Hero, fool or traitor? Those are now the three possibilities for Judas, the onetime apostle, based on the Bible and a recently published text.
The New Testament is clear that Judas was a traitor. But the publication in April of The Gospel of Judas, a 1,700-year-old Coptic document, made headlines with its claim that Judas was a hero: the disciple, in fact, to whom Jesus entrusted his deepest secrets: “Jesus said to him, ‘Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom.'”
But in early December, a New Testament scholar at Acadia University said the translators made a mistake. He believes an accurate reading shows Judas to have been duped.
Either way, the notion of secret knowledge in the Gospel of Judas is a mark of Gnosticism, the subject of this issue's cover story.
Interest in secret knowledge about the afterlife has heightened recently over the publication of several works about Gnosticism and especially through the popularity of the novel and movie The Da Vinci Code.
We want the secret to immortality and the aphorism “knowledge is power” was never more apt than in respect of this quest to live forever with God or even to become divine.
The desire for such knowledge is rooted in our (fallen) humanity: “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.” (Genesis 3:22)
Gnosticism is also marked by a sharp division between the material and the spiritual. By Jesus' time, philosophers understood that God was immaterial and beyond time and space. Many people therefore rejected the idea that God could have anything to do with matter: could not have created this mutable world, certainly could not have become incarnate.
Those who were eventually called Gnostics rejected Christian teaching that everyone will have a heavenly body at the Resurrection. And they believed only those who were worthy of knowing the secret teachings would be admitted into heaven.
We may smirk at such ideas, but the temptation is powerful. The human drive to know the answer to every problem, to have the solution for every ethical dilemma is evident in Christianity even today.
But ethics is not a matter of looking up the right answer like Harry Potter trying to find the right spell to win the Quidditch World Cup.
Increasingly these days, theologians and ministers are suggesting that in matters of faith and ethics it is more important to ask the right question than to find the right answer — if in fact there is only one “right” answer.
It's a venerable and biblical way of approaching a problem. Clearly, there are some hard and fast rules in the Bible. Just as clearly, some rules change over time. Even in the Bible. Jesus himself re-interpreted the Holiness Code, little of which we follow today.
And Jesus was fond of asking questions. When challenged about temple versus Roman coinage, his first response is a question: whose image is on the coin?
One of the most famous examples of asking the right question is the 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, (the Sum of Theology). Aquinas's teaching about God and creation is directed by a series of questions. He leads the reader to an answer by referring to quotes from scripture and major theologians who lived before him.
Faced with two apparently contradictory statements, Aquinas doesn't pick one over the other. Instead, he asks what question the authors were answering. By so doing, by asking the right question, he reveals that appearances are deceiving; that the apparent contradictions evaporate when properly examined.
We might do well to take a page from Aquinas. The interest in New Age spirituality and people's ability to believe the most fantastic parts of a novel such as The Da Vinci Code are not always best met with a dogmatic rebuttal.
People are not stupid. Asking why they believe something we think is wrong may reveal deeper questions. In other words, asking the right question may uncover even more questions and, paradoxically, get closer to the truth.
The current interest in Gnosticism should not threaten Christians. It should be seen as an opportunity for evangelism and faithful questioning.
