The Gospel According to Bart

DAVID V BARRETT talks to biblical scholar Professor Bart D Ehrman about the recent discovery of the Gospel of Judas reveals much about the murkiness of early Church history and might send Christians back to the classroom.

Judas! The ultimate hate figure in Christianity - and last year his newly discovered gospel hit the headlines (see FT210:4-5). One of the very first to see the manuscript was Bart D Ehrman, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has probably done more than any other scholar to bring the realities of New Testament (NT) criticism to a general readership. The moment the Gospel turned up, scholars accepted that it wasn't written by Judas, or even by anyone who knew him. In his latest book, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, Ehrman asks rhetorically: "If the book doesn't give us any historical information about Judas or Jesus, why in the world should its discovery matter?" But he goes on to say: "The Gospel of Judas is tremendously important. It is safe to say that it is the most significant Christian text to appear in the past 60 years."¹

Just before Christmas, I met Bart Ehrman in a cafe in Wimbledon, and asked him to explain.

"We have a lot of gospels that claim to be written by a lot of people that they weren't written by. We have gospels by Peter, and by Thomas, and by Mary Magdalene, and these are significant not because the alleged authors actually wrote them but because they show us what Christians were saying and thinking in the decades after these people had died.

"The Gospel of Judas is significant because it was probably written 40 or 50 years after the Gospels in the New Testament... As such, it can tell us what Christianity was like in those early decades. What is striking about it, of course, is that the person who is normally thought of as the villain of the story is the hero, and so it has this inherent intrigue that few other gospels have."

AN INSIDE JOB

The late third- to early fourth-century manuscript of the Gospel of Judas, after being buried for 1,600 years, very nearly didn't survive the last couple of decades. The leather-bound codex, which included four texts altogether, was discovered in 1978, and, like most ancient manuscripts, by accident: some peasants found it in a limestone box with human remains and other bits and pieces, in a cave in Middle Egypt. Immediately, it found its way into the seedy world of the antiquities market. In 1984, one dealer, not offered enough for it, stashed it in a safety deposit box on Long Island, New York, where, absorbing moisture from the humid atmosphere after centuries in a dry environment, it steadily disintegrated over the next 16 years. At some point, it was torn into two parts, an upper third and a lower two-thirds; after this, another dealer shuffled the crumbling parts of pages to put the best ones at the beginning and end. One dealer even kept the manuscript in a deep freeze, believing this would stop further damage; instead, it completely destroyed many fibres of the papyrus. It's something of a miracle that anything survived.

Eventually, the remains of the manuscript were acquired by a philanthropic organization, which employed specialists to restore it -from nearly 1,000 fragments - and scholars to translate it. Around 15 per cent of the Coptic text is thought to have been irretrievably lost. But what remains, according to Bart Ehrman, is remarkable.

"This was the most surprising find that I had in doing research on Judas. Something that I had never quite understood in the gospels is that the Jewish leaders want to arrest Jesus so they paid Judas in order to find him privately, That never made sense to me... why couldn't they just follow him?"

Could Judas have actually betrayed something else, Ehrman wondered, other than Jesus's whereabouts? Jesus was executed for calling himself the King of the Jews, which he never publicly did - so where did this idea come from? Jesus taught his Disciples privately that there would be a future kingdom, and that they would be rulers in it.

"So who would be their ruler? I presume Jesus would be; that he would be the king over all. But this isn't something he taught the crowds. If the Romans had this information about Jesus, and it was information he had only given the insiders, then one of the insiders must have told the story. It made sense to me that Judas, instead of betraying Jesus's whereabouts, had betrayed this insider information - and that was just what the Jewish leaders needed to turn Jesus over to the Romans." Because now Jesus, in Roman eyes, wasn't just a religious preacher but a political threat.

The conventional theological "justification" for Judas, where there is one, is that by his betrayal he enabled Jesus's atoning sacrifice to happen, the moral being that God can bring good consequences out of even the most evil acts. The Gospel of Judas sees it quite differently. Judas is the only one who understands who Jesus really is, which is why Jesus gives him the job of betraying him. "This is not a malicious act, as it is portrayed in the earlier [canonical) Gospels," writes Ehrman. "Judas is not acting out of greed; he is not being driven by Satan; he is not himself a wicked man acting out the evil machinations of his heart. He is doing Jesus the greatest favor possible. He is enabling him to escape this wicked world to return to his heavenly home." ²

When I mention that Heaven's Gate used exactly the same reasoning for their suicides in 1997 (see FT99:32,100:35-40), Ehrman expands on the point.

"This can be misunderstood if it is not set within its own Gnostic context. In this Gospel, as in a lot of Gnostic thinking, Jesus is a divine being who is temporarily inhabiting a physical body. The body is a necessary evil - because for him to communicate he has to be in a body - but for salvation he has to escape the body. The only way he can escape is if the body gets killed, and so Judas makes it possible - and that's why Judas is the hero of the text."

MAD, BAD AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW

The word "Gnostic" has been criticized as covering too many varieties of belief and practice; some scholars have suggested dropping it altogether, but Ehrman says it just needs a clearer definition. The Gospel of Judas is clearly a Gnostic gospel, he argues: "It conveys secret knowledge, gnosis, that is offering salvation, and the salvation appears to be deliverance from this evil, material world. That's what I think Gnosticism to be: a set of religions that taught that one needed secret knowledge in order to escape the material trappings of this world."

Is that what Jesus taught? Ehrman says not. "I think Jesus is best understood as a Jewish apocalypticist. Gnosticism developed out of Jewish apocalypticism; it rejected it, but retained some elements. Traditional Christianity also developed out of apocalyptic Judaism and also changed a lot of its terms. So what came to be traditional Christianity, say from the Nicene Creed, is very far removed from what Jesus himself had to say. I think they're both pretty far away from what Jesus actually taught."

This means that, for a change, he'll be dealing with the Old Testament and with Hebrew texts, in addition to the Greek, Aramaic, Latin, Syriac and a bit of Coptic he already works with. "I'm not a great linguist," he says, with no trace of false modesty, but you have to be able to deal with these languages."

Gnostic dualism offers a clever solution for the problem of evil: at its simplest, there's a Good God and a Bad God, and it was the Bad God (or Mad God) who created the world, with its earthquakes, tsunamis and murders (not to mention the tsetse fly and the common cold).

Apocalypticism was another solution to the question of suffering. Jews came to believe that their suffering wasn't a punishment from God for doing wrong, but a punishment from God's enemies, the forces of evil, because they're trying to follow God's law. "It turns the older view on its head," says Ehrman. "Jewish apocalypticists thought that God was going to bring an end to all that, and that he was going to bring in a new kingdom where there wouldn't be any more suffering. And they thought it was going to happen right away. There were a lot of Jewish apocalypticists in the first century that we know about from the Dead Sea Scrolls and other sources. And scholars for the last century have been saying that Jesus was an apocalypticist." Even though, presumably, a lot has been edited out, there are still plenty of verses in the NT where the Apostles, even Jesus himself, dearly believe that he'll be returning very soon, and that his own generation will see the End.

When it became inescapably obvious that this wasn't the case, that Jesus hadn't returned and the End hadn't arrived, the early Christians had to do some major rethinking. Christianity itself was redefined, and in more than one way.

For Gnostics, instead of evil forces causing suffering, it was the Bad God of this world who caused it. But what developed into orthodox Christianity redefined it in a very different way.

"It transformed the horizontal dualism between the present age that's evil and the coming age that's good into a vertical dualism between this world down here that has suffering and the world above in heaven, which is good. People stop talking about entering into the Kingdom of God, and start talking about dying and going into heaven."

Jewish and early Christian apocalypticism is massively misunderstood. There are millions of people, especially in the United States, who believe deep in their hearts that we are now in the End Days, that believers will soon be enraptured and that Jesus is about to return in clouds of glory to establish his Kingdom. Such millenarianism is nothing new; in almost every century of the last 2,000 years, people have been confidently predicting his return next -week or next year- ³ But in recent decades, we've had Hal Lindsay's Late Great Planet Earth, the Jehovah's Witnesses and others [editors note: Radio Church God aka Worldwide Church of God] prophesying Jesus's return in 1975, and now those dreadful "Left Behind" novels... Doesn't Ehrman feel a bit depressed by this?

I mention a booklet entitled 1975 in Prophecy; ⁴ he caps that with one called 88 Reasons Why the Rapture will occur in 1988. "There are two things you can say about these people. One is that every one of them has been wrong. The other is that they've almost all used the Bible to get there - so that should tell you something!" he laughs.

From the Human to the Divine

What about those writers like Acharya S (The Christ Conspiracy)⁵and Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy (The Jesus Mysteries),⁶ who say that Jesus never existed, and that Christianity was an invented religion, the Jewish equivalent of the Greek mystery religions?

"This is an old argument, even though it shows up every 10 years or so. This current craze that Christianity was a mystery religion like these other mystery religions - the people who are saying this are almost always people who know nothing about the mystery religions; they've read a few popular books, but they're not scholars of mystery religions. conservation work began.

"The reality is, we know very little about mystery religions - the whole point of mystery religions is that they're secret! So I think it's crazy to build on ignorance in order to make a claim like this. I think the evidence is just so overwhelming that Jesus existed, that it's silly to talk about him not existing. I don't know anyone who is a responsible historian, who is actually trained in the historical method, or anybody who is a biblical scholar who does this for a living, who gives any credence at all to any of this."

A far more interesting and worthwhile enquiry is how Jesus became God, the subject of Ehrman's next book but one. "How could Jesus or his Disciples, good God-fearing Jews, possibly have thought of him as God?" I ask; surely it would have been not just utter blasphemy, but completely unthinkable.

"I agree completely. I think it's beyond what one could imagine Jesus or his followers thinking; but it is true that within 20 years the Apostle Paul is making it sound like he thinks Jesus was in some sense divine; how do you get from one to the other in 20 years? The striking thing is how quickly Jesus becomes revered as a divine being. I think it's a really interesting question.

"The early Christians thought that Jesus was raised from the dead. That wasn't just resuscitation of the body; for the earliest Christians it meant that Jesus had been exalted to God's right hand - he's God's right-hand man, so to speak. They thought this very early on. This understanding that Jesus had become the Lord, had taken on divine characteristics because God made him that way, then begins to have an impact on how they talk about Jesus when they talk about his earlier life. He became the Lord, but they start thinking of him as always having been the Lord, and that leads into his deification "

It's often said that oral societies preserve the integrity of stories, but Ehrman argues precisely the opposite. "In oral culture, there is not a concern for what we in written culture might call verbatim accuracy," he writes. "In oral societies it is recognized that the telling of a story to a different audience or in a different context or for a different reason calls for a different version of the story. Stories are moulded to the time and circumstance in which they are told."⁷But this contradicts what many people believe, I tell him.

"That whole idea that oral cultures maintain their stories verbatim came about in written cultures," he explains. "It was an ideology that tried to provide some kind of assurance that when we write history based on oral traditions we can be sure we got it right. But cultural anthropologists who have worked on this have shown that that's not how it works. And it's clear with the stories of Jesus that we have the same stories told from different written sources and they're different stories, even in the canonical gospels. Compare the crucifixion of Jesus in Mark and John and then tell me they're preserving these things verbally accurately!"

The reliability of the Gospel accounts can be questioned for many other reasons. Ehrman's top-selling book isn't, as I'd have thought, his one on The Da Vinci Code,⁸ but Misquoting Jesus, ⁹which was on the New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks in 2005. This sets out in layman's terms the basics of biblical criticism, points out that there are hundreds of thousands of differences between NT manuscripts in both Greek and Latin, and shows how, although most of them are simple copyists' errors, a good number are deliberate changes, both additions and deletions, to push one theological stance or another. "It caused a bit of a stir," Ehrman says with a smile.

Rewriting Christianity

It's quite clear that the practice of Christianity in the mainstream denominations has very little in common with early Christianity, and from time to time over the centuries groups of Evangelicals say: "Let's throw all these traditions and accretions of history out, and go back to pure New Testament Christianity" Perhaps the most important thing to come out of all of Ehrman's books is that there never was such a thing. There was no single "New Testament Christianity", but instead a huge variety of beliefs in the early Christian melting pot. "Discoveries of new texts simply show us how murky, rather than clearly delineated, the religious world of the Christian second century actually was," Ehrman writes.¹⁰

In all his books, Ehrman distinguishes between two things: what different groups of early Christians believed about Jesus, and what the historical reality of the Jesus story (and of the Disciples, including Judas) might actually have been. His emphasis is usually on the former: the widely differing stories that people were telling about Jesus and his Disciples within just a few decades of his death.Two of his most important books are Lost Scriptures and Lost Christianities, one containing many of the non-canonical gospels and epistles, and the other exploring the conflicting varieties of Christianity in its first few centuries.¹¹

The hardest thing for his new undergraduates to understand, says Ehrman, "is that what they grew up with as Christianity isn't what the historical Jesus taught. There is an automatic connection; getting them to make the disconnect is quite the hardest thing." But today's students are simply not very knowledgeable. When I mention that I had to tell some Sociology of Religion undergrads at LSE that the Bible has an Old Testament and a New Testament, he's not in the slightest surprised. Ehrman begins his New Testament course with a pop quiz; he gives his new students - around 350 of them each year - 11 questions, and tells them that if they get nine right he'll buy them dinner. Even in the heavily Christian American South where he teaches, he has only had to buy four dinners in 18 years.

"These are not hard questions. How many books are in the New Testament? What language were they written in? But the students who do know a good deal about religion have been taught it from an Evangelical point of view. There are very few people with anything like an enlightened understanding of religion and Christianity going into the class. They are somewhat more enlightened by the time they get out!"

Through his impressive output of books on the complexities of New Testament scholarship, Ehrman is greatly extending the size of his class.

DAVID V BARRETT regularly speaks on radio and TV on everything from Scientology to The Do Vinci Code. His book The New Believers is a comprehensive study of sects, 'cults' and alternative religions, and his A Brief History of Secret Societies will be published by Constable & Robinson in July. He plays fretless bass in the rock-jazz-blues band Midnight.

NOTES:

1. Bart D Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, Oxford, 2007, p 173
2. ibid, p 97.
3. For proof of mankind's persistent credulity or misguided hope in the face of all evidence, see David V 8arrett, The New Believers, Cassell, 2001, Ch7; David S Katz & Richard H Popkin, Messianic Revolution, Allen Lane, 1999; Eugen Weber, Apocalypses, Hutchinson, 1999; Marina Benjamin, Living at the End of the World, Picador, 1998; Damian Thompson, The End of Time, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996, etc.
4. Herbert W Armstrong, 1975 in Prophecy, Radio Church of God, 1956; unaccountably, it went out of print from the mid-70s...
5. Adventures Unlimited Press 1999.
6. Thorsons, 1999.
7. Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Gospel..., p 36.
8. Bart D. Ehrman, Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code, Oxford, 2004.
9. Bart D. Ehrman. Misquoting Jesus, Harper, San Francisco, 2005 (UK: Whose Word Is it?, Continuum, 2006).
10. Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Gospel..., p 115.
11. Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament, Oxford, 2003, Bart D Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, Oxford, 2003.

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