This week is Holy Week.
It is probably no coincidence that the "gnostic" Gospel of Judas is being introduced with great fanfare. USA Today and
other national newspapers have run stories on it, and National Geographic is about to present a TV special about it.
The manuscript itself is genuine and dates
to the year 300. It is a copy of the original gospel, which appears to have been written a century or more earlier.
The Gospel of Judas is one of a number
of alternative gospels written in the 2nd and 3rd centuries after Jesus' execution -- the Gospel of Thomas and the Secret
Book of James are other examples. Do they have value for the serious Christian today?
I think they do, in that their
existence gives us glimpses into the earliest days of the emerging Christian community. It was a time when hundreds
of different accounts of Jesus were circulating, and when good people who understood themselves to be disciples of Jesus came
up with very different "takes" on the good news of the kingdom of God, often based on their prior worldviews.
The Bible study group I lead at our
local church is finding something similar as we study the Atonement. Early Christian leaders such as Peter and Paul,
the writer of Hebrews, and John, all agreed on the central tenet that "God was in Christ, reconciling the world
to himself" (2 Corinthians 5:18). But just how God did this differed from leader to leader.
What this suggests to me is that
how we perceive the Cross will vary according to the times we live in and our individual circumstances. This in turn
means, I think, that each of us has an obligation to "apply our heart to understanding" (Proverbs 2:2), and not just passively
accept the tradition handed down to us.
