The Gospel of Judas is dumb. If you’ve read it, you know that. But people are still talking about it — much like The Da Vinci Code. Of course, if people weren’t still talking about The Da Vinci Code, my book wouldn’t sell. I wouldn’t have even written the book, and we could all be talking about what really matters: When are the Braves going to reclaim first place in the National League East?

So, there’s this Gospel of Judas that people keep talking about. I wrote about it once, but my pal Conrad Gempf — he’s one of those rare guys who is a great scholar who writes in such a way that regular folks can actually understand — has taken on The Gospel of Judas.

You can read about it here:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

I’ve had a number of people ask me about the recently unveiled document The Gospel of Judas. I’ll offer some brief observations here, but I don’t pretend to be an expert in this arena. There are others — far more capable than I — who are busily tearing the document to shreds. I refer you to them for anything in more detail than you find here.

First, it’s important to remember that the document never claims to have been written by Judas or anyone else who lived in the first century. The document they found dates back to the fourth century A.D. and is supposed to be a translation from an earlier document — though there is some speculation about that. If it is the same document, it probably dates back to the middle of the second century.

There was a fairly common practice among Gnostic heretics of the second and third centuries that I’ve talked about before. The Christian movement was generating momentum and many people wanted to jump on the bandwagon. Some even wanted to derail the whole project for their own philosophical, religious and political agendas. One easy way to do this was to write a fictitious story about Jesus and slap the name of one of the early disciples on it. There were dozens of these floating around by the middle of the fourth century (though there were never 80 of them as Dan Brown claims in THE DA VINCI CODE). The Gospel of Judas is old; it’s just not old enough.

Second, the things Jesus says in this document don’t match much that you’ll find in the four canonical Gospels. There’s a fair amount of anti-Semitism, and Jesus basically tells Judas, “You have to help me shed this outer shell of a body so I can become who I am truly supposed to be.” That’s a paraphrase, but that’s the general idea. It’s a far cry from the traditional Hebraic view that creation is inherently good and will ultimately be redeemed by God rather than done away with. It’s typical of Gnostic texts to demean anything physical in favor of the spiritual. It’s a shame that this thinking has crept into mainstream Christianity as much as it has. It sure ain’t biblical.

Third, the timing of all this is interesting. I do not think National Geographic is part of some giant plot to overturn historic, orthodox Christianity, so I’m not accusing them of anything here. But I do think it’s more than coincidence that all of this has happened during the days leading up to Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter. There is an enemy — a person who commands the forces of darkness and is intent on prying people away from God. This enemy has used persecution, poverty and the seductive force of political power in the past. He is certainly not opposed to using this document to create more doubt in the minds of people who so desperately need to hear the life-changing message of the true gospel.

Dan Brown is right about one thing: there was a culture war going on in the early church between those who accented Jesus’ divinity and those who stressed his humanity. There were extremists on both sides; Dan Brown merely sides with the extremists who stressed Jesus’ humanity to the exclusion of his deity. And, while that same culture war may still be going on in 2005, perhaps it’s not entirely fair to blame it all on Constantine. In the Nicene Creed, Jesus is understood as both fully human and fully divine. Some have trouble with that paradox. Others take the paradox itself as evidence of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Forty years after the Council of Nicaea, in 367, the highly influential bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, delivered an Easter sermon in which he endorsed the writings that make up the New Testament as we know it today. To eliminate potential confusion, Athanasius wanted other books with other teachings destroyed.

“But someone,” writes Elaine Pagels, speculating specifically about the monks of a monastery in Upper Egypt, “gathered dozens of the books that Athanasius wanted to burn, removed them from the monastery library, sealed them in a heavy, six-foot jar and, intending to hide them, buried them in a nearby hillside near Nag Hammadi,” where they were unearthed in 1945, providing fodder for conspiracy theorists in general and Dan Brown’s novel in particular.

In a real sense, however, Brown’s novel only underscores the wisdom of Irenaeus. Pagels defines a Gnostic as “one who knows.” She suggests Irenaeus and other early church leaders “used the term derisively to refer to those they dismissed as people claiming to ‘know it all.’” At the core of Dan Brown’s novel is the conviction that folks like Leonardo Da Vinci, Robert Langdon and Elaine Pagels know things about God that lesser people cannot know, matters kept secret from common Christians like us who are not “in the gnosis.”

“One of these things is not like the other….”

What doesn’t fit into Dan Brown’s conspiracy plot is the fact that the canonization of New Testament Scripture and establishment of creedal statements was initially borne out of the dilemma faced by second century leaders such as Irenaeus, who believed it of critical importance to forge a unified church. Irenaeus’ mentor, Polycarp, himself a disciple of the apostle John, had been burned alive by the Romans in 167. How was the church to survive that kind of pressure if it couldn’t even agree on whether Jesus was laughing or suffering on the cross?

Elaine Pagels says that the issue really came to a head when “The Three” — Montanus, Maximilla and Priscilla — began traveling around the churches of Asia Minor “claiming to communicate directly with the holy spirit.” The Three were having all sorts of visions and revelations. Priscilla, writes Pagels, “claimed that Christ had appeared to her in female form.” Furthermore, they taught others to fast and pray so they too could receive direct visions and revelations, their own personal gnosis.

Gnostics, such as “The Three,” made a distinction between Common Christians and Spiritual Christians — they, of course, being the latter. They were Christians “in the know.” But the Book of Acts tells us that the first edition of the church held everything in common (Acts 2:44). They were all in the same boat. Irenaeus cannot be blamed for being concerned that a two-tier system was evolving with Christians “in the know” holding themselves superior to the others.

There are Christians today who, because of some spiritual experience, practically disdain other believers who have not experienced what they have. We see still what Irenaeus was talking about, when he said, in effect, you can always tell a Gnostic, “strutting around with a superior expression on his face, with all the pomposity of a rooster.”

How was the church ever going to sing out of the same hymnal if there were 80 gospels floating around and anybody and everybody could claim to be communicating directly with the Holy Spirit, their gnosis making them more spiritual than other believers?

It was Irenaeus himself who came up with the four-gospel solution. The bishop noted that Ezekiel had envisioned God’s throne “borne up by four living creatures;” likewise, the church would be borne up by four pillars: the “full formed gospels” of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These had been accepted for generations; Irenaeus wisely saw no need to add to them.

Then, in the second decade of the next century, Constantine himself was converted. Dan Brown portrays the emperor as a master manipulator, using Christianity to his own political purpose. I don’t know that his accusation is entirely justified. Legend says that Constantine had seen a vision of the cross in the sky with the words “In this sign conquer.” Having committed himself to Christianity, it was perhaps understandable that Constantine would want to konw what he was supposed to believe. Thus, it was he who called church leaders from across the empire to gather in Nicaea, June of 325, asking them to come up with a clear statement of belief. The result is remembered as the Nicene Creed.

Are you still with me?

The reason I’m writing so much about church history lately is because millions and millions of people around the world have read Dan Brown’s version of how things happened. In his telling, the books of the New Testament, as we have received it, were selected by self-interested men for self-interested purposes, and the church has been involved in a 2,000-year conspiracy to suppress the writings that didn’t toe the company line.

Says the eccentric religious art historian in The Da Vinci Code, “The modern Bible was compiled and edited by men who possessed a political agenda — the promote the divinity of the man Jesus Christ and use His influence to solidify their own power base.”

Robert Langdon interjects, “An interesting note. Anyone who chose the forbidden gospels over Constantine’s version was deemed a heretic. The word heretic derives from that moment in history. The Latin word haereticus means ‘choice.’ Those who ‘chose’ the original history of Christ were the world’s first heretics.”

If by “original history of Christ,” one means the notion that Jesus was not God in the flesh living a sinless life and dying on the cross to pay the price for the sins of the world, then, yes, these were the world’s first heretics. The word haereticus doesn’t just mean “choice” or “able to choose.” Its original meaning also carries the notion of being factious.

Granted, when former Senator Frank Keating, a man hand-picked by Roman Catholics to lead the inquiry into the church’s role in sheltering pedophilia among priests, resigned after saying his experience was like dealing with the Mafia, it is easy for many to believe the historic church is just one big organized crime syndicate. It’s relatively easy to cast the Roman Catholic Church in the role of bad guys. It’s not too big a stretch to see them branding everyone who disagrees with them with a scarlet “H” for “Heretic.”

But, while the word “heretic” has been misused in the past and continues to be misused today, we cannot dismiss it as easily as Dan Brown wants us to. It is a sad but true fact that we may be called heretical for disagreeing over a great many things — the role of women, which translation of the Bible you use, your view of biblical prophecy, etc.. Unfortunately, the word “heresy” is often used to protect a base of power or some long-held religious dogma.

Sometimes, however, a person is called a heretic because they actually are a heretic. Dan Brown, Elaine Pagels and those who champion the Gnostic gospels are heretics, not simply because they choose to believe an alternative story of Jesus, but because they create division and foster attitudes of superiority among those “in the know.”