Sherry Chandler

In the second century of the common era, Christianity was in crisis. It was dangerous to be a Christian because Rome had decided Christians were a threat to the state. Although the period of Roman persecution was short-lived in historic terms, the question of how to approach martyrdom became a defining one. The meaning of death became the reason — or the excuse — for a major schism among the faithful, for the choosing of the canon gospels and the aggressive suppression of the Gnostics.

The Gospel of Judas, according to Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King in their new book Reading Judas. The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity (Viking 2007), does not argue that Christians should not be willing to die for their faith. It does argue that they should not embrace martyrdom as a way to be like Jesus. Take, for example, St. Ignatius, who was arrested about 115 C.E. and who engaged in a copious letter-writing campaign in favor of martyrdom:

Speaking as if martyrdom were the best—if not the only—way to “gain God,” Ignatius insisted that the wild beasts would offer him great opportunity to “imitate the suffering of my God” (by which, of course, he meant Jesus; Ignatius Romans 6:4). Ignatius envisioned his own body, like Jesus’ body, becoming “God’s bread” to be eaten as eucharist: “I am God’s wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts to make a pure loaf for Christ” (Ignatius Romans 4:1). Ignatius prayed that nothing interfere with his plan:

Let there come upon me fire, and cross, and agony with wild beasts, racking of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body—only let me attain to Christ Jesus! (Ignatius Romans 5:3).

—Reading Judas, p. 54

This frenzy to be martyred for the cause sounds uncomfortably familiar.

The Gospel of Judas makes no pretense to have been written by Judas Iscariot but it does attempt to clear his name. It argues that Judas was the favorite disciple and that what he did was necessary to fulfill Christ’s mission. There are hints of this in the other gospels, too, and the interpretation of motive becomes as much a plot device as it might be in a modern detective thriller. The spin becomes, forgive me, more and more Rovian as the canonic gospels get further away from the events in time. Judas’s motive becomes darker, thirty pieces of silver are added, and then he becomes aligned with pure evil in the form of Satan.

But no, says the Gospel of Judas, this death is what Jesus wanted and what the crucifixion brought about was not Christ’s agony and his resurrection in the flesh but his release from the confines of that flesh into pure spirit. It’s a path we can all follow but the emphasis should be on the life and not on the death of Christ. It strikes me as altogether a more Zen kind of thing.

More surprising is the way the Gospel of Judas turns upside down what we know about the other disciples—or what we thought we knew. This gospel does more than champion the disciple that all the rest regard as the villain; it also sharply condemns “the twelve.” For when they come to Jesus, disturbed by a dream they had of priests at the altar who are sacrificing their own wives and children and committing all kinds of sins and injustices—and doing so in Jesus’ name—his reply shocks and angers them: “You are the ones you saw receiving offerings at the altar. . . . And the domestic animals you saw being brought for sacrifice are the multitude you are leading astray upon that al[t]ar” (Judas 5:1;4).

—Reading Judas, p. 33

In the end, the Roman state co-opted Christianity bloodlessly in the body of the Emperor Constantine I, and the Gnostic gospels were buried away for thousands of years. But the bloodshed didn’t stop, just the nature of the victims changed. And the questions raised by the Gnostics were not finally settled, have not been finally settled. The arguments surface and re-surface in everything from the Protestant revolution to controversy over Mel Gibson movies.

I have been watching the progressive withering of the dogwood blossoms, the bluebells, and the mayapples outside my bedroom window as we have experienced night after night of hard freeze, and I am not in much mood to celebrate the resurrection. More in the mood to celebrate the recent decision of our wounded Supreme Court that something should, after all, be done about carbon emissions. It should never have been warm enough, this early in April, for everything to bloom so copiously and too soon.

The chocolate that goes into our Chocolate Jesus is produced by children sold into slavery, their lives blighted by poverty and hard labor, and Easter bunnies are often neglected and starved.

Anyway, I’ve always been fond of underdogs.

The message of Judas is this: Die however it is that you must die, but live like Jesus.