Published by Today, Christianity has a following of over two billion people, qualifying it as the largest religion in the world. Roman Catholicism, the oldest of countless denominations, constitutes the largest percentage of that demographic (adherents.com).
This means that nearly a third of the population of the Earth believe in the same story as a basis of their faith. Jesus was betrayed by Judas, crucified, and rose on the third day to save the souls of all man kind. Even Jews and Muslims hold Jesus as a prophet and, minus the part about salvation, believe this story to be true as well.
However, in the past few years, a document has surfaced which presents a revolutionary reinterpretation of the life, death, and teachings of Jesus Christ, and threatens to shake the very foundations of the world’s most widely spread faith. The Gospel of Judas tells the story of how Judas Iscariot, traditionally considered the betrayer of Jesus, was in actuality Christ’s favorite disciple and possibly the only one of the thirteen who truly understood Jesus’ teachings. More importantly, the recently uncovered text presents a radically revised, Gnostic view of G-d, the world, and man’s relation to both.
In the early days of the Church, shortly following the death of Jesus, many different sects were vying for the minds and souls of followers. In essence, they competed to determine who would become the “true” Christianity. Of the sects that emerged in those fledgling days of Christianity, several fell under the umbrella of Gnosticism, including the view put forth by the Gospel of Judaism.
The early Gnostics held profoundly different beliefs from that of other Christians. Gnosticism derives from the word Gnosis, meaning “knowledge”. An individual gains knowledge through deep spiritual revelation, or a gnosis. “In the Gnostic view, there is a true, ultimate and transcendent God, who is beyond all created universes and who never created anything in the sense in which the word “create” is ordinarily understood.” Rather this god emanated from himself the substance from which the universe is composed and in the process created beings referred to as Aeons.
Aeons exist as “intermediate deific beings between the ultimate, True G-d and ourselves”. One such being, Sophia, in the course of her journeying emanated from herself a “flawed consciousness”. This being, also called the Demiurgos or “half-maker”, not knowing his true origins, believed himself the one absolute G-d. He proceeded to create the material and psychic universe in which we live.
Because of the imperfection of our creator, the world became an essentially flawed place. Humans did retain the “divine spark”. Our key to salvation, comes in the form of Gnosis. Being the mortals we are, however, we sometimes need assistance to unlock our true beings from the enslavement of our material selves. From the earliest times, the true G-d has sent forth Messengers of Light, namely Jesus, to aid us in this aspect.
All these views must have caused controversy among the ranks of the early Church. Gnosticism offered ideas vastly different from those of the Early Catholic church. Both, at the time, struggled to persuade newly converted Christians to their version of the faith, but as history tells, Catholicism eventually won out.
Craig Evans of Acadia Divinity College explains why the four canonical gospels of the Catholic church may have eclipsed the Gospel of Judas and other similar Coptic books, “Those early Christian groups were generally poor; they couldn’t afford to have more than a few books copied, so the members would say “I want the Apostle John”s gospel, and so on’. The canonical gospels are the ones that they themselves considered the most authentic.”
In any case, by the end of the fourth century Catholicism was the dominant denomination of Christianity. In 313, when Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, “his tolerance extended only to the organized Church”. Any heretics who disagreed with the official doctrines were forced to stop meeting. Then in 367, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, put forth a list of 27 texts which became the only ones to qualify as the New Testament. The Church denied the validity of any other gospels, such as that of Judas, and hid them from the public eye.
Many of these books became lost to the world for centuries. Then, in 1945 a library of 52 texts, many of them Gnostic, was discovered near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, and again, two years later, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found on cliffs in Israel. With the resurfacing of such apocryphal texts, interests in Gnosticism and other historical faiths began to grow.
