Conrad Gempf on the Gospel of Judas

New Testament scholar Conrad Gempf has posted a brief but engaging three-part series on the Gospel of Judas. Conrad brings an excellent biblical and historical perspective to the issue. Here's a sample from Part 1:

People in the second and third century were becoming more and more interested in Christianity, but had trouble with its more radical teachings. In particular, the idea that salvation was conferred on the basis of gooey things like love and dying and faith must have seemed an unworthy set of beliefs for the powerful educated elite. They didn't like all the business about becoming servants of others or self-sacrifice, so they played down Jesus as Redeemer and played up Jesus as Revealer. They tried to make out that what was important was not love and servanthood but insider knowledge and secret wisdom (perhaps even handshakes). They either denied the cross or made it all about freeing Jesus' heavenly spiritual bits from the nasty dirty physical bits, in line with their pre-Christian philosophies totally unlike Hebrew thinking. And once you have that perspective on the death/release of Jesus' soul, of course, it's totally possible to recast Judas as his liberator.

Part 2 puts the Gospel of Judas in the larger context of Gnostic writings and shows them all to be found wanting:

Quite a few of the gnostic Gospels picture a Jesus who thinks all the disciples are schnooks except the one or two in which he confides. How come it's never the same disciple? Turn to the next and the author of the last one is one of the misled. In the Gospel of Philip, it's Mary, and Jesus kissed her on the mouth. . . . But in the gnostic Book of Thomas the Contender, Jesus says "Woe to you who love intercourse with anything feminine and the defilement that goes with it." Or how about the way that the Gospel of Mary affirms the feminine? The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas does the reverse and says that since she's female, Mary can only be saved by being turned into a male.

Now, come on. Does this sound to you like a group who has the true story and is being supressed? Or does it sound rather like a group who cannot stomach what really happened and is rummaging around to reinvent a new version which removes or alters things they found objectionable, like Jesus' salvific death?

If you're not familiar with Conrad's writing, his Judas posts offer a delightful example of the high energy and hard-hitting content he packs into few words. Part 3, by the way, is even stronger than the first two. Really.