Phony gospels give me the blues

  • I was hang­ing out in a Barnes & Noble cof­feeshop last week when a guy sit­ting with his bud­dies started to hap­pily pon­tif­i­cate on the great­ness of “The Gospel of Judas.” I had been hear­ing the ads for National Geographic’s show about this — I was par­tic­u­larly care­ful not to set the timer to record it. But now I was get­ting a recital on its (per­ceived) strong points any­way from a fifty-something loudmouth.

    “And Jesus asked Judas to do this thing. He wasn’t betrayed at all. He asked him. It was all like a big mar­ket­ing ploy. Jesus was just tired of it all, y’know? He just wanted out of it all, y’know?“

    And on and on. I thought I could tune him out, but I finally got sick of it. Leav­ing the cof­feeshop I almost col­lided with an entire dis­play rack titled “Spir­tu­al­ity,” which in this case must’ve been meant sar­cas­ti­cally. It was full of the new trendy here­sies — “The Gospel of Judas,” “The Gospel of Thomas,” “The daVinci Code” and on and on. And mind you, I’d already encoun­tered a dis­play rack just for daVinci Code (along with some cri­tiques of the book) downstairs.

    Heresy. All of the sud­den, peo­ple just can’t get enough. I haven’t both­ered to go read up on “The Gospel of Judas.” The guy in the book­store told me all I need to know. He didn’t care about apply­ing crit­i­cal think­ing or eval­u­at­ing some new piece of impor­tant evi­dence. There’s this manda­tory phrase that shows up in all the sec­u­lar report­ing about this being an “impor­tant” find that will make peo­ple really “think.”

    Give me a break. The peo­ple who are buy­ing these books aren’t the least inter­ested in really think­ing, at least if that means doubt­ing for one minute that a text that came along 200 years after the last gospel was penned some­how tells big truths that the other guys missed.

    I think this is why I find all this so depress­ing. It’s not just the wedge that it dri­ves between me and some large por­tion of the book-reading pop­u­lace. It’s also the feel­ing of Amer­i­can Chris­ten­dom, with all its faces and all its flaws, hav­ing basi­cally failed some­how. It’s not a new thought — “daVinci Code” made me feel that way, too. But this seems worse. “daVinci” fans had to admit, at least to them­selves, that that was a novel, a work of fic­tion. In the case of “Judas,” this aber­rant ves­tige of some ancient sect or other is going to meet all the require­ments faith-challenged Amer­i­cans require to swal­low it hook, line and sinker. Clearly, they believe ancient man­u­scripts com­pletely when they want to.

    And the insult of all of this attack depresses me, too. As Get Reli­gion and Ortho­doxy Today note, are we sup­posed to think it’s a coin­ci­dence that both the “daVinci” movie and the mas­sive cov­er­age of “Judas” have come out so close to (West­ern) Easter?

    It’s enough to make me won­der. It’s hard to miss the fact that there are some peo­ple who hate — I mean, actu­ally hate – Chris­tian­ity in our cul­ture. They don’t think a sin­gle good thing has ever come out of it, and some of them think almost every­thing bad has come out of it. But do they really want it to dis­ap­pear? Do they want any­thing that bears any real sem­blance of it to be sur­gi­cally removed like a cancer?

    Or do they really not notice that real, active Chris­tian­ity is in a pre­car­i­ous posi­tion, mar­gin­al­ized almost every­where in the world and treated in Euro­pean coun­tries as some­thing irrel­e­vant or ugly?

    This arti­cle seems to indi­cate that many pas­tors are just dis­miss­ing “Judas” or (incred­i­bly) say­ing that it’s a good thing because it will stim­u­late dia­logue about Jesus. (Good grief! That’s like say­ing that Lincoln’s assas­si­na­tion was a good thing because it gave Mary Todd Lin­coln some­thing to talk about at par­ties.) I can’t find that same happy place. This excit­ing new hereti­cal text will dis­ap­pear from the head­lines, but the impres­sion that many peo­ple will have that the Bible is just one point of view, that Chris­ten­dom has noth­ing of sub­stance to say in reply to these claims — that will be the take-away from all this trendy blasphemy.

    It would be incred­i­bly grat­i­fy­ing if the non-Ancient Chris­t­ian churches could get a grip and teach their parish­ioners why some things made it into the Bible and oth­ers didn’t. The early Church made its way suc­cess­fully through many such spu­ri­ous claims; it’s time for present-day Chris­tians of all stripes to respond to that effort and learn their own Tra­di­tion. Book pub­lish­ers and movie-makers can’t have missed the impact all this has made. We surely can’t have heard the last of this.


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    1. Give us this day

    April 11th, 2006 | Grace | 9 Comments |

9 Responses and Counting...

  • BJohnD 04.11.2006

    Amen, sis­ter. Nail-on-head. Thanks for this posting.

    “So, other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”

  • Mimi

    You nailed it, Grace. I’ve been amazed at watch­ing the dis­cus­sions “One priest put together the bible” Say what????? Yikes.

    It’s the desire to be reli­gious with­out encoun­ter­ing ones own sin­ful­ness, I think.

  • Grace

    “…the desire to be reli­gious with­out encoun­ter­ing one’s own sin­ful­ness.” — Amen back atcha. That’s well said.

  • Gabriel

    Grace,

    I think that you’ve nailed this dead-to-rights. I actu­ally watched National Geognostic’s “The Gospel of Judas” spe­cial, mostly just because I have a geeky inter­est in lin­guis­tics and was curi­ous about the trans­lat­ing of the ancient text. Unfor­tu­nately, the spe­cial was far too focused on today’s trendy inter­est in gnos­ti­cism and, as you allude, it’s very evi­dent under­ly­ing anti-Christian themes.

    By the way, I really enjoy your blog. I’ve been fol­low­ing your posts for a lit­tle while, but I haven’t got­ten around to actu­ally pop­ping in and say­ing, “Hello.”

  • Fr. Michael

    It’s just another reminder that the entire world really does revolve around Jesus Christ. If Dan Brown had come to the con­clu­sion in his book that Jesus is Lord, he wouldn’t have sold two copies. But let him attack the divin­ity of Christ and he becomes an overnight celebrity and a best-selling author. He is a clever man, giv­ing peo­ple what they want to hear.

    Let not your heart be troubled.

  • Grace

    Gabriel,
    Wel­come! Or — since you’ve been around for a while — happy com­ment­ing(?). I hadn’t even thought of the fact that there are going to be some things about this find that would be inter­est­ing just because of its age. And, for that mat­ter, there’s some­thing inter­est­ing about study­ing a fake, just because the nature of the fak­ery tells you some­thing about what was going on at the time. But yeah, it sounds like it was pre­sented more for the sen­sa­tion­al­ism than any­thing else.

    It’s a real pity. The National Geo­graphic Soci­ety is a well-respected name. Would it have been that impos­si­ble to talk about Gnos­ti­cism and its attacks on Chris­tian­ity at the time? I gather that “The Gospel of Judas” is known to be Gnos­tic, but it’s hard for me to believe there aren’t schol­ars that are at least con­sid­er­ing that possibility.

  • Grace

    Fr. Michael,
    That’s a good point. Doing a lit­tle Wikipedia research, Dan Brown did five other books — three thrillers, two humor books — which got tepid response at best (a reader review of one of his thrillers is titled “Pos­si­bly the dumb­est com­puter book in the his­tory of the world.”) Then he took the anti-Vatican tone from “Angels and Demons” to the next level in “daVinci Code” and all of the sud­den, the guy is a genius. (His pub­lish­ers re-released “Angels and Demons” and of course, it did much bet­ter the sec­ond time.)

    Well, shouldn’t the credit for this major break­through go to the Chris­t­ian Church? That’s the dif­fer­ence between a hack writer and a genius, apparently.

    (Didn’t know you had a blog. Cool — I’ll add you to the blogroll.)

  • s-p

    I heard Elaine Pagels speak at Ari­zona State U. back in the 70’s about the Nag Ham­madi library and her first book about gnos­ti­cism. Even way back then I saw it as a “chris­tian­ized foun­da­tion” for new ageism, rel­a­tivism and its fake intel­lec­tu­al­ism. Unfor­tu­nately it is sim­i­lar to much of mod­ern Chris­tian­ity: you can quote a cou­ple verses, a cou­ple “schol­ars” and all of a sud­den you are a the­olo­gian and Church his­to­rian. I mean, who can chal­lenge the “pon­tif­i­ca­tors” who can sit at Barnes and Noble amped on espresso and know the “mind of Christ”? Only the Church, really, but the Church chal­lenges Elaine Pagel’s take on the gnos­tic gospels, Dan Brown, the guy with cof­fee breath and EVERYTHING… all real­ity cen­ters on the per­son of Christ as the Church knows Him. Try telling that to the rel­a­tivist schol­ars look­ing for a new gospel that val­i­dates the author­ity of indi­vid­ual pon­tif­i­ca­tions. sigh.….

  • Grace

    It’s like watch­ing a game show where a con­tes­tant is strug­gling with a major ques­tions when you know the answer. I’m *cer­tain* that Protes­tants want a ready come­back to all this stuff, but if you don’t acknowl­edge the early Church as the defin­ers of ortho­dox Chris­tian­ity, your biggest weapon is taken away.

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