Challenging Times

Recently, I saw two articles in quick succcession – articles that contradicted each other:

One was by Alice Thomson, writing the Comment column in the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday 19th April 2006. She was objecting to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter Sermon.

The Archbishop talked about ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and the Gospel of Judas. Thomson objected, saying that

‘A bad novel is the least of our concerns.’

‘Easter,’ she said,

‘is the biggest event in the Christian calendar. Dr Rowan Williams could have used his sermon to talk about the growing gap between rich and poor, the appalling treatment of the elderly, the ethical problems surrounding both unborn babies and the concept of euthanasia, genocide in the Sudan or the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries… Instead, all he could talk about was a bestselling paperback.’

About the same time, someone pointed me to this article on the BBC web site about a rare interview with Dan Brown. While Brown was less than straightforward in saying that it isn’t for him to debate the issues raised in ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ he also said

“It’s a book about big ideas, you can love them or hate them, but we’re all talking about them, and that’s really the point.”

Yes it is.

Dan Brown is right that they’re big ideas, and that it’s important that we’re talking about them. Rowan Williams was quite right to talk about them in his Easter Sermon, and Alice Thomson is wrong to dismiss them as unimportant.

Ideas matter.

I’m not for one moment suggesting that poverty, persecution, euthanasia and abortion are unimportant: they’re all vitally important. But if there’s one thing our society is showing us very clearly, it’s that you can’t have a consensus about moral and ethical issues when there isn’t any consensus about underlying beliefs. What we believe about reality will decide what we think about questions of right and wrong.

Thomson is wrong. Rowan Williams is right to discuss these issues, and it’s important that we debate them. Dan Brown is right, just this once.

I’ve just spent two hours watching a National Geographic Channel programme about the Gospel of Judas. I didn’t realise that the programme lasted two hours, and after about 35 minutes, I was looking at my watch wondering when it was going to end. A two hour programme with about half an hour’s worth of real content, if that.

According to the Gospel of Judas, the best-known traitor in the world wasn’t really a traitor at all. He was Jesus’s closest friend, and Jesus told Judas to hand him over to the authorities.

This is yet another Gnostic Gospel. According to it, Jesus revealed secret teaching to Judas which he didn’t reveal to the other disciples. This is a classic Gnostic device – it’s almost a hallmark of Gnosticism. There are similar ‘secret gospels’ of Mary, Thomas, and other disciples.

The newly restored and published manuscript dates from about 300 AD. Until now, all we knew about the Gospel of Judas came from Irenaeus, the leader of the Church in Lyons, who condemned it in his writings around 180 AD. The Gospel of Judas was probably written around 150 AD, that is, fifty to eighty years after the Gospels in the Bible.

National Geographic has put the entire manuscript online. They’ve also made the full English translation available, which is useful if you can’t read Coptic.

So does the Gospel of Judas change anything?

Not really. It’s just another example of a late Gnostic Gospel. It’s interesting for what it tells us about the Gnostics, but it doesn’t tell us anything more about the historical Jesus. There is less to it than meets the eye.

To read more – and for some useful links, visit our Jesus & The Da Vinci Code site.