Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., a practicing Catholic, writes today: “If Judas can make a comeback after all these years, just about anyone can hope for salvation at the altar of public opinion. The snake in the Garden of Eden must be looking for the Web site and e-mail address of Judas’s spin doctors.”
Dionne continues:
As Marvin Meyer, a biblical scholar at Chapman University, points out in a helpful essay in the National Geographic volume that includes the Judas Gospel, the “knowledge claimed by these people [the Gnostics] is not worldly knowledge but mystical knowledge, knowledge of God and self and relationship between God and self.”
Judging by the Gospel of Judas, the “knowledge” claim of the book’s author or authors is to a rather bizarre cosmology. The detailed description of a divine realm of assorted angels and an emphasis on the stars — “Stop struggling with me,” the Jesus of the story says. “Each of you has his own star.” — reads like a rejected screenplay for a Spielberg movie.
Purely as a matter of style, those who made the choices for the canonical gospels deserve our thanks and praise. Matthew, Mark, Luke and, in a different way, John offer a powerful narrative and present a Jesus who speaks to the world about ethics and justice even as he makes much larger claims.
Garry Wills is correct in his new book, “What Jesus Meant,” to insist that Jesus cannot be reduced to being a gentle teacher of principles or of politics. But the Jesus of the Gospel of Judas seems entirely disconnected from human struggles and laughs at human ignorance.
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