The Not So Secret Gospels

Once the dusty preserve of theologians and historians, the success of the Da Vinci code has turned an ancient religious document into a major publishing event. There could hardly be a luckier time - or more providential depending on your perspective - for publishing a newly discovered gospel.

When the antiquities dealer, Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos, bought an ancient papyrus book in April 2000 containing the Secret Gospel of Judas, he could not even find a buyer. He can have had no idea that, by the time a translation was published, the most talked about book in the western world would be a conspiracy thriller about suppressed gospels and the secret origins of Christianity.

The Da Vinci Code has turned this 2nd Century tract from a talking point at theological conferences to a media event, perhaps even a blockbuster. The translators' press release said the "launch is due in Easter 2006" - and New Testament scholarship very rarely gets to be "launched", it is just published in journals.

Scholars to Dollars

So what's the story with the Gospel of Judas? Will it rehabilitate this supposed traitor and arch-villain, not unlike what Da Vinci Code author, Dan Brown, has tried to do with Mary Magdalene? Will it add another layer of intrigue and mystery to the tangled web of religious history? Will it give Christian scholars nightmares, or a good laugh? Should we take it with a pinch of salt, or as gospel?

The first thing to say is that we do not know much about the precise contents yet. National Geographic has put the whole text online, but, with only half a dozen short pages in translation, those of us whose Coptic is a little rusty will have to wait a while.

What we do know is that the Gospel of Judas was condemned in 180AD by Irenaus the Bishop of Lyons. So it existed by then and had made its way from Egypt to Gaul.

National Geographic has had a variety of tests carried out on the remains of the document, from carbon dating to handwriting analysis, which place it in about the 4th Century. So we can be pretty confident that this is the original Gospel of Judas and not a modern forgery.

It evidently portrays Judas sympathetically. Rather than betray Jesus to the religious leaders, he is told by Jesus to hand him over. More than that, he is Jesus's closest friend and the one to whom Jesus chooses to unveil all his most deep and secret teachings.

Silver lining

This puts the Gospel of Judas on what is actually a pretty crowded shelf of 'secret gospels' from the 2nd Century. Alternative histories of Christianity were about as popular 1,800 years ago as they are now. A new gospel is exciting for scholars, but it is hardly the first. There are four gospels in the New Testament. But by the time Irenaus attacked this writing, there were, according to some estimates, more than 20 known Christian gospels doing the rounds.

This means there is nothing very revolutionary or scandalous in itself about another new gospel turning up. We have the Gospel of Peter, for example, in which Jesus is not hurt by his crucifixion, and the Gospel of the Ebionites, in which he is a vegetarian. There is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, where the child Jesus makes birds out of mud and they come alive, and then a boy bumps into him and he kills him.

What is clear from Irenaus, and from as much of Judas as we have seen so far, is that it is a gnostic gospel. Gnosticism was a very broad religious movement - there were Christian and non-Christian gnostics.

Rival histories

They tended to believe that matter was evil, and created by the shoddiest of all gods, and that Jesus was disembodied spirit come to deliver selected souls from matter by revealing secret 'knowledge' (gnosis). As these ideas violently contradicted the version of Jesus and his teaching given by all leaders of the church in the 1st and 2nd Centuries, and by all the 1st Century gospels, they were put into 'secret' gospels.

In these Jesus tends to take one chosen disciple aside - John, Thomas, Mary Magdalene - and reveals secret truths about God and heaven too deep for the rest of them. Thus gnostics hoped to explain why the people whom Jesus had left in charge of his church did not seem to know any of his most important teachings.

So we can expect the Gospel of Judas to have a lot of esoteric religion in it. Whether there is anything as page-turning as Dan Brown is another matter.