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N T Wright on the Gospel of Judas

An excerpt from Wright's Maundy Thursday sermon. Read the full text here.

"I was studying this newly discovered little tract, the ‘Gospel of Judas’, yesterday morning, and reading what some of its editors had written about it; and there crept over me the horrible sense of a lie cheerfully told, a lie which people are eager to believe, a lie which could sap the vital energy of the church and individual Christians unless we name it for what it is, see the danger, and know why we reject it. There is a wilful blindness about today which is uncomfortably like what Paul was talking about in 2 Corinthians. This isn’t the time or place for a full discussion. But let me just say three things about this ‘Gospel of Judas’, and about the contemporary movement which is so eager to fasten on documents like this and to make out that they represent the hidden truth about Jesus which the church has hushed up. And I say this partly because many of you will be asked about all this in the next few days and partly because it relates directly to what we are doing in this service.

First, as a historian I want every scrap of information about the ancient world, every coin, every inscription, every papyrus. I am delighted at every new find and publication. But, precisely as a historian, I have to say that this ‘Gospel of Judas’ has no historical worth at all. It tells us nothing about the true Jesus, or for that matter about the true Judas. It breathes a totally different air from that of early first-century Palestine. It’s like finding a document purporting to be about Napoleon and his senior advisors, and discovering that they’re talking about nuclear submarines and B52 bombers. It is that crass.

But, second and more important, the ‘gospel of Judas’ and the worldview it represents are deeply, dangerously, damagingly opposed to the goodness of creation and the call of Israel, which of course go together. The whole scripture, and with it all mainline Jewish and Christian thought, is based on the belief that there is one God who made the world, who made it good, and who will put it to rights at the last. Gnosticism declares, very explicitly in the ‘gospel of Judas’, that the world was made by a lesser, low-grade divinity, and that the thing to do is to find the way to escape, to get rid of this human nature which is bottling up the divine spark within us. That’s why the ‘gospel of Judas’ declares that it was Judas who truly understood Jesus, the ‘Jesus’ reinvented in the gnostic imagination, the ‘Jesus’ who wanted to be killed so that he could get rid of his body and live as a pure spirit. This has been touted as an appropriate answer to the church’s use of the figure of Judas as a stick to beat the Jewish people with, but that is ridiculous: the ‘gospel of Judas’ is deeply, structurally anti-Jewish in every line. The last thing the gnostic wants is the enthroned son of David launching the project of new creation.

And that is why the word ‘gospel’ is itself a cheat when applied to books like this. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are good news about a good God who made a good world and who loves this world so much that he has rescued and redeemed it, has defeated the evil which has intruded into it, and has launched his project of new creation. That’s why we celebrate these great gospel events over the next three days. ‘Thomas’, and ‘Judas’, and the other so-called ‘gospels’, have no such good news. They don’t want to hear about the saving cross and the powerful resurrection. They only have advice: you’d do better not to worry about this world, but to find a way of escape, and in the meantime search deep within yourself to discover who you really are.

First, then, this document is worthless historically. Second, it is opposed to the fundamental Jewish and Christian doctrine of the goodness of creation. And third, it cuts the nerve of working for God’s kingdom in the real world. Who cares about speaking the truth to power if the real task is to escape? Why bother feeding the hungry and housing the homeless, why worry about global debt or global warming or the madness of global warfare, if the main thing to do is to follow your own star and discover your true spiritual identity? Why bother following the real Jesus and standing defenceless before the powers of the world if you can invent a fake Jesus who panders to your inner desires? Let’s be quite clear: despite the sneers of so many who say that the New Testament was written, edited and then chosen out of a much larger collection of books in order to sustain the church’s political power and prestige, the truth is that in the second and third century, long before anyone thought of the Constantinian settlement, it was the people who were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Acts, Romans and the rest who were being thrown to the lions, burned at the stake, beaten and bullied and beheaded. Why would Caesar worry about ‘Thomas’, ‘Judas’ and the other pseudo-gospels? The rulers of this world are not bothered when yet another little group invents a new form of private spirituality. What makes Caesar shiver in his shoes is if people start to believe that whereas the Gentile rulers do it one way, God does it a different way, that there is a different way of power, a different form of rulership, and that Jesus has inaugurated and modelled it in his servanthood and suffering, and that the community that hails him as the only true Lord is going out into the world to live that way, and to celebrate it, as we do today, in sacrament and vocation and healing.

And that, my friends, is the vocation we are signing on for yet again in this service. Gnosticism laughed at the sacraments; in the ‘gospel of Judas’ Jesus himself laughs at the eucharist. Gnosticism doesn’t bother about healing for the body and things like anointing with oil, because the point is not to heal the body but to escape from it. Gnosticism doesn’t envisage the followers of Jesus going out to make the kingdom happen out on the street, because it’s only interested in nurturing its private spiritual interiority. We are here today because we want to follow the real Jesus and seek the real kingdom in the real world."

Good Friday

"The very heart of the atonement is the overcoming of sin: sin in its character as the rebellion of man against God, and in its character as the ground of man’s hopeless destiny in death. It was to fulfil this judgment on sin that the Son of God as man took our place as sinners. He fulfils it—as man in our place—by completing our work in the omnipotence of the divine Son, by treading the way of sinners to its better end in death, in destruction, in the limitless anguish of separation from God, by delivering up sinful man and sin in His own person to the non-being which is properly theirs, the non-being, the nothingness to which man has fallen victim as a sinner and towards which he relentless hastens. We can say indeed that He fulfils this judgment by suffering the punishment which we have all brought on ourselves.

The decisive thing is not that He has suffered what we ought to have suffered so that we do not have to suffer it, the destruction to which we have fallen victim by our guilt, and therefore the punishment which we deserve. This is true, of course. But it is true only as it derives from the decisive thing that in the suffering and death of Jesus Christ it has come to pass that in His own person He has made an end of us as sinners and therefore of sin itself by going to death as the One who took our place as sinners. In His person He has delivered up us sinners and sin itself to destruction. He has removed us sinners and sin, negated us, cancelled us out; ourselves, our sin, and the accusation, condemnation and perdition which had overtaken us. That is what we cannot do and we are not willing to do. How can we be able and willing to remove ourselves as those who commit sin and therefore sin itself? That is what He could and willed to do and actually did for us in His right and authority and power as the Son of God when He took our place as man. The man of sin, the first Adam, the cosmos alienated form God, the “present evil world” (Gal 1:4), was taken and killed and buried in and with Him on the cross. On the one side, therefore, He has turned over a new leaf in the history of the covenant of God with man, making atonement, giving man a new peace with God, reopening the blocked road of man to God. That is what happened when Jesus Christ, who willed to make Himself the bearer and Representative of sin, caused sin to be taken and killed on the cross in His own person (as that of the one great sinner). And in that way, not by suffering our punishment as such, but in the deliverance of sinful man and sin itself to destruction, which He accomplished when He suffered our punishment, He has on the other side blocked the source of our destruction; He has seen to it that we do not have to suffer what we ought to suffer; He has removed the accusation and condemnation and perdition which had passed upon us; He has cancelled their relevance to us; He has saved us from destruction and rescued us from eternal death.

The passion of Jesus Christ is the judgment of God in which the Judge Himself was the judged. As as such it is at its heart and centre the victory which has been won for us, in our place, in the battle against sin. By this time it should be clear why it is so important to understand this passion as from the very first the divine action. As the passion of the Son of God who became man for us it is the radical divine action which attacks and destroys it at its very root the primary evil in the world; the activity of the second Adam who took the place of the first, who reversed and overthrew the activity of the first in this place, and in so doing brought in a new man, founded a new world, and inaugurated a new æon—and all this in His passion. It is only as His passion that it can be this action; only as sin is, as it were, taken in the rear, only as it is destroyed by the destruction and eternal death which threatens the world, only as this worst becomes an instrument in the hand of the merciful and omnipotent God for the creation of the best. For the sake of this best, the worst had to happen to sinful man: not out of any desire for vengeance and retribution on the part of God, but because of the radical nature of the divine love, which could “satisfy” itself only in the outworking of its wrath against the man of sin, only by killing him, extinguishing him, removing him. Here is the place for the doubtful concept that in the passion of Jesus Christ, in the giving up of His Son to death, God has done that which is “satisfactory” or sufficient in the victorious fighting of sin to make this victory radical and total. He has done that which is sufficient to take away sin, to restore order betwen Himself as the Creator and His creation, to bring in the new man reconciled and therefore at peace with Him, to redeem man from death. God has done this in the passion of Jesus Christ. For this reason the divine judgment in which the Judge was judged, and therefore the passion of Jesus Christ, is as such the divine action of atonement which has taken place for us."

Karl Barth

Blogging tips

It's coming up to two full years since I started blogging, and although as a rule I generally don't like blog posts that are just about blogging itself, I've decided to impart the limited blogging wisdom that I've gleaned in the last two years to anyone who's interested. Here are my top ten blogging tips:

1. The greatest sin in blogging is to be boring. Different people are bored by different things of course, but if you write about what is interesting to you, then it won't be a chore to read what you've written.

2. Get your grammar and presentation right. You're not submitting an essay to be marked, but no one will read a long post that doesn't use paragraphs for example. Please spell "weird" correctly (see my specially written tutorial at the bottom of this post) and make sure you get apostrophes right.

3. Use Blogging support services like Technorati, Pingomatic, Bloglines, and so on. Registering your blog with these services gets you noticed and boosts your search engine ranking.

4. Recognise when you've outgrown Blogger! Blogger is a great free service but it is also fairly limited as to what it can do and you only need to add a few tiny scripts into the template code and the whole thing begins to run like treacle. For about £2 a month you could get your own domain and webserver and use a really powerful free blogging programme like Pivot which will let you run a much sharper and smoother blog.

5. Make sure your blog publishes a valid RSS or Atom feed! About 70% of the people that read a blog will do so by subscribing to its feed rather than visiting it directly. Most blogs will publish one automatically, so make sure your frontpage has a link to your RSS or Atom feed. Blogspot blogs publish an Atom feed automatically but if you disable it then you're severely hampering your chances of building a regular readership.

6. Blog regularly and consistently! It's hard to sustain a readership by posting five times a day for a week and then not writing anything for a month. If you can post every day, post every day. If you only post once a month, just post once a month. Consistency is important.

7. Have separate blogs for separate topics. If your interests are (say) Fly Fishing and Ancient Near Eastern texts then you are writing for two very different and specific readerships, and you're much more likely to make a success of blogging if you keep very diverse themes separate from one another.

8. Break the three month barrier. The average lifespan of a blog is just three months, but perseverance is key. It can take ages for you to start attracting regular readers and to start getting significant numbers of comments, but no one knows you're out there at first and it takes time to develop the habit of blogging and also to accquire a regular readership.

9. Join a blogging community. Find blogs that have similar interests to yours and link to them, as people will often reciprocate links. There are hundreds of weekly or monthly blog carnivals that you can submit your writing to on pretty much any subject you can think of. It's an excellent way to get your work noticed and to establish relationships with like-minded blogs.

10. Finally, make sure you enjoy blogging. If you don't enjoy it, you won't blog - it's that simple. Also, be very careful you do not turn into either a blog that exists simply to write about what other bloggers are doing without writing anything of your own. That's what search engines are for. Secondly, (and especially if you're a Christian blogger) don't write a blog that exists simply to criticise and find fault with everyone else, even if it's under the guise of 'discernment' or 'concern for biblical truth'. Such blogs are poisonous, lifeless, and full of bitterness and the last thing that the world needs to see.

I now present you with my extensive tutorial on how to spell 'weird' correctly, in reference to point #2. Read and meditate upon it, and the internet will become a better place. (Originally posted here).

Dear English-speaking people,

It has come to my attention a great many of you are incapable of spelling the word 'weird' correctly. There is not, nor has there ever been, a word called 'wierd', and so I would like to invite you to refrain from using it all the time. Admittedly in school we are taught "i before e except after c" but this is a guideline, not a law to be fanatically followed to the letter by misguided word-zealots.

For all our sakes, I have devised a simple 6-phase plan to help awaken us all from this spelling nightmare:

You will need: Pencil, paper, eraser, dictionary to check your answers with.

Phase 1. Begin with the letter 'w'. Almost all scholars and all the major dictionaries are in agreement at this point, and the belief that the word 'weird' begins with a 'w' is a relatively uncontroversial position to take. You may remember 'w' from such words as 'weekend' and 'wonderful'.

Phase 2. Pay attention. If you do not pay attention here you may as well resign yourself to a life of irremediable ignorance and shame. Do not fidget, scratch, or stare out of the window at this point.

Now very carefully place a letter 'e' next to the letter 'w' (see phase 1) so that your word reads 'we'. This 'we' sound will give the word 'weird' its overall shape and feel. It is imperative that you do not write 'wi' or the entire word will be doomed and all your effort will have been wasted. 'Weird' is never spelt 'wierd', except in your imagination.

Phase 3. First check to see that you have completed phases 1 and 2 successfully. If you have then you are now on the home straight, but if not then start all over again. You will learn to spell 'weird' correctly even if it means staying in at playtime.

Thus far you should have a word that looks like this:

we

Now add a letter 'i' onto the right-hand end of the word 'we' to form a new word that we shall now refer to as 'wei'. At this point your baser instincts may be urging you to write 'wie', but you should suppress these backward desires and resolve firmly to write 'wei'. If this is all too much, you may open a window and let in some fresh air to help clear your head. The hardest part is almost over, so don't worry.

Phase 4. You should now have a healthy looking 'wei' in the middle of your page. It is customary at this point to add the letter 'r', leaving you with a nice big 'weir'. If you were intending to write a word that referred to a small dam or a fence-like device used to catch fish then 'weir' will be sufficient. Hand in your paper to the teacher or pencil monitor.

Phase 5. Remain focussed. You are almost done and it would be a shame to ruin everything you've achieved thus far. Calmly and quietly add a 'd' (as in duck, destitute and darkness) to the end of the word 'weir' to leave you with the finished product: 'weird'. Advanced students may care to develop their word into 'weirdo' or 'weirdness', but be careful not to get too carried away or everyone will think you're a smarty pants and deck you.

Phase 6. You're done! Congratulate yourself on achieving (not acheiving) something of immense significance. Remember: wierd no, weird yes!

Boff on Charismatics

Perhaps it is unfair in some ways, but generally I found this criticism of the charismatic church by Leonardo Boff to be absolutely spot-on:

"Finally, there are dimensions of society, among the well-off and the poor, in which the dimensions of subjectivity and creativity are over-valued . This is particularly true of charismatic groups. People from the middle and upper classes, who enjoy the benefits on an individualistic social system that works to their advantage, tend to find that the Christian charismatic movement, with its inward-looking spirituality, satisifies their religious needs for inner peace, for resolving conflicts, for not feeling alone. [...]

We then find the confusing gamut of religious experiences, sects and movements whose dominant feature is the expression of human subjectivity and individuality, expressed in "witnessing": "God enlightened me...," "God gave me these words of wisdom...," "the Spirit led me," and so on. The extreme forms of this charismatic, inward-looking religion are fanaticism and anarchy. This is the religion of the Spirit alone and its main relationship is with the inner self."

Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society, pp14-15

It actually sounds eerily familiar. Anyone have any other thoughts?

What's what this week

There's now only 14 days until the end of term and I'm starting to get stressed out so in between studying spells I've been tinkering in the garden (with the hope of being able to grow my own vegetables) rather than blogging. I'm so full of things to blog about that I might actually explode but they'll probably have to wait until I've done my finals in the middle of May.

Gospel of Judas

The Gospel of Judas has been causing quite a stir in the last week and I started writing a post on it but then I discovered that EVERYONE IN THE WORLD had also written on it, so here are a few links to some better posts instead:

You can now read an English translation of the Gospel of Judas online here, or if you're a sucker for the original inerrant autograph that Judas actually wrote himself then you can read the Coptic text here.

Mark Goodacre (fast becoming one of my favourite bloggers) has a useful list of links to GJ posts here, and he has a minute-by-minute (almost) account of the recent documentary on the GJ here.

Ben Witherington has written a couple of good posts on GJ. Part One of his analysis is here, and the second part here. He also reflects on a radio discussion on GJ that he was involved in earlier in the week here.

Lastly, Scot McKnight has written several posts on the GJ. here are parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Is there anyone in the world of Biblical Studies who is a more prolific blogger than Scot is? The man is a phenomenon.

Hebrews - now in technicolour!

If you're more comfortable reading something written by someone who is still very much flapping about in the shallow end of Biblical Studies I've uploaded my presentation on the warning passages in Hebrews which you can download here. The original essay actually spent more time and space trying to reconstruct the historical setting of Hebrews than actually attempting to formulate a theology of the warning passages themselves.

In the end I argued that the warnings of fiery judgment and destruction refer not to a post-mortem fate in hell that awaits apostates, but that they refer to the impending judgment on Jerusalem temple, and that the OT background for the warnings also help to suggest this is the case. In short, the Hebrews are seeking respite from persecution by returning to Judaism, but in doing so they will only come under the judgment of fire and destruction that is about to come upon Jerusalem and the whole Land. It presupposes a Palestinian setting for the Letter to the Hebrews, which has problems of its own, but it was an interesting idea to explore in any case.

Journals

I finally managed to read the Autumn edition of the Bulletin For Biblical Research, in which there were two particularly captivating articles written by Michael Bird and Steven Bryan respectively. Steven Bryan's article The Eschatological Temple in John 14 looked at ideas of the Temple as 'my Father's house' in John's Gospel, and argues that Jesus' oft-quoted promise in John 14:2-4 refers not to believers going to heaven but to Jesus' actions in the creation of the eschatological Temple, which is experienced both in the future and also in the present in the form of continued fellowship with Jesus.

Michael's article The Purpose and Preservation of the Jesus Tradition: Moderate Evidence for a Conserving Force in Its Transmission reminds us that in historical Jesus studies it is first of all necessary to establish the often complex relationship between the historical Jesus, the early church, and the transmission and compilation of the Jesus tradition(s) that led to the synoptics Gospels. Michael's case for a strong emphasis on the conservation of Jesus material during its transmission and circulation in the Early Church is both honest and compelling. It's certainly one to read next time you're in the library. Michael reports that he is also suffering with chicken pox (yuck), so remember him in your prayers.

Cricket

Michael excluded, there are some Australians that I do enjoy watching suffering , and it has been a pleasure following Australia's once-mighty batting line up as they have been skittled out like schoolboys in the First Test against Bangladesh. The Aussies managed to recover of course, but England's bowlers will eat them alive next Winter if they bat like that. It also becomes increasingly clear that without Glenn McGrath Australia are rather less potent as a bowling force and it will be a delight to watch them being effortlessly tonked to the boundary all next winter. Happy days ahead.

If you're American and wondering what Cricket is, it's the noblest of arts that separates man from the beasts, and civilised countries from barbarians.