Happy Easter. I had hoped to offer you some light, entertaining fluff this holiday, but something has cast a pal across the holiday and I feel like I need to address it.
Unless you’ve been living in a box, you’ve probably heard that the National Geographic Society has unveiled the discovery of a “Gospel according to Judas.” It’s actually a bunch of papyrus that was discovered nearly 40 years ago, the existence of which was known all along by scholars.
So why is it such a big deal right now? Newsweek magazine said that it was as if “an unseen hand must have arranged for the Gospel of Judas to be published while the "Da Vinci Code" craze still had life in it.” Just before Easter, and soon before the Da Vinci Code movie is released. Convenient, whether you believe that is the unseen hand of commerce or the hand of the devil himself, it is a little too fishy.
The Da Vinci Code itself is very controversial. It suggests that the early Church conspired to hide secret knowledge. The theory is that Jesus didn’t really die on the cross, but went on to marry Mary Magdalan and the holy grail wasn’t a chalice that held the first communion wine or even the blood He shed, but it was Mary and the wine/blood is the bloodline of Jesus, carried by his descendants. People who get too wrapped up in this need to remember that the novel is "almost pure fiction, using author Dan Brown's imagination, loosely based on legends about so called “lost gospels” or “Gnostic gospels” like gospel of Thomas, the gospel of Mary, and now the gospel of Judas.
First of all, Leonardo Da Vinci had nothing to do with all this. Sure, he may or may not have included and later painted over Mary in his famous “last supper,” but he was a vain, short-attention-spanned fame hungry pop-star who was working for a church that at the time was drunk with the opulence of the renaissance and political power.
This Easter, you might want to read John 20:11-18. Think about the role Jesus appears to be give Mary in his church? I think that’s far more meaningful than being just a spouse.
Keep in mind, too that the four canonical gospels in the Bible were all written within a few decades of Jesus’ resurrection by Jesus’ followers who had a direct connection to Him. These other apocrafal gospels were written hundreds of years later by people trying to make Jesus’ story more complicated and mysterious than it has to be. I believe that Mary, the Apostle ‘doubting’ Thomas, and even the regretful, suicidal Judas would be ashamed that anyone put their names on something so counter to Jesus’ own teaching.
There are two basic false-doctrines that are being promoted by both the Judas gospel craze and the Da Vinci Code fad. One is Arianism and another is Gnosticism.
Arianism was a 4th-century Christian heresy named for Arius (c.250-c.336), a priest in Alexandria, Egypt. He basically denied the deity of Jesus. He held that the Son of God, while divine and god-like, was created by God the Father, rather than being part of the Trinity. Arianism spread in the early church and resulted in such disunity that Emperor Constantine called for a church council at Nicaea in 325, from which we get the “Nicean Creed.”
One of my favorite stories about the council was that a bishop from Turkey named Nicholas (you may know him as “Santa Claus”) got so angry he punched Arius in the nose!
Gnosticism is form of mysticism, that says that the goal of life is to discover "special knowledge" (gnosis). It basically sees the struggle of good and bad as a division between the physical realm, and the higher spiritual realm. This dualism is not a Hebrew, Jewish or New Testament Christian idea, it came from the Greeks, and the philosopher Plato in particular.
An in depth study of Gnosticism makes it look like some bizarre pagan religion like Wicca or Scientology (or even the deepest levels of Mormonism). It’s definitely not some lost or hidden form of true Christianity, far from it. Basically, the gospel of Judas and other Gnostic teachings want us to imagine that rather than the only begotten Son of God, who is the only way truth and life (John 4:14), He’s just a perfect human who demonstrated for us the “secret” way to discover our own inner-light.
This new gospel of Judas tries to suggest that Jesus asked Judas to help him escape his corrupt physical body in order to reach “enlightenment.” Funny, I could have swore that He was crucified for the forgiveness of our sins, not just his own spiritual benefit.
Like Judas, Gnostics want control, they want religion on their own terms, not God’s. At first Judas wanted to overthrow the Romans but when he saw that Jesus’ Kingdom was one of humility, love and service- he sold Him out for money instead. Now they’re trying to capitalize on our appetite for the mysterious and our own desires to feel like we understand or control God, instead of trusting Him.
This Easter, go to the sources. Read the Gospels of Matthew Mark, Luke and John and discover the true “light of the world,” the one outside yourself, who died and rose again so that you can know all His secrets, nothing hidden, nothing that we have to work for ourselves, free.
“Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist—he denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.” ~1 John 2:22-23
"Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.” ~1 John 4:1-3
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