Short Takes
Jack Miles
Judas & Jesus
WHAT DID THE GNOSTICS REALLY BELIEVE?
T he recently published Gospel of Judas, writes biblical
scholar Bart Ehrman, "has a completely different un-
derstanding of God, the world, Christ, salvation,
human existencenot to mention of [sic] Judas himself
than came to be embodied in the Christian creeds and canon.
It will open up new vistas for understanding Jesus and the re-
ligious movement he founded" (see "Christianity Turned Up-
side Down" in Rodolphe Kasser et al.. The Gospel of Judas
[National Geographic Society]).
I doubt it. In fact, I venture to say that almost any reader,
religious or irreligious, who takes the trouble to download
the text of the Gospel of Judas (available at www.national-
geographic.com) will come away less enthusiastic than Ehrman.
Aesthetically, the newly published text is quite without charm,
a few numinous verses notwithstanding. As for historical im-
portance, one is sadly accustomed to seeing a newly discov-
ered text, the relevance of which is no more than incremental,
inflated into an epoch-making new departure.
Ehrman subtitles his essay, "The Alternative Vision of the
Gospel of Judas." Alternative indeed. Is Jesus, as Ehrman ar-
gues, the founder of the Cainite sect that evidently produced
the Gospel of Judas? Were these Cainiteswho drew their
name from the fratricidal Cain of the Book of Genesisnot
simply practicing another religion, one in which Jesus had
been incorporated as just one god among many?
The assumption in too much popular talk about the early
church suppressing gnosticism or excluding gnostic texts from
the canon of Christian scripture is that from the beginning
the gnostics aspired to be regarded as orthodox Christians
and to have their texts ecclesiastically canonized. But surely
there is much reason to suppose otherwise.
In a recent special issue of U.S. News & World Report (on
sale through August 29), one can read: "In the beginning,
there was not one Christianity, but many. And among them
was a well-established tradition of gnosticism, one of the key
'heresies' upon which Dan Brown builds the plot of The Da
Vinci Code." Well, no, actually: In the beginning of the com-
mon era, there was not even one Christianity but only Greco-
Roman Jewry, whose monotheism, even in its proto-Christian
guise, the polytheistic majority rightly regarded as atheism
vis-a-vis all gods but one. This was the divide that mattered.
Within that Jewish world community, two historic world re-
ligionsRabbinic Judaism and Orthodox Christianity
would define each other into existence in a reciprocal process
that, as Daniel Boyarin has recently and brilliantly shown
{Border Lines, University of Pennsylvania Press), took cen-
turies to reach completion. Alongside both, more than ready
to absorb them, was the immense, flexible, metaphysically
speculative, culturally omnivorous, definition-defying main-
stream that was Greco-Roman polytheism. Gnosticism was
a kaleidoscopically pluriform variety of that.
Bentley Layton, in his early and still indispensable anthol-
ogy. The Gnostic Scriptures (Doubleday), makes two of gnos-
ticism's features crystal clear. First, it was a multicultural
syncretistic polytheism. Rather than join anybody, it tended
to absorb everybody. Second, it neither had nor aspired to
have a closed canon.
It is the relevance of the first of these two features that is
most often slighted. Gnosticism recognizes a whole troupe of
gods or quasi-gods, including Barbelo, the Ten Aeons, Nebro,
Saklas, Harmozel, Oroyael, the 365 Archontes, and some-
where in the mix El, Jesus, and other transformed biblical
personalities like Cain, Seth, and Thomas. The list goes on
and on, and because this array of celestial beings makes the
modern head spin, journalists almost always gloss over gnos-
ticism's complexity, smoothing it down into a therapeutic
version of itself. Layton stresses that gnostic polytheism, for
all its heterogeneity, was readily enough understood by the
gnostics themselves. The point, however, is that the Jews who
founded Christianity did not intend to repudiate their ances-
tral monotheism.
That said, three features of nascent Christianity undeni-
ably complicated the maintenance of a monotheistic identi-
ty. First, the emergent dogma of the Incarnation gave the
ancient culture of polytheism an opening that it immediate-
ly and, as it were, instinctively seized. Belief in the divinity
of Christ created a quasi-ditheism through which the estab-
lished Jewish and the emergent Christian myths alike could
be and frequently were absorbed into a revised, enlarged poly-
theistic supermyth. Second, the decision to admit Gentiles
to the Christian movement on an equal footing with Jews
meant that Jewish ethnicity could no longer serve as a quick
and reliable extrinsic marker for monotheistic belief. Third,
the fact that the early Christian movement became a frater-
nal organization with significant material benefits created a
clear practical need for some criterion to determine who was
undergoing initiation (baptism) into the community in good VO
faith and who was not. o
o
CN
Before the rise of Christianity, the Greek common noun
hairesis most often referred to a philosophical preference or
school of thoughtthe Stoics, the Peripatetics, the Cynics,
and so forth. A philosopher could freely cross back and forth
from one to another of these without ever ceasing to be a
philosopher, an ethnic Greek, or a cultural Hellene. But then
these were only schools of thought. The Christian ekklesia as- o
pired to be a material as well as a spiritual union. Thus, when S
Irenaeus wrote his Against Heresies in the second century, at S
a time when the Christian movement was still far too weak o
 to suppress anything effectively, he was not just declining in-
tellectual assimilation. He was also helping to establish a
novel form of social organization: the church as a memher-
ship organization in which right belieforthodoxyrather
than ethnicity was to be the membership criterion.
There were those of Christian sympathy, of course, who
would happily have welcomed and even joined an accultur-
ated church as just another school of Greco-Roman religious
thought, one for which no one need suffer martyrdom, one
prepared to extend to others the same easy tolerance extend-
ed to them, subject only to nominal homage to the sacred
symbols of the Roman Empire. Christians who refused such
assimilation created a subversive new possibility within the
empirenamely, the unchecked spread of their inherently
subversive "atheism" vis-a-vis the religious expression of
Roman civic loyalty. At the time Irenaeus wrote and the
Gospel of Judas was in circulation, major imperial persecu-
tions of Christianity like that of Diocletian still lay well in
the future. Rather than mighty orthodoxy vs. defenseless
gnosticism, then, one should envision groups variously in-
spired by Christian scriptures and ultimately Jewish ideas, all
deciding just how to render to Caesar the things that were
Caesar's and to God the things that were God's.
Under such circumstances, what would have been the ap-
peal of a sect that postulated that the Lord of Torah was not
really God, and which then inferred, logically, that those
who, like Cain, opposed him were not really sinners but para-
doxical saints, while their counterpartsAbraham, Isaac,
Jacob, Moses, that crowd, down to and including the Jewish
apostles and their successorswere the real sinners? In some
quarters, this would have seemed a welcome "out," but among
second-century Christians of strongly Jewish descent or sym-
pathy the appeal cannot have been very broad. A faintly anti-
Semitic Jesus who laughs at Jews for supposing that their Lord
is the real God; an ethereal Jesus who hates his own body; a
Jesus who aspires not to transform but only to escape the
world order and material reality itselfthe Jesus of the newly
discovered text is undeniably a different fellow from the hero
of orthodox Christianity. But is it far-fetched to suppose that,
"suppression" aside, this eccentric gnostic Jesus may have had
a limited appeal in these circles? The Cainites put one in
mind of garage bands with names like "The Aliens" and "The
Outsiders." The appeal of adversarial identity is real enough,
but it wears thin as the years pass.
And yet, just as cultural faux pas invariably teach us some-
o
o thing about deep cultural differences, so the ways in which
IN
Jewish and Christian ideas were ripped out of context and
put to use eccentrically in gnostic polytheism teach us some-
thing about those original ideas and their first expression.
Thus, for example (and examples are easily multiplied), the
canonical Gospels do not infer that God was Jesus' enemy
from the fact that God, in some sense, put Jesus to death on
the cross ("not my will but thine be done"). But take a step
back from the canon, and that inference cannot be called ex-
actly illogical, can it? It is what we call an understandable
o
mistake, what Harold Bloom would describe as a creative
"misprision." Similarly, although Jesus was God incarnate,
and although, therefore, God in some sense put himself to
death, the canonical Gospels do not infer that God simply
wanted out of his human body. But, again: Would that infer-
ence be illogical? Finally, though, the idea whose native
strangeness we can most clearly see afresh by the light of the
Gospel of Judas is that of the immolation of God by God
an act so radically out of character for Yahweh Elohim that
it cannot fail to bring his very identity as God into crisis.
As I have written elsewhere (Christ: A Crisis in the Life of
God), Yahweh and Jesus are characterologically so different
that they must either be two distinct beings or one being who
has undergone some kind of change. Modem Christians may
be shocked at this suggestion, but it is hardly a novel one.
Rabbinic Judaism looked at Jesus and the God of the Hebrew
Scriptures and said, "They are indeed two, but only God is
God." Gnosticism of the sort on display in the Gospel of Judas
looked at the two and, in effect, said, "They are indeed two,
but only Jesus is God." "No," Christianity insisted, "they are
one," and Christian orthodoxy managed to find a way to make
metaphysical sense of this insistence. Yet that metaphysical
explanation, the doctrine of the Trinity, did not expunge the
characterological difference that haunts the pages of Chris-
tian Scripture, most of all in the tale of the quasi-suicidal
agony and death of the Lamb of God. For if Judas were not a
tool in the hand of God incarnate, if the sacrifice of "Christ,
our Passover Lamb" were not somehow at God's behest, then
what could Jesus have meant when he said (John 10:18), "No
one takes my life from me. I lay it down of my own accord"?
Sin is an offense against God. No sin in the Bible offends
more personally against God than the sin of Judas. If, then,
even this sin was not a true sin but only a dark and mysteri-
ous part of the great divine plan, how can any lesser sin be
considered a true sin?
This is the nettle that Paul seems to grasp in Romans when
he claims that by the death and resurrection of Christ, God
has "condemned sin in the flesh" (Rom 8:3). In more abstract
terms, we would say that Paul has eliminated the category of
sin as such. This is the possibility that Martin Luther, in his
own way and in his own language, found so electrifying and
so liberating. But this is also the point where the gates yawn
open on the hellish topic of theodicy.
In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus exalts his betrayer for enabling
him to escape corporeality: "You will exceed all of [the bap-
tized]. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." Or-
thodox Christianity does not resolve the problem of evil by
locating it thus in corporeality and then promising escape.
All the same, the orthodox answer says something strange
about God in its own way, and that strangeness is illumined
by this new discoveryas when light falls from an odd angle,
through a broken window, into a dark and forgotten corner
of the house you call home.
Jack Miles is the author of Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God
(Vintage Books). Funding for this article was provided b^i a grant
from the Henry Luce Foundation.