Gospel of Judas

There has been a lot of coverage recently regarding the newly found Gospel of Judas (here is a link to one such article). For centuries, Judas has been characterized as a traitor. But now there appears to be evidence that Judas might have been fulfilling a request from Jesus. It's hard to know what to believe. The Gospel of Judas and Judas being a traitor are not necessarily incompatible. If you were Judas or an associate of Judas and he really did betray Jesus, you might still feel guilty about the betrayal and propagate a story that you were simply "acting under orders" - the excuse certainly get used for all forms of atrocities. On the other hand, perhaps Judas has been misunderstood all these years. Who knows.

Reading about the Gospel of Judas reminded me of a larger topic from my religion course - whether the Bible is literally the word of God. My opinion is that it's not. In one of our lectures, the professor pointed out that “the New Testament … took centuries to take its final form. Many writings were not included because at some point or other decisions were made what was orthodox (true) and what was heretical (not true).” When I hear things like that, it immediately makes me think of the fact that the winners write the history books. Many American history books (especially those used in K-12 settings) either gloss over or massively sugar-coat the injustices against Native Americans. But the reality is that the “white man” was the victor and propagated a favorable (or at least more favorable) version of those events. Similarly, with the New Testament, practical considerations such as a patriarchal culture and Roman/Greek philosophy can’t help but to have compromised the New Testament in some way. I understand the argument that some make that the authoring and editorial process was guided by God (specifically the Holy Spirit) and, therefore, the New Testament is the word of God. But I have a lot of trouble buying that argument. I can certainly accept that many people were moved by the Holy Spirit to record their stories in written form and to share their stories with others. But if you buy into the concept of free will (and “free will [being] so important that even God must respect it”), I don’t see how God could have guided every sub-action of the process. If God did, it would imply that the human participants wouldn’t be permitted to choose between good (ensuring the absolute accuracy and integrity of the document) and evil (compromising the document given external forces). And if free will was active in any part of the authoring process, there must be at least one word in the entire New Testament that isn’t truly the word of God. I’m not saying any of this to “attack” the New Testament. I’m sure it’s a very valuable document and is probably accurate in many accounts. But I just can’t accept – at least not right now – that the document is the literal word of God.

Islam shares a similar opinion regarding the Bible. They believe the Bible is divinely inspired but God's true message was corrupted by man over time. Muslims believe that message was restored through a "direct transmission" to Muhammad and is recorded in the Koran. By the same logic as before, I can't buy into that argument. In The World's Religions, it says that “the words that Muhammad exclaimed in [his] often trance-like states were memorized by his followers and recorded on bones, bark, leaves, and scraps of parchment, with God preserving their accuracy throughout.” But I can’t buy into this argument (that God preserved the accuracy throughout) any more for Islam (and the Koran) than I do with Christianity (and the Bible). Free will must have been active and compromised the process somewhere along the way. With all that said, I can accept that the Koran is divinely inspired and that its existence and beauty is a miracle (given Muhammad’s level of education, etc).

The thing that all of this gets me thinking about is whether any of these faiths is really “complete”. For example, why would God create man and then offer revelations to different people / prophets around the world (“to every people we have sent a messenger”)? One explanation is that God wants man to search out the “truth” and conduct that search of their own free will. But that begs the question of why such a search for truth (religion) has led to so much turmoil and violence in the world. Perhaps it’s all a test of man. Perhaps God gave different pieces of the puzzle to different faiths but left enough overlap and confusion that it wouldn’t be immediately clear which pieces were which (or even what is or isn’t a piece in the first place) and how the pieces fit together. Perhaps that man’s greatest test – finding a single truth among all the revelations (old and new), being selfless and God-seeking enough to set aside some of our prior beliefs, and come together as a people (all of us) in that new found truth.