No refunds: Before Marvin Meyer, Judas the Betrayer

Little Earthquakes
In a book-cramped office on the second floor of a building at the center of campus at Chapman University, in the center of Orange, in the heart of Orange County, a man has been toiling away for the last year to help translate a 1,700-year-old manuscript whose publication last month, it’s fair to say, rumbled like a religious earthquake through the rest of the world. The man is Professor Marvin Meyer, and the book is the Gospel of Judas, whose title—a double-take title if there ever was one—was not invented by publishing marketers trying to devise the best way to piss off Christians for whom Judas is evil incarnate, but is the actual name on the actual document, inscribed right there on the last leaf of a seriously crumbling papyrus manuscript in 1,700-year-old ink.

This is a gospel—ostensibly some new “good news” about Jesus—which was originally written early in the second century of the Common Era, got translated into Coptic in what carbon dating and ink analysis determine was the fourth century, and which then disappeared until 1978, when it was rediscovered in an ancient tomb by the Nile River. Taken up by shady antique dealers eager to make a buck, the codex (archeological talk for manuscript) got buffeted about on several continents in ways no ancient decaying codex should, spending time in papyrus-decaying cold storage for a while and then 16 years in, of all places, a way too hot Citibank safe deposit box in Hicksville, New York, before falling in 2001 into the responsible scholarly hands of Switzerland’s Maecenas Foundation, which contracted National Geographic and several scholars to first restore and then translate the fragile thing into English. Professor Meyer, brought onboard the project in 2004, is the sole translator whose first language is English. He wrote the introduction to the volume.

This is a gospel which didn’t make the New Testament’s original cut, the way Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did, and when you read it, you have no problem seeing why it’s had a devilish reputation since old Irenaeus of Lyon trashed it as heretical way back in 180 C.E. To be brief about stuff that I’ll spend a lot more time with later on, the Gospel of Judas says that the God you think is God isn’t God, that Jesus did not die for your sins, and that Judas was not the worst guy who ever lived for betraying the best guy who ever lived (to put it in the Sunday school vernacular most of us remember). In fact, Judas was not The Betrayer at all, but Jesus’ best friend and confidant, who was actually in cahoots with Jesus to have him crucified because His death was the only way to get Jesus back home to heaven and the Great Spirit from whence he came (much more to follow, later).

This is a gospel, then, whose title isn’t the only thing that’s pissing off Christians. The pope, for instance, who in an oddly conspicuous part of his Last Supper address at the Vatican this past Holy Week pointed out that Judas was a “repugnant,” “greedy” liar for whom “only power and success are real,” and whose “treason was of total free will, a rejection of the love of God.” In case we didn’t get the reference to the Gospel of Judas, Father Raniero Cantalamessa (the “pope’s preacher,” according to the Catholic News Service) said in a Good Friday homily that Christians were today being “crassly manipulated by the media”: “Christ is being sold again . . . to publishers and booksellers” for billions of dollars. Then there was Archbishop Hector Aguer of La Plata, Argentina, who declared the Gospel of Judas to be part of an “ideological attack” on the church.

Protestants are upset too. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler Jr. says the Gospel of Judas argues that “early Christianity had no essential core,” and says publication of the book is part of an attempt to “explode the myth of a monolithic religion.” The born-again community hasn’t been too happy, either: one commentator describes anybody attached to the Gospel of Judas as “enemies of Jesus and His Church” and as “God-haters.” Carl Westerlund, a spokesman for Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, simply waves away the whole controversy as “phony. Calvary’s rock is way too buried in unshakeable ground to be affected by all this,” he says. And the Christian-right blogosphere is dependably holding up its reputation as a cesspool of American culture, singing endless verses of the subterranean headsick blues. One fulminating blogger claims to have read and studied the text of the Gospel of Judas 30 years ago—odd, since 30 years ago the text was still in that tomb by the Nile.

All this shouting from the more orthodox chambers of Christian faith is countered, of course, by the scholarly community, who are mostly overjoyed by the appearance of a brand new text on which they can exercise their ingenuity for what will doubtless be decades. Elaine Pagels, doyenne of American religious scholarship, calls the Gospel of Judas “astonishing,” and Bart Ehrmann, another major scholar, calls it “one of the greatest historical discoveries of the twentieth century. It rivals the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Gnostic Gospels of Nag Hammadi.” Then there comes the countervoice of eminence grise James Robinson, of Claremont Graduate University, who says some of those involved in the publication of the Gospel of Judas “are making the sly suggestion that the Gospel of Judas is more or less equally valid” with the New Testament Gospels,” “and contain things that could pull the rug out from under Christianity as we know it,” suggestions he calls “ridiculous.”

But that notion seems, well, slyly vague when you meet those involved in bringing Judas into the light. When I first contact one such scholar for an interview, almost the first thing he says is that “we academics aren’t trained for this sort of thing”—handling this controversy he means—though, as it turns out, Marvin Meyer has been at the epicenter of little theological earthquakes for three decades now, many of them emanating from his little office at the center of the center of the center of Orange County.