The Gospel of Judas (review)

Simon Gathercole’s The Gospel of Judas is a helpful guide that includes the history of the discovery and publication of the Gospel of Judas, a background of Judas in early Christian writings, and a fresh line-byline translation and commentary of the actual text. The translation of the text is the most valuable feature of the book, giving readers a first-hand impression of the content and style of the work. The accompanying commentary is especially helpful, not least because the text is fragmentary in so many places. In the commentary, Gathercole also provides definitions and background information to the obscure names and references in the text, allowing it to be more accessible to a wider audience that may be unfamiliar with specialist knowledge such as parallels to the canonical gospels and Gnostic language, imagery, and cosmology.

In addition to the descriptive tasks of introducing the background and producing a translation and commentary of the text, Gathercole also offers a well-reasoned critique of some of the sensational claims made (most notably by H. Krosney and B. Ehrman) regarding the implications of the Gospel of Judas for reconstructing who Jesus was. He argues, for example, that since the Gospel of Judas employs phraseology from Matthew and reveals a developed picture of the Eucharist, it must have been written mid-to-late second century. Further, the Gospel of Judas depicts the biblical God as a second-rate demiurge who is subservient to the ‘Great Invisible Spirit’ – a view wholly incompatible with the predominantly Jewish worldview of the four New Testament evangelists. The fact that the Gospel of Judas is relatively late, and that it is aware of the canonical gospels but nonetheless diverges so significantly from them, suggests that it is the product of an attempt to rewrite the Jesus story at a much later stage, with little regard for the traditional data and setting of the story. Gathercole’s erudition is a welcome contribution to the ongoing and often sensational discussions about the newly discovered gospel, and his work serves as an insightful and lucid investigation that will profit both the scholar and the casual reader with an interest in the Gospel of Judas.