Reading the Gospel of Judas XII: The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper

One of the first scenes in the Gospel of Judas has Jesus “when he visited his disciples when they were gathered seat giving thanks over the bread. He mocked his disciples.”[1] What were his disciples doing that was worthy of ridicule? The same phrase is used in the Mesokemic version of Matthew 26:27 when Jesus, administering the Last Supper, gives thanks over the cup of wine (the Bohairic version uses a different expression). It is also used in the Lycopolitan version of John 6:23 where they remember the place of the feeding the five thousand when Jesus gave thanks over the bread. For the early Christian readers of the Gospel of Judas, this seems to have been designed to refer to the Eucharist, or the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. This reading is confirmed in the next sentence:

They said to him: Master, why are you laughing at our Eucharist, What have we done that merits that? He answered and said to them: I was not laughing at you; you are not doing this because you want to but because your god will be blessed through this.[2]

When Jesus instituted the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, he said that it was his new covenant and gave remission of sins (Matthew 26:28). (Its covenant aspect is why it is called a sacramentum “an oath.”) This was one of the most prominent practices of the early Church, one even mentioned by Pliny[3] making it the earliest Christian practice mentioned by non-Christians. Its importance to the earliest Christians can hardly be overstated. The writer of the Gospel of Judas rejects the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.

This is of a piece with making the betrayer of Jesus as his most devoted follower. The Gospel of Judas signals within the first two pages that it is rejecting those things that Christians held most sacred.

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[1] Gospel of Judas 33.26-34.3.

[2] Gospel of Judas 34.3-11.

[3] Pliny, Epistles 10.96.

Reading the Gospel of Judas XI: Lycopolitan again

One of the interesting features of some Lycopolitan documents is the use of the djandje (ϫ) where Sahidic and other dialects have a chi (ⲭ). The two letters look strikingly similar, the only difference being the line underneath the djandje. One could easily expect that perhaps the scribe had a quirky way of not picking up his pen when making the letter. That, however, would be a mistake.

Way back in the Twenty-first Dynasty, almost a millennium and a half before most Lycopolitan manuscripts were written, the Egyptian language began to lose the distinction between its g, k, and q. This can be seen in the misspellings that appear then and become more frequent with time. The interchange between these letters becomes common in Demotic.

Be that as it may, it does not explain the interchange between the djandje (ϫ), which usually has a sound more like the English j, and the chi (ⲭ), which is a variation of the g/k/q sound.

Modern Egyptian Arabic, however, has precisely that confusion. The letter that most Arabic dialects pronounce as a j is pronounced in the Cairo area as a g. This dialectical feature is more widespread than just Cairo, but is more likely to disappear the further south one goes.

Lycopolitan's use of a djandje for a chi may be early evidence of this sound shift. They are writing a j (ϫ) for a k/g (ⲭ), because they pronounce the j sound as a g. This is also evident in Bohairic, a northern dialect, which writes ⲛϫⲓ for Sahidic ⲛϭⲓ. The spelling may be different but the pronunciation was likely the same.

Reading the Gospel of Judas X: Theology

In the Gospel of Judas, when Jesus approaches the twelve disciples, they are “sitting together studying theology” (Gospel of Judas 33.24-26). Judas was depicted as one of those doing so, but so were all the other apostles.

The term used for theology in this passage is a calque of the Greek term. The term was literally translated into Coptic rather than borrowed as it was in English.

The term theology is first used by Plato, in his dialogue, The Republic. Plato means by it lies told about gods to children and child-like adults to manipulate them for political purposes.[1] In that passage Plato reasons that as long as one says nice things about the gods, no harm can come from them. It does not matter whether or not they are true. For Plato, theology is a useful tool to silence prophets or other people who are inspired.

The early Christian church did not have a positive view of theology. The word itself does not occur in the New Testament. The earliest Christian to use the word, Clement of Alexandria, refers to the “theology of idols” had among the pagans.[2]

On the other hand, Gnostics (the term is simply the Greek word for “intellectual”) liked philosophy and theology.

 
In the Gospel of Judas, when Jesus sees his disciples engaged in theology, he laughs at them (Gospel of Judas 34.2-3). Clearly, doing theology was not a good thing, not even from the perspective of the author of the Gospel of Judas.

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[1] Plato, Republic 2.378-379.

[2] Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus 7.

Reading the Gospel of Judas IX: Why a Gospel of Judas?

When Judas tried to repent of his heinous crime, he discovered that it was too late to undo the damage that he had done. Can anyone imagine what it would have been like among the twelve apostles if Judas had stayed around? They all knew what he did. They were there. So Judas did the honorable thing from the Roman point of view, he committed suicide (Matthew 27:3-5). The gospel writer puts Judas’s death at near the same time as Jesus’s death. So Judas cannot have written the gospel attributed to him.

Judas did not write the gospel attributed to him; someone else did. Given his horrible reputation, why would anyone write a Gospel of Judas? What Christian would take it seriously?

One possible explanation is that it was not meant to be taken seriously. It was a satire. If that is the case, it is written to make fun of the positions of certain Christian factions.

The other possibility is that it was meant to be taken seriously with the following logic: In order to redeem humans, Jesus had to die. Anyone who helped Jesus to die must have been doing the will of God. Judas, by betraying Jesus, was doing the will of God. Therefore, Judas must have been the best of Jesus’s disciples. This logic is implicit in the Gospel of Judas and several points of it are made explicitly.

When reading the Gospel of Judas, one must bear in mind whether it was ever meant to be taken seriously. It might be sick satire and it might be sick logic. The intellectual position on issues that the Gospel of Judas need to be carefully examined.

Reading the Gospel of Judas VIII: Judas's Legacy

It is clear from the gospels that during Jesus’s life, many groups persecuted Jesus and his followers and they wanted to kill Jesus and end his Church. The outside persecution could be endured, what made a difference was the treachery inside and its conspiracy with the persecutors. As I have noted before:

The most deadly combination for the Church in its first century was apostates within colluding with persecutors without. Judas Iscariot had used that combination to kill Jesus, and others found it equally effective in killing his Church.[1] 

This was Judas’s legacy to the first century Church.

Whenever 3 John was written, probably in the last half of the first century, John notes Diotrephes would not permit him to come to the Church because Diotrephes wanted to be in charge (3 John 1:9).

In the seventies and eighties, a number of Christians left their faith, although the man who recorded this did not care why they did so only that they did so.[2]

Jude’s grandsons were denounced as politically dangerous in the late eighties or early nineties, but they were released even though they were Christians.[3] This means that someone had to make accusations to Roman authorities about them, accusations so serious that they carried the death penalty.

At the end of the beginning of the Second Century, Pliny writes to his friend, the emperor Trajan, and notes that he is receiving anonymous accusations against individuals accusing them of being Christians.[4] Pliny wants to know whether simply being a Christian is automatically sufficient cause for execution, and it seems that whoever wrote the accusation must have thought so.

Hegesippus records that also about this time a certain faction of Christians at Jerusalem accused Symeon, bishop of Jerusalem, to the authorities and had him put to death.[5] Hegesippus also says: “until that time, the Church had remained a pure and uncorrupted virgin since until that time those who corrupted it lay undeclared in darkness.”[6]

Clement of Rome says that in Trajan’s day the Church was filled with “unholy sedition,”[7] as proof of that he pointed to “everyone abandoning the fear of God, and becoming blind to his faith, neither walking in the ordinances of his appointment, nor comporting according to the Christian duty, but walking according to wicked lusts of his own heart.”[8]

This tale of Christianity to the beginning of the second century shows that various individuals tried to sabotage the Christian faith, often by betraying the leaders to get gain or imagined power. Between the betrayal of Jesus and the similar betrayals of local Christian leaders lies about a half century hiatus. Other betrayals may have occurred, obscured from our view. The legacy of Judas was alive and well at the end of the first century.

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[1] John Gee, “James, First and Second Peter, and Jude: Epistles of Persecution,” in The Life and Teachings of the New Testament Apostles: From the Day of Pentecost through the Apocalypse, ed. Richard Nietzel Holzapfel and Thomas A. Wayment (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2010), 190.

[2] Pliny, Epistles 10.96.6.

[3] Eusebius, History of the Church, 3.19.1-20.8.

[4] Pliny, Epistles 10.96.2.

[5] Eusebius, History of the Church, 3.32.1-3.

[6] Eusebius, History of the Church, 3.32.7.

[7] Clement of Rome, Corinthians, 1.1.

[8] Clement of Rome, Corinthians, 3.4.

Reading the Gospel of Judas VII: Contemporary Conspiracy

If Dante consigned Judas to the lowest circle of hell, gnawed by the devil himself, two other figures shared the same fate: Brutus and Cassius.[1] In the time of Jesus these two were the most recent and thus best known examples of treachery. Because of the pivotal role they played in Roman history, they would continue to be well-known figures inspiring such literary works as Dante and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Gaius Cassius and Marcus Brutus were Roman senators. Julius Caesar, the first Roman emperor, did come off occasionally as arrogant. The Roman Senate felt that Caesar insulted them by not standing to greet them.[2] Though Caesar had declined the title of king, some of the senators wanted to press the title anyway.

Because his enemies shrank from agreeing to this proposal, they pressed on with their plans for his assassination. Several groups, each consisting of two or three malcontents, now united in a general conspiracy.[3]

And so,

More than sixty conspirators banded together against him, led by Gaius Cassius and Marcus and Decimus Brutus.[4]

The latter two Caesar had treated like adopted sons since their mother was his favorite mistress.[5]

And so, on March 15, when Caesar was visiting the Senate for a meeting, he was stabbed twenty-three times. The physician Antistius concluded at the autopsy that the second wound, to the chest, killed Caesar. That blow had been delivered by Marcus Brutus, to whom Caesar is said to have spoken his last words: “You, too, my child.”[6]

The death of Caesar, however, had not been the end of the plot:

It had been decided to drag the dead man down to the Tiber, confiscate his property, and revoke all his edicts; but fear of Mark Antony, the Consul, and Lepidus, the Master of Horse, kept the assassins from making their plans good.[7]

Instead the result was another Roman civil war where one adopted son, Octavius, defeated the other adopted son, Brutus, and went on to become the emperor Augustus, in whose days Jesus was born (and likely others of the apostles as well).

This would have been the story of treachery that would have come to the mind of most citizens and subjects of the Roman empire when Judas betrayed Jesus.

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[1] Dante, Inferno 34.61-69.

[2] Suetonius, Julius Caesar, 78-79. I will quote from Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, The Twelve Casears, trans. Robert Graves (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1957).

[3] Suetonius, Julius Caesar, 80.

[4] Suetonius, Julius Caesar, 80.

[5] Suetonius, Julius Caesar, 50.

[6] Suetonius, Julius Caesar, 82.

[7] Suetonius, Julius Caesar, 82.