The Gospel of Judas or Hugh Hewitt is a Democrat Operative!

Imagine that someone told you that Hugh Hewitt was a secret agent for Howard Dean. With breathless assurance, he tells you that Hugh has been given instructions to act as an advocate of Republican or conservative values as part of an elaborate plan. What is the plot? Dean is betting Bush will implode during his second term. This implosion, better than a narrow Kerry win in 2004, will set up the White House for a true progressive in 2008. Hewitt was recruited by Dean from PBS in order to advance this deep plot to deny the Republicans the White House long term and to revive the far left. Hewitt attacks Democrats in order to help them.

Now this is an amazing revelation, contrary to all information one can gather about Hewitt from public records. The Hewitt dissident is going to need some pretty potent evidence to convince Hewitt fans, especially his closest friends, that Hugh secretly pined his entire life to write for the Daily Kos. Now suppose your source is breaking this odd story decades after the fact and his only evidence is an alleged written record of a conversation Hewitt had with one of his friends which was heard by nobody else. Conveniently this evidence also fits an eccentric view of Republican politics in the early twenty-first century, which otherwise would be impossible.

When folks want you to believe something Big . . . they need Big Evidence. Sadly, secret conversations that fly in the face of common sense and the public record need more verification than one person’s word . . . especially if the person reporting the conversation was not there . . . and the report conveniently fits odd views the person holds.

And yet to believe the mainstream media, and folks I am talking to in the airport, Christians should be deeply disturbed by even less evidence advanced in the so-called “Gospel of Judas.” Some media sources act as if the entire Christian faith might be in trouble because of this “explosive document.”

What does this have to do with the Gospel of Judas? Just like the Hugh as Democrat thesis, this ancient manuscript asks us to believe the unlikely based on the improbable.

First, the good news: anyone who loves old books (hurrah!) has to be happy to find any manuscript from the third or fourth century. Any new text will expand scholarship. It is far better to learn something directly than indirectly and an early manuscript that cuts out some of the middle men of textual transmission is helpful.

The bad news, from a scholarly point of view, is that there is not much new here or much that is exciting in terms of explosive new ideas. Ancient Christian apologists wrote about the gospel of Judas summarizing its main points. Irenaeus, perhaps relying on earlier apologetic works, is the first example now extant. Now, if this new text is a real one, we know Irenaeus got it right. We have long known such a Gospel existed by about 150 A.D. This new manuscript does not contradict this date and in fact suggests it.

What does this mean? If the Gospel of Judas undermined the faith, then every reading Christian would have left the faith by now as we have know of its claims for centuries! It is nifty to have the actual text, but that adds nothing to the argument. There is nothing in this text (so far as I can tell from news accounts) we did not already know.

The Gospel of Judas claims that Jesus told Judas to betray him. It claims that Judas is the best disciple (convenient!). It was written decades after Judas was dead . . . and so it could not be falsified even if true. There is just no reason to believe it.

We have long known that there was an early sub-Christian group that decided Judas was a good guy. Why? First, some Christians wanted to make Christianity less Jewish. They wanted to squash Greek ideas into Christianity and the standard story told in the canonical Gospels got in the way. The traditional Gospels don’t leave an “exciting Jesus” from the point of view of those who want religion weird, esoteric, or Greek. Jesus in the oldest Gospels (which are plausibly written by eye witnesses) is just too first century and very Jewish. How can he fit into the world of mystery religions and Greek philosophy?

Now I am a big fan of thinking about this sort of question, but one must resist the temptation to change the text and give oneself a Jesus that makes the job easier. Sadly, this early Christian sect, the Gnostics, took the easy way out and began to write their own texts.

The second reason these sub-Christians groups wanted a new Gospel was a desire to know stuff no one else knew. This is one reason we have so few copies of their books (in fact Christians preserved their memory in many cases!). Copies of Gnostic texts were few and far between (unlike the Gospels) because these groups did not want “public readings” (as happened with the Gospels), but only readings for the insiders.

The Gnostics had a problem. Public Christianity was, well, public and allowed the common folk to examine their arguments and sacred texts. The same kind of person who wants to become a Free Mason today and learn secret words and “deep insights” unavailable to the “outsider” also existed in the ancient world. Some folks just don’t like worshipping with just anybody. They want a small group of the “brightest and the best.”

Think of these Gnostic gospels as the club handbooks for the secret societies of the ancient world. We don’t get the funny hats of groups like the Shriners when we look at the ancient secrets societies, but we do get the funny ideas. The Gnostic texts contain teachings that do not fit early Christian documents from the first century (like the letters of Paul). They contain bizarre (really!) stories about Jesus childhood and often show strong reliance of the canonical Gospels/or standard accounts.

Gnostic ideas lost in the market place of ideas. They lost because their ideas were derivative, elitist, and misogynistic.

The Gnostics did not lose because they were persecuted. They were losing or had lost long before Christians had the power to do much overt persecuting, unless one counts having better arguments as persecution! Gnostics simply lost the argument. Go read a Gnostic gospel and compare it to the Jesus of the canonical gospels. The Gnostic gospels do not reflect a Jewish Jesus (which is suspicious since Jesus was Jewish) or the worldview of the converted Jews of the first century. They do not jibe well with the letters of Paul, which even the most liberal scholars agree come within living memory of the events portrayed. At least Mark (on even the most liberal reading) is based on manuscripts from the period of the eye witnesses to the events and is plausibly written within the lifetime of those eye witnesses.

The canonical gospels argue that Judas betrayed his Lord because he was a bad man. Ask yourself what you know of betrayers. Is it more likely Judas was motivated by money (in your experience of bad men) or secret plans to exalt Jesus? Surely Judas as bad guy is the simplest and most plausible interpretation of the betrayal of our Lord! The burden of proof is and was on the Gnostics to provide contrary evidence. This was a burden they could not meet in the second century and there is no reason to think they could do so now.

Bluntly, orthodox Christianity had no profound reason to lie about Judas. Nothing so great would have been gained or lost theologically if Judas had been written out of the story altogether. He is put in because he was there . . . and those who knew him well assigned motives to him. On the other hand, the Gnostic group’s very existence depended on having mysterious and counter-intuitive secret knowledge. They needed to be weird . . . and the Gospel of Judas was written to fill that need.

Why is this so attractive to modern people? If there is nothing new here, then why do we get so excited? Our interest often gets mixed up with bizarre anti-Catholic conspiracies that have been popular since the founding of the nation. Otherwise responsible people will speculate about all sorts of documents hidden for centuries in the Vatican. Of course to believe this one will have to ignore that the Pope has been forced out of the Vatican several times in history, be utterly cynical about every Pope (surely one of them was not a fraud?), and believe something based on no positive evidence, but their hatred of the Bishop of Rome.

Waggish liberal scholars will coyly suggest that the gospels might hint at Judas and Jesus having such a relationship. They point to Jesus telling Judas to do what he must do quickly, but then overlook the guilt assigned by the same gospels to Judas. Of course they never actually argue this openly, because they know how weak of an argument this is.

Why? It proves too much. These ideas assume the Biblical writers were too stupid to get rid of a pro-Judas statement, but clever enough to invent his guilt. Why invent reasons for his guilt but leave in mitigating passages? The more sensible view is that the Gospels (which were written very early in time) were written before the Gnostic gospel of Judas. They don’t reflect any theological worry that anyone (and who would?) would suspect that Judas was on the Jesus team. As a result, they report the whole story without fear, including parts that their later foes would use against them. (“Aha, but did not Jesus tell Judas to act?” “Well, yes, but He was very unhappy with Judas’ choice. Evil must come but woe be to he by whom it comes.”) If the “Judas story” found in the Gospel of Judas had really been around at the time of the writing of the canonical Gospels, and the Gospel writers were so all fired intent on changing history to grind a theological axe then they would have left out any expression that helped “the other side.”

But just as conventional historians have always thought . . . the Gnostics and their books were the product of the second wave of Christianity that was struggling with its Jewish roots and wondering what to do. The Gnostics offered the Church an anti-woman, anti-Jesus, elitist, Greek path. The Church found the only safe road was to embrace her actual roots and stick to history. That is why the older Gospels survived.

What is the mainstream media doing? Religion sells. Over written stories confirming religion sell papers. . . but so do stories that attack religion. The temptation is strong for reporters, who in my experience have staggering ignorance about religion, to hype a story. They don’t much care for traditional religion, are not well read, and hype sells. So it is easy for them to decided to challenge Christianity right before Easter (what odd timing!). . . sell a television special and then move on. The good news is that the new media including blogs can quickly give another point of view.

Finally, we should all beware. Ancient texts or artifacts sometimes get announced, even “confirmed” only to turn out to be fakes. Anybody remember the “bone box” of James, Jesus brother? It may be real, but is probably a fake. It was announced with the same explosive media hoopla. . . The document in question has a very odd history to say the least . . . and we shall see what happens when the entire world of scholarship gets a crack at it.

Just as you would require major evidence to believe Hugh was a secret Democrat, so you should need huge amounts of evidence to believe that Judas was a secret Jesus agent. You are not tempted to worry about Hugh . . . you should not worry about Jesus!

The sad thing is that ill informed people might believe the hype and worry.

More blogging later, but I am in the Pittsburg airport following a great time at the wonderful Franciscan University of Steubenville, as a guest of a student club. It seems to me that this University would be a great choice for Roman parents looking for a first class education integrating spiritual and academic values. I was very impressed with the students I met.