The World of Religions, September-October 2006 —
The Gospel of Judas was the international bestseller of the summer (1) . An extraordinary fate for this Coptic papyrus, rescued from the sands after seventeen centuries of oblivion and whose existence was previously only known through Saint Irenaeus's work Against Heresies (180). It is therefore an important archaeological discovery (2) . However, it does not provide any revelation about the last moments of Jesus' life and there is little chance that this little book will be able to "strongly stir the Church", as the publisher proclaims on the back cover.
Firstly, because the author of this text, written in the middle of the 2nd century, is not Judas, but a Gnostic group who attributed the authorship of the story to the apostle of Christ to give it more meaning and authority (a common practice in Antiquity). Then because, since the discovery of Nag Hammadi (1945), which allowed the updating of a veritable Gnostic library including numerous apocryphal gospels, we know much more about Christian Gnosticism, and, ultimately, The Gospel of Judas does not shed any new light on the thought of this esoteric movement.
Isn't its resounding success, perfectly orchestrated by National Geographic, which bought the world rights, simply due to its extraordinary title: "The Gospel of Judas"? A striking, unthinkable, subversive combination of words. The idea that the one whom the four canonical Gospels and Christian tradition have presented for two thousand years as "the traitor", "the villain", "the henchman of Satan" who sold Jesus for a handful of money, could have written a gospel is intriguing. That he wanted to tell his version of events in an attempt to lift the stigma that weighs on him is as wonderfully romantic as the fact that this lost gospel has been found after so many centuries of oblivion.
In short, even if one knows nothing about the contents of this little book, one cannot help but be fascinated by such a title. This is all the more so, as the success of The Da Vinci Code has clearly revealed, given that our era doubts the official discourse of religious institutions on the origins of Christianity and that the figure of Judas, like those of the long list of victims or defeated adversaries of the Catholic Church, is rehabilitated by contemporary art and literature. Judas is a modern hero, a moving and sincere man, a disappointed friend who, deep down, was the instrument of divine will. For how could Christ have accomplished his work of universal salvation if he had not been betrayed by this unfortunate man? The Gospel attributed to Judas attempts to resolve this paradox by having Jesus explicitly say that Judas is the greatest of the apostles, because he is the one who will allow his death: "But you will surpass them all! For you will sacrifice the man who serves as my fleshly envelope" (56). This word sums up Gnostic thought well: the world, matter, the body are the work of an evil god (that of the Jews and of the Old Testament); the goal of spiritual life consists, through secret initiation, in the rare elect who possess an immortal divine soul, issued from the good and unknowable God, being able to free it from the prison of their body. It is quite amusing to note that our contemporaries, who love tolerance and are rather materialistic and who reproach Christianity for its contempt for the flesh, are infatuated with a text from a movement which was condemned in its time by the authorities of the Church for its sectarianism and because it considered the material universe and the physical body to be an abomination.
1. The Gospel of Judas, translation and commentary by R. Kasser, M. Meyer and G. Wurst, Flammarion, 2006, 221 p., €15.
2. See Le Monde des Religions, no. 18.