National Geographic is about to "reveal" the secret Gospel of Judas in time for Easter. I should point out that the so-called secret gospel has been known about for more than 1,800 years so calling it secret is a little misleading and an attempt to sensationalize the document.
Around the time the Gospel of John was written (90 a.d. give-or-take) certain people were beginning to emerge teaching new wisdom about Jesus. John was the earliest to respond to these teachings and denounce them primarily because they were false and written by people who had never even met Jesus or knew an eyewitness to Christ like one of the apostles for instance.
Over the next 200 to 300 hundred years a tradition developed in this particular area of writing. People would claim authority through dreams/visions to have witnessed Christ and than write down this new "knowledge" as a gospel or such and in certain circles these were treated with equal authority to scripture. Based on the fact that this group claimed to have hidden/secret knowledge they have been called Gnostics (gnosis is Greek for knowledge). Their writings have been called the gnostic gospels. A particular characteristic of this group was a belief that all things flesh were evil and that only the spiritual was good. This is rooted in Platonic philosophy and essentially a Greek idea which intruded on Christian thought. This belief is seen when we read the following statement of Jesus to Judas in an excerpt from the Gospel of Judas:
"you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothed me."
It should be pointed out that for Christ to suggest that Judas would exceed the other apostles runs contrary to the whole witness of the New Testament in which Jesus was seen as constantly discouraging this kind of elitism and competition amongst the apostles.
As CNN points out the "man that clothed me" is a reference to the body which was seen as keeping the true man, the soul, a prisoner, only to be released at death. Not only was this sort of belief a strong aspect of gnosticism but it was also key to another belief at the time known as Manichaeism (thanks to Pastor Alex for help with this particular heresy – check out his blog at:
http://qaz1.bannerland.org/wordpress/?cat=1 ).
Manichaeism: The third century religion founded by Iranian philosopher Mani…discouraging involvement in the physical pleasures on the basis that the physical is imperfect and only the spiritual is good.
So what’s the problem?
First, gnosticism reduces the effectiveness of Christ’s death and ressurection by limiting its redemptive power to the spiritual – as though He was not strong enough to redeem the whole of creation: physical and spiritual.
Second, people are always saying that the church (as though we had one huge DaVinci Code-like secret administrative wing that controlled everything) has supressed and unfairly excluded books from the Bible. The reality is that the books that we commonly consider authoritative as scripture were considered authoritative long before the council of Nicea in 325 AD chose to officially sanction them – which it did primarily to avoid confusion and to recognize what the majority of Christians already accepted.
One of the tests the council used to affirm the books we have as the New Testament, aside from common acceptance by the majority of believers, was whether the book, letter, gospel, was written by someone who was an eyewitness to Christ like the apostles, or someone who had a close personal relationship with the apostles. This is an effective journalistic test even today in terms of trusting information which is reported – asking the question: is the person an actual witness to who is being talked about or is it essentially gossip?
So the Secret Gospel of Judas was never a secret and the reason it’s not considered a Biblical book is not becuase it reveals hidden truth so much as it is a writing which attempts to claim that only the spiritual is good and not the physical. When the ressurected Christ allowed Thomas to place his fingers in His wounds he did so to prove He was more than spirit but also flesh. When the ressurected Christ ate a fish dinner with the apostles He did so for the same reason – spirits don’t need to eat nor can they tolerate anything physical like a fish dinner – but the real, living, flesh and bone resurrected Christ could join you for pizza tomorrow if He chose to.
1What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life– 2and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us– 3what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. 4These things we write, so that our joy may be made complete.
– The First Letter of John, chapter one, verses one through four
Harnessing Chaos 