JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS
Judas Gospel: No, Judas didn't write it

The National Media is all in a frenzywith the release of the ancient document dubbed 'the Gospel of Judas'. Let's establish this right off the bat, as Ben Witherington states:

"The manuscript tells us nothing about the historical Jesus or the historical Judas," said Ben Witherington III, professor of New Testament interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky. "It tells us a lot about a group that were labeled heretics in their own day."

Scholars on all sides agree that the text was probably produced by a scribe in a Gnostic community of Cainites — early Christians who regarded the traditional villains of the Bible, including Cain and Judas, as heroes.

"There is no evidence that any of these documents ever represented mainstream Christianity," Professor Witherington said. "The Cainites were always on the fringes of their own movement."

He said that unlike the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which were written in Christianity's first century, Gnostic works were produced in the second century and afterward. To say that the Gospel of Judas reveals anything factual about Judas, Dr. Witherington said, "is like saying a document written 150 years after George Washington died tells us the inside truth about George Washington."

He is exactly right, of course. We have here nothing of value to help us understand Jesus, but rather an important document in understanding a splinter group from decades later.

The document comes from a Gnostic sect, which were groups that claimed to have 'insider' knowledge about God and Christ. In their view the real, hardcore information just wasn't for everybody:

Some of the scholars on National Geographic's advisory committee said the text should prompt a reassessment of Judas. In it, Jesus speaks privately to Judas, telling him he will share with Judas alone "the mysteries of the kingdom." Jesus asks Judas to turn him over to the Roman authorities so that his body can be sacrificed.[emphasis mine, nac]

The real laugher is that these 'scholars' try to give this view some validity:

Craig Evans, a professor of the New Testament at Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and a scholar on the National Geographic panel, conjectured that some of the dialogue between Jesus and Judas may have been spoken in private, and so did not make its way into the New Testament Gospels, which are more likely to treat Jesus' public statements.

"It is possible that the Gospel of Judas preserves an old memory that Jesus had actually instructed Judas in private, and the other disciples did not know about it," Dr. Evans said.

Somehow it preserves an old memory, although the memory was private and no one knew it...well, except for an heretical faction decades later with no direct ties to Jesus at all.

We'll call this the 'Da Vinci effect'. The terrible desire on the part of moderns to find the real story about Jesus. This discovery is interesting, and even important, within the context of Gnostic studies. For the Christian and his faith in the historical veracity of the gospel accounts the 'Gospel of Judas' doesn't even rate a blip on the radar.