The Betrayal of Judas
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - April 14, 2006
This afternoon, at the beginning of the recitation of the Passion according to St. John, Catholics will hear of the treachery of the most famous traitor of all time, Judas Iscariot. This was a man who had watched Jesus raise at least three people from the dead, miraculously multiply food to feed multitudes, walk on water, cast out countless demons, and cure scores of people of leprosy, paralysis, withered hands, blindness, hypochondria, and other maladies. He had listened to him preach and teach vast crowds, leaving them astonished. Along with the other eleven, he had been instructed by the Lord for three years in an intimate mobile seminary. He had even been given the Lord's own incredible power to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cast out demons. Yet, after all of this, he valued Jesus less than thirty pieces of silver. He led a band of soldiers to capture his innocent teacher and friend in the Garden of Gethsemane, betraying him by faking a gesture of love. What happened next, to Jesus and to Judas, we all know.
Last week, National Geographic Magazine and many either gullible or complicit media outlets sought to call into question the whole nature of Judas' betrayal. National Geographic had a dramatic roll-out of the rediscovery of The Gospel of Judas, a fourth- or fifth century copy of a second-century document that makes the outrageous claim that Judas was asked by Jesus to betray him. It paints a story that Judas was considered the strongest and most courageous of the apostles. It describes that Judas would be called apart by Jesus to receive special instruction on the mysteries of the kingdom and was once told by Jesus that he would come to rule over all the others. All of these actions and assertions are found in the midst of flamboyantly outlandish cosmological claims placed either in the mouth of Jesus or in lengthy visions received by Judas himself.
It is silly and surprising that National Geographic and many in the mainstream are taking this document seriously. It was written well over a hundred years after Judas died by a crazy religious group widely known to invent documents and put them into the mouth of famous historical personages. These gnostics were responsible for the eccentric pseudo-gospels of "the Consummation,""Eve," "The Egyptians," "Peter," "Matthias," "Philip," "Thomas," and the equally off-the-wall "Acts" of "Peter," "Andrew," and "John." Despite this track record, some are treating the pseudo-gospel of Judas as a primary historical source on par with the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It would be as if the Unabomber, pretending to be John Wilkes Booth, wrote a document that, within the context of bizarre musings like those found in his infamous Manifesto, claimed that Abraham Lincoln actually asked Booth to kill him in Ford Theater — and National Geographic and media outlets treated it as equivalent to eye witness accounts and hyped that it would "shake Lincolnian historiography to its foundations."
Early Christians were not so naïve. St. Ireneus of Lyons, to whom Pope Benedict referred recently as the first true Christian theologian, refuted and ridiculed the Gospel of Judas in a treatise against heresies written about the year 180. He described that it was written by a gnostic sect called the Cainites, famous for attempting to turn the most infamous Scriptural villains into saints. They tried, for example, to rehabilitate Cain, whom they said was just following God's instructions in murdering his brother Abel, as well as Korah, the insurrectionist against Moses, and the people of Sodom. Ireneus said that the Cainites produced "a fictitious history of this ["black is white"] kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas."
Christians today likewise cannot be naïve. We are living in an age — like that of the time of St. Ireneus — when so many, including those who by their education should know better, are willing uncritically to accept even the most outrageous claims against the faith. Millions have treated the fanciful concoctions of Dan Brown in the Da Vinci Code, such as the assertions that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers and that their progeny became the French kings, as exciting revelations rather than what they really are: blasphemous fabrications. The only way for Christians to sift through truth and falsity — and to help others to do so — is to know the faith better and, like Ireneus, to do what is necessary to defend and promote it.
On that first Good Friday, Christ gave his life in "witness to the truth" (Jn 18:37). Ireneus spent his life doing the same. Now it's our turn. Love for God and for others demands it.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
