Graphic By: Julie Brennan

In the early Christian Church, there existed several varying schools of thought, each with one with its own ideas on Jesus and the nature of salvation. There were Marcionism, a dualist system that taught that Jewish law was incompatible with the teachings of Christ; the Ebionites, who denied the divinity of Christ; and then the Gnostics. Although there were several different strands of Gnosticism, the one we'll focus on is the Sethians, because the Sethian worldview informs the Gospel of Judas, although the Gospel was linked to a sect called the Cainites. All Gnostic schools teach that it is knowledge of the divine, not faith, that is the key to salvation. This belief put Gnostics at odds with the emerging mainline Church.

The Sethians, as their name implies, revere Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve. They believe that, like Jesus, he was a divine incarnation. Followers of the movement believed themselves to be his descendants, in a spiritual sense. Sethian Gnosticism, and most other Gnostic movements, have an elaborate cosmology that gives Scientology's a run for its money. According to the Sethians, there exists God--unknowable, and totally alien to our perception. From this unknowable God emanated various entities, among them Sophia. Sophia, in turn, gives birth to Yaldaboath, or the Demiurge. He is inferior in power to God and is often portrayed as evil at worst and ignorant at best. It is this Demiurge that created the physical world in an attempt to imitate the plemora from which Sophia came. In short, the Demiurge is the creator God of the Old Testament, who also created Adam and Eve.

However, due to intervention from the plemora, both Adam and Eve were created with a divine spark in them, a move which angered the Demiurge to no end; in response, he imposed strict rules upon them. Here the Sethian and mainline stories sync up, albeit with wildly different intepretations. In both, the Serpent persuades the two to eat from the Tree of Life. As you're aware, in the mainline account, this angers God and causes the Fall. However, in the Sethian story, this is a great thing, as it awakens Adam and Eve's true divine natures. Seth was born with similar characteristics, thus creating a lineage that opposes the Demiurge and his sinister machinations. Jesus was seen as the ultimate expression of this lineage, which brings us to the Gospel of Judas. (Information for this portion of the article was adapted from this article).

The Gospel of Judas is structured as a dialogue between Jesus and Judas. Judas has been singled out by Jesus to be the one who truly receives what Jesus has been sent to teach--namely, the secrets of the universe and salvation, both Sethian in nature. Present are the unknowable God, Sophia, the Plemora and the Aeons. As mentioned earlier, Sethian beliefs posit that the world was created by a inferior being--the Demiurge--and he, too, is present in the dialogue. Judas is then given the task of betraying Jesus, but, far from the heinous act it's depicted as in the Synoptic Gospels, here it is the greatest task that one can fulfill, for it is through Jesus' death that humanity can be saved. The narrative portion ends rather abruptly, with Judas "betraying" Jesus to the authorities. No mention is made of what happens next.

The Gospel is accompanied by several essays. The first is the introduction, which covers the role of Judas in both the orthodox and Cainite traditions. The next, written by Rudolph Kasser, is a historical account of how the version presented found its way into the hands of scholars. The third essay, by Bart Ehrman, contrasts the Gnostic version of Christianity with the Orthodox version. The relationship between the Gospel of Judas and Bishop Irenaeus is discussed in a piece by Gregor Wurst. The final essay, by Marvin Meyer, discussed Judas' life and actions in a general Gnostic context. All of the people mentioned worked on the restoration and translation of the text in some capacity, and the essays are written to a lay audience.

As for my personal opinion, I find the book to be of little use. Being a scholar (admittedly of the arm-chair variety) of early Christian history, I found the book to no offer no real insight into the early Church, a view shared by many religious scholars. Despite this, the essays at the end are excellent, because they present the ideas of the Gospel in an easily accessible fashion, and this is important, because people will be picking this up, largely due to the media frenzy surrounding its release. Books such as The DaVinci Code have opened the minds of many to inquiring about the history of the early Church. Whether or not these conclusions are true is left open to the individual. While The Gospel of Judas offers little insight for the advanced scholar, it provides the inquiring minds created by Dan Brown's book a further look at a growing area of interest.