Judas and the Gospels

This is an intro post on Bart Ehrman's The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot (OUP, 2006). Someone at OUP noticed my post on Misquoting Jesus and was kind enough to send me a copy of Lost Gospel to review. My advice: buy it. Buy three or four and give them to friends. Okay, first read my comments, then decide for yourself. But Ehrman writes well and is very informative — without forcing his naturalistic, historical framework on the reader — so you can hardly go wrong with any of his books. In this post, I'll sketch out his review of Judas in the canonical gospels. In a later post I'll get to the new material drawn from the recently discovered Gospel of Judas manuscript.

Reviewing how Judas is portrayed in the four canonical gospels isn't simply a matter of collecting references and stringing them together. Each evangelist wrote the episodes in which Judas appears as each wrote their entire gospel, with a particular view of Jesus, his mission, and his teachings in mind. Ehrman writes,

To make sense of how each of the Gospel writers portrays Jesus, it is important to understand more broadly how they portray Jesus and his disciples. As it turns out, the distinctive emphases of each Gospel come to be reflected in what they have to say about Judas.

This approach is not a natural move for Mormons. Perhaps Talmage's Jesus the Christ is to blame for this. It is the classic LDS "harmony of the gospels," harmonizing not just the four gospels but the entire cosmic narrative from Preexistence (Jesus isn't even born until Chapter 8) through the Second Coming. Granted, the book was written almost a century ago, but it's still unfortunate that it contains almost no discussion of the gospels as individual narratives. The LDS Bible Dictionary doesn't do much better: incredibly, it does not provide separate entries for each gospel! Instead, the character and perspective of each gospel is summarized in one paragraph in the "Gospels" entry (that's one paragraph for all four, not one paragraph for each gospel). So the average LDS reader should benefit from Ehrman's background discussion of the canonical gospels in Chapters Two and Three. I'll summarize that material below.

Mark portrays Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, but no one in Mark's narrative ever comes to this knowledge (the idea is sometimes termed the "Messianic Secret"). This persistent misunderstanding by the disciples is mirrored by Judas (who is, after all, one of them). Judas does betray Jesus in Mark by telling the Jewish leaders where to find him at night, but Judas' motivation in doing so (in Mark's text) is murky. In Mark, Judas failed Jesus, but so did Peter (who denied him three times) and the disciples in the garden (who fell asleep in Jesus' hour of greatest need).

Matthew carries over Mark's account but tweaks it in significant ways. He provides an explicit motive for Judas: greed in the form of thirty pieces of silver. Luke adds a demonic component to the actions of Judas: "Then entered Satan into Judas surnamed Iscariot" (Luke 22:3), tying back to Luke's foreshadowing during the temptation in the wilderness episode, after which "he [the devil] departed from him [Jesus] for a season" (Luke 4:13). And John adopts a fully polarized worldview of light and darkness, good and evil, in which Jesus is a fully divine being from the very first verse and talks publicly and constantly about his identity and mission. The contrast with Mark could not be more stark. Not surprisingly, Judas is described as fully evil: "Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?" (John 6:71). In John, just as Jesus was divine even before birth, so is Judas evil, "a devil," even before his betrayal.

The best known discrepancy regarding Judas is between Matthew, where Judas "went and hanged himself" (Matt. 27:5), and Luke, where, in a field he purchased with the reward money, Judas "burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out" (Acts 1:18). Then Luke uses the story to segue into the selection of a new apostle, Matthias (who is never heard from again after his selection).

In a later post I'll summarize Ehrman's comments on the new Gospel of Judas document.

Comments

[Jeff G]

I wholeheartedly agree with your views of Ehrman's works. While he is uncompromising in terms of methodological naturalism, he admirably resists the tendency of some (such as the Jesus Seminar) to go too far with this. He is, in my opinion, a fairly conservative and yet highly reliable source of scholarly information regarding early Christianity.

[Rob Osborn]

The whole gospel according to Judas has brought all sorts of things to light. It has mostly brought into light how easily one can be decieved when he looks not for the truth in the right places. If we do not want to believe that Judas is a son of perdition then the gospel according to Judas will tell us he is not while stating that he is better than the other 11 disciples.

The New Testament also has it's flaws. We are not exactly sure how they have changed over the years since Christ as the JST in my opinion was never finished.

What I do find interesting however is that in the Book of Mormon, Christ fortells the Nephites future generations saying that there will come again in the land sons of perdition 4 generations removed. He then refers indirectly to Judas when he says that they will once again sell him for silver and gold.

[Dave]

Rob, you'll want to read my next post on the book. No one is really suggesting the new Gospel of Judas gives an accurate account of historical events associated with Jesus and Judas. As a second-century gnostic text, it is useful for what it says about what Gnostics were thinking and how that relates to the diverse Christianity of the day, but it won't make Judas into a sympathetic figure.

The verse you cited in 3 Nephi 27 is actually quite interesting. The resurrected Jesus is addressing the Nephites:

30 And now, behold, my joy is great, even unto fulness, because of you, and also this generation; ...
31 ... and none of them are lost; and in them I have fulness of joy.
32 But behold, it sorroweth me because of the fourth generation from this generation, for they are led away captive by him even as was the son of perdition; for they will sell me for silver and for gold, and for that which moth doth corrupt and which thieves can break through and steal. And in that day will I visit them, even in turning their works upon their own heads.

For more on this interesting topic, see the EOM entry "Sons of Perdition" at LightPlanet (aka All About Mormons). A follow-up article at that link (not from the EOM) speculates that there will be no "daughters of perdition" because only a priesthood holder could, uh, progress high enough to fall that far. I don't buy this idea. There must be a few women there, otherwise it wouldn't really be hell fair.

[Rob Osborn]

I look forward to your next post then. I do know that there will be women who are cast out at the last day. To be a son of perdition, one does not neccesarily have to have the priesthood. A person can be wicked enough to be craftily led away to the point that they will no longer possess through their agency a desire to side with God. This obviously is the state of those who kept not their first estate and became sons to perdition.

The misconception that one must first hold the priesthood in order to become a son of perdition is to deny the very fact of what the gospel teaches about being led down captive to the everlasting chains of hell. Extremely wicked people who deny godliness which is manifest in their own being and then knowingly glory in abominations of all manners and types are the type spoken of in the BoM and New Testament as being led down to this everlasting destruction (the second death) of which seldom ever gain sufficient priesthood if any at all that we as LDS would classify as such in order to condemn.

I do look forward to your next pot on the issues I can't wait!

[John Remy]

I credit Ehrman for introducing me to the synoptic problem (and the argument for Markan priority) and for subsequently reinvigorating my interest in the New Testament. While I understand why people want to create harmonies, it makes so much more sense to me to treat each book as its own creation (and to study the sources/influences of each).