the precise meaning is lost because of the lacunae, Jesus describes the disciples as having hidden themselves and asks them why. Possibly Jesus’s question alludes to Gen 3:8–13, in which Adam and Eve hide themselves in shame and god asks them a series of questions. The disciples feel shame at what they have seen, and rightly so, for they were in the dream and almost certainly participated in the sins that they witnessed.

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