Finding Jesus and the Gospel of Judas

The annual publication from the School of Humanities at Rice University, HUMANITAS: THE MEANING OF BEING HUMAN, just came out.  There is a featured article in it on my adventures on the CNN set of the FINDING JESUS film.  I took a photo of the article because it is not on line yet.  I see back issues in pdf on line, but not the 2015 magazine.

The story is meaningful to me because it contains my reminiscences of filming in Geneva and seeing the Gospel of Judas for the first time. Hope it is clear enough to read.

CNN, Finding Jesus, Gospel of Judas

I had hoped to be able to link to a streamed version of CNN's broadcast on the Gospel of Judas which aired Sunday evening.  But I have not had any luck discovering a link.  We went over to a friend's house to watch the episode (admitting we don't have cable).  It was the first time that I saw the episode so I was curious what they would do with the two days of filming that I alone was involved in.  We ate a fine dinner and sat back and enjoyed the show.

A screen shot from CNN New Day Weekend, Sunday March 15, 2015

For all of those who have been writing me, yes, there is much more to the Gospel of Judas then was put into the film (all these details are in my book, The Thirteenth Apostle, and on the rest of the footage they shot in Geneva but didn't use in the film itself). 

The analysis of the Gospel of Judas runs deep and has very significant ramifications for our understanding of early Christianity.  The person of Judas is only one issue and it is rather small compared to what else the Gospel of Judas tells us. 

My take away from the Gospel of Judas is that Christian Gnostics were a big part of the Christian movement and had developed sophisticated forms of Christianity that were at odds (even violently) with catholic or apostolic Christianity (precursor to Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy).  The Gnostics who wrote the Gospel of Judas thought that the concept of Jesus' death as a sacrifice to God for the atonement of sins was horrid.  Absolutely and fundamentally wrong. 

These Gnostics thought that sacrifice to gods of any kind was sacrifice to demons.  So they were criticizing the catholics of their time for their central doctrine (atonement) and practice (eucharist or communion meal when Jesus' body and blood were sacrificed on the church altar weekly and eaten).  The demon Judas was responsible for this horrific act and the twelve disciples were responsible for teaching Christians to believe that this demonic act was really for the worship of God.  The Gnostics thought the true God hated sacrifices.

Whatever else we might take away from the Gospel of Judas, this I know.  The doctrine that Jesus' death was a good thing for humankind, a sacrifice that God wanted to atone for the sins of humankind, was not universal among the early Christians.  Some of them abhorred it.