[First posted 2013, reposted during the Christian Lenten season in 2015;  always a timely reminder about  Jewish expectations for the Jewish messiah that signals the ‘end of the age’.

James D. Tabor in his book Restoring Abrahamic Faith clarifies:  

“What we need to recover is some balance:

Image from mymorningmeditations.com

The prime emphasis of the Scriptures is upon the return of YHVH Himself as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the only ultimate Savior, Redeemer, and Judge.  

This is not to be confused with the role of the Messiahs as His chief agents.

The doctrine of the Messiahs has a place within this general scheme of things, but it has been terribly distorted and grossly overemphasized.”

 If you have not read the related articles about the ‘messiah’ according to the Hebrew Scriptures, here are the posts:

• The Messiahs – 1 – The Origin of the Messiah Idea
• The Messiahs – 2 – The Davidic Messiah
• The Messiahs – 3 – The Second Coming of YHVH
• The Messiahs – 5 – A Heavenly Messiah?
• The Messiahs – 6 – Was Jesus the Nazarene the Messiah?

Continuing Chapter 4 of Tabor’s timely wake-up call —– edited, condensed, reformatted. We can’t say it enough, this is a book worth reading many times over, so own one!  The author has a website from which you could order your copies; we got ours on a deal of two for the price of one 3 years ago.  We recommended it for reading to our former fellow-Messianics and their Leaders only to find out it was labeled ‘demonic’ and banned for resource reading.  Why?  Only way to find out is read this and related posts, and read the whole book! —Admin1.]

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image from genesis2000.org

A vital aspect of restoring ABRAHAMIC FAITH is to recover a balanced view of eschatology, that is, the Biblical teachings about the “End of the Age.”  The first step is to thoroughly grasp the essential teachings and emphasis of the Hebrew Prophets.

The teaching about the Davidic Messiah is a key aspect of the Biblical revelation.  It is surely one of the fundamentals of the Faith.  However, both Christians and Jews need to return to the core texts of the Hebrew Prophets, allowing these to be the foundation of messianic faith.  Both groups, often in reaction to one another,  have developed speculative lines of thinking which run far afield of what is written in the Prophets.

What we need to recover is some balance.  The prime emphasis of the Scriptures is upon the return of YHVH Himself as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the only ultimate Savior, Redeemer, and Judge.  This is not to be confused with the role of the Messiahs as His chief agents. An essential part of the Faith is the link between our own direct, individual, relationship with YHVH God and a deep longing for His coming Kingdom and Presence.  The doctrine of the Messiahs has a place within this general scheme of things, but it has been terribly distorted and grossly overemphasized.

Since the Hebrew Prophets primarily focus upon the Return of YHVH God Himself, in power and manifest Glory, a better term to focus upon might be the Moshia, or Savior,  rather than the Mashiach or Messiah.  Notice Isaiah 63:8-9 in this regard:  

For He [YHVH] said, Surely they are My people, children that will not lie; so He [YHVH] became for them a Savior (moshiah).  In all their affliction He was afflicted [or He did not afflict], and the Messenger (Mal’ak) of His Face saved) them.

It is clear that YHVH is the Savior here, rather than any human “Messiah” figure—yet YHVH acts through the instrument of His Mal’ak/Messenger.  If we are expecting a repeat of the Exodus type of deliverance, which the Prophets certainly foretell (see Micah 7:15), then we should long for the manifestation of YHVH Himself, along with His anointed ones as agents or messengers.  The texts I have set forth in this study can serve as the basis for the restoration of a Biblical balance regarding eschatology.  If we are going to be firm about staying with the core of messianic teaching, spoken of consistently in all the Prophets, we will resist these later Jewish and Christian speculative traditions.  They inevitably take one in non-Biblical directions and are the source of unnecessary controversies.  If we do not find our doctrines clearly set forth in TORAH and Prophets, then we are on shaky ground indeed.  In formulating our doctrine of the Messiahs we need a concentrated focus on the basic texts surveyed in this chapter, and most of all we need a restored balance and emphasis on the Second Coming of our Only God and Savior—YHVH of Hosts.

Second Temple Jewish Messianism

The earliest “Christians” were just that—Messianists–to the core.  Like those of the Dead Sea community at Qumran, they focused on “preparing the WAY of YHVH in the wilderness” (Isaiah 40:3).  They were an apocalyptic, messianic, movement within Judaism.  However, their great distinctive feature was belief in a suffering  Messiah who had actually died for the sins of the people and would return in glory at a later time in history.  The Dead Sea community revered their Teacher of Righteousness, who had been persecuted and possibly killed by a wicked High Priest in Jerusalem.  There is also a newly released pre-Christian Dead Sea inscription that possibly mentions a slain Messiah, who is raised after three days.

[Footnote: See Israel Knohl, “By Three Days, Live: Messiahs, Resurrection, and Ascent to Heaven in Hason Gabriel,” Journal of Religion (2008) 88:147-158, as well as the discussion and links at jesusdynasty.com/blog.  For another related text see James Tabor, “A Pierced or Piercing Messiah,” Biblical Archeology Review, November/December 1992, pp. 58-59).

In later Jewish tradition one finds the doctrine of two messiahs–one, from the tribe of Joseph (Messiah ben Yosef), who appears first and is slain in the great battle for Jerusalem in the last days, while the other (Messiah ben David), comes subsequently and rules triumphantly over Israel and the nations.

[Footnote: For a collection of texts see Raphael Patai, The Messiah Texts (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), pp. 104-121.  There seems to be little Biblical support for this rabbinic idea of a Messiah from the tribe of Joseph, who is to suffer and die in a battle just before the arrival of the Davidic King.  It was one way the Rabbis dealt with the two aspects of the messianic prophecies, that of his suffering and his triumph, splitting him into two figures.  However, this was not uniformly the case, as the rabbinic discussion in the Talmud demonstrates (b. Sanhedrin 98a).  There the Rabbis maintain that the Davidic Messiah will come either in power “with the clouds of heaven” or in humility, riding upon an ass, depending on the merits of Israel at the time—yet they clearly have a single figure in mind.]

Some scholars maintain that the Nazarenes only developed the idea of the suffering and dying Messiah in reaction to the unexpected death of Jesus, and then subsequently wrote these themes back into the Gospel texts as part of the so-called “Messianic secret.”  Others maintain that Jesus himself anticipated, on the basis of Scriptures such as Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22, his own suffering and death.

[See Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty, chapter 10, as well as the article “Messianic Self-Identity” at jamesdtabor.org.  Hugh Schonfield has made a strong case for the latter position in his controversial book The Passover Plot (1965).  Although his work is popular and speculative it contains some valuable background material and is well worth reading.]

It is possible that the “Seventy Weeks” prophecy of Daniel 9 might also have had some influence on this direction of thinking.  It speaks of a 490 year period toward the end of which an “anointed prince” (maschiach nagid) will be “cut off,” and the city of Jerusalem sometime thereafter destroyed and made desolate.  We know from the Jubilee chronology preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls that this 490 year period could be calculated in such a way as to stretch into the early first century C.E.  Such a direct reference to a messiah being killed, followed by the destruction of Jerusalem, must have deeply impressed those followers of Jesus who lived through the last half of the century.

From the standpoint of the Hebrew bible, however, the main problem with the idea of a suffering or slain Messiah is none of the texts that mention the reign of the Davidic Messiah even hint at any such thing.  There is an apparent reference to one from the “house of David” being “pierced” in Zechariah 12:10-14, but it is unclear as to whether the author has in mind the Branch figure so strongly highlighted by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and earlier in Zechariah. As we have seen, the Hebrew Prophets, without exception, speak of the rule, power, and successful mission of the Davidic “Branch” figure in bringing about the rule of God to this planet.

However, in the latter part of the book of Isaiah (40:53) one does find the idea of the suffering and death of a “righteous Servant” of YHVH.  Indeed, there are at least ten separate contexts in these chapters of Isaiah that mention the “Servant of YHVH.”  The problem is, this “Servant” figure is never specifically identified with the Davidic Messiah, even though, elsewhere, Isaiah says more about the Messiah than any other prophet.  Is there any justification for bringing together these two concepts—that of the Servant and the Messiah?

Image from outreachjudaism.org

Most of these ten references to the Servant in Isaiah clearly refer to the people of Israel, personified as YHVH’s instrument or agent for bringing TORAH to the nations.  Isaiah 41:8-9, the very first text, clearly speaks of the nation of Israel as a whole: 

But you, Israel, are My servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, descendant of Abraham My friend.  You whom I have taken from the ends of the earth, and called from its remotest part, and said to you, “You are My servant, I have chosen you and not rejected you.”
 

Other similar references to the nation of Israel as the Servant are:  42:19; 43:10; 44:1-2; 45:4; 48:20.  However, at least four of these “Servant” texts seem to refer to a righteous remnant, or even a single extraordinary individual, within the larger nation of Israel (Isaiah 42;1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; 52:13-53:12).  The idea seems to be that although Israel as a whole is the chosen Servant of YHVH, the nation has become blind and deaf and has not carried out its task and mission to bring light to the Gentiles (42:18-19).  However, there is a righteous remnant, a persecuted minority, a “Servant to the Servant nation,” so to speak, which through its suffering will bring redemption to the Nation, and thus finally to the world.  The task of this Servant is to “bring Jacob back to Him . . . to raise up the Tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved ones of Israel” (Isaiah 49:1-6).  In some texts this righteous, suffering, “Servant” is clearly seen as a group of zadiqim, cast out by the majority, who are bitterly persecuted and even slaughtered (see Isaiah 51:1-8; 65:13-15; 66:5). We find this idea throughout the Psalms and other places in the Prophets.  David writes, “For Your sake we are killed all the day long, we are counted as sheep to be slaughtered” (Psalm 44:22).  Jeremiah says of his own suffering, “But I was like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter” (11:19).  In Daniel this group is called the  maskilim, who are “among the people“ but suffer by “sword, flame, and captivity” (Daniel 11:33; cf. 12:3-10).

This is clearly the overall meaning of texts like Isaiah 52:13-53:12, which speak of the horrible suffering of this Servant for the sins of the unfaithful majority (“the many”).  He is slaughtered like an innocent lamb, he is slain “for the sins of my people,” as the text plainly says (Isaiah 53:8).  The sacrificial blood of the righteous is shed because of the sins of a wicked generation.  Through such a death human life and history are redeemed and made worthy of continuation. In that sense, the blood of the righteous is also shed on behalf of the world.  It becomes an “offering for sin.”  We find this idea clearly expressed in Jewish texts that were written during and after the Maccabean period when many righteous martyrs were willing to suffer horribly and die for their TORAH faith.  One of the more striking passages is in 4 Maccabees:  

They [the martyrs] having become, as it were, a ransom for the sin of our nation.  And through the blood of those devout ones and their death as an atoning sacrifice, divine Providence preserved Israel that previously had been mistreated (4 Maccabees 17:21-22).

Of course none of these texts speak of the Messiah dying.  However, it is clear that the followers of the historical Jesus clearly saw his death in this light.  They identified him as both the suffering Servant of Isaiah and the Davidic Messiah, and they interpreted his death in the light of these ideas about martyrdom that were developing within Judaism at this time (Mark 10:45; 1 Peter 2:24). Through his blood, which acts as a ransom for sin and atoning sacrifice, those who turn to God in repentance are given forgiveness.

Yet what one might easily miss is that according to the Gospels, Jesus sees himself as well as his followers in this role.  Just as with the Maccabean martyrs, it is a wider concept that applies to all who follow this sacrificial way, and it is not understood to apply exclusively to a single individual.  When Jesus speaks of his own suffering, rejection, and death he issues a call to his disciples to likewise  “take up a cross and follow him” (Mark 8:31-35).  In other words, although he clearly sees himself as fulfilling the role of the “Suffering Servant” of Isaiah, he never limits this to himself.  Indeed, the text of Isaiah 53 itself supports such a reading.  There are a number of references in this chapter that are in the plural rather than the singular.  For example in verse 8-9 it should read literally:

 “For he was cut off from the land of the living, for the transgression of my people the stroke was upon them (lamo), for they made his grave with the wicked, and with a rich man in his deaths” (Hebrew is plural).  

According to this line of thought, the followers of the Servant become suffering servants, giving up their lives as a ransom “for the many,” thus hastening the redemption.

Jesus’ insight, likely based on these very sections of Isaiah, as well as passages in the Psalms about David’s suffering, was that in order for one to fulfill the exalted role of Davidic Messiah, one must first face the rejection, persecution, and even death, from an apostate majority who have given themselves over to power and corruption.  This was his main and constant emphasis to his disciples—in order to “sit on thrones” in the Kingdom of God, they must learn to be suffering servants in this age of wickedness (see Luke 22:28-30); Mark 9:35-45).  This is clearly the meaning of Isaiah 52:13-14: 

Behold My servant will prosper, he will be high and lifted up, and greatly exalted . . . so his appearance was marred more than any man.

The greatly exalted Servant, very much like King David, must first  have walked in the valley of the shadow of death, suffering abuse and rejection.  The logic here is compelling.  

Would YHVH choose to exalt to the highest position of rule and authority one who had never shared in the rejection and suffering of his righteous ones (zadiqim) who have been slaughtered like lambs throughout the ages?

 The Jewish sages support this idea.  The Rabbis say that the Davidic Messiah will be “loaded with good deeds and suffering as a mill is laden” (b. Sanhedrin 93b).  They also quote Isaiah 53:4—“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows:  yet we did esteem him a leper, smitten of God, and afflicted” and apply it to the Messiah to come (b. Sanhedrin 98b).

[Footnote: See the many related texts cited in Patai, The Messiah Texts, pp. 104-121.  In the Talmud Isaiah 53 is also applied to the sacrificial life and death of Moses (b. Sotah 14a) and to the suffering of the righteous in general (b. Berachot 5a).] 

It is unfortunate that Christian polemics against Jews, in misguided attempts to get them to “accept Jesus as their Savior,” have caused many Jews to shy away from any messianic reading of this prophecy of Isaiah (52:13-53:12).

• The reference here is primarily to an individual, and the Gemara (later Rabbinic tradition) supports such an interpretation.
• The Rabbis also clearly recognize and discuss the contrasting images of a Messiah who comes with the clouds of heaven (Daniel 7:14), and one who comes in humility, riding upon an ass (Zechariah 9:9). [Footnote:  b. Sanhedrin 98a-98b]
• They also discuss the possibility that the Davidic Messiah can potentially be one who “comes from the dead,” that is, one who has lived in past generations, died and is raised up to fulfill his messianic role in the last days (b. Sanhedrin 98b).

 [Footnote:In Zohar Shemos 8b, as explained by the ARI (Isaac, Luria, the greatest of the Kabbalists, Sefer Hagilgulim 23), the man designated to be Messiah will lead a normal life in the world, learning and experiencing suffering, he will then have “the soul of the Messiah” bestowed upon him, will realize his role, and then be concealed, ascending to heaven.  Only afterwards will he be revealed openly to the Jewish people and the entire world.]

What is particularly valuable about Jewish messianic tradition is that it remains fluid.  The Rabbis preserve a number of varied and even contradictory opinions about the Messiahs, when they will come, and the precise nature of their roles.  This uncertainty and ambiguity is reflected in the Biblical texts themselves.

In contrast, the Christian views of the Messiah became hardened and inflexible, and subsequently lost much of the richness of the Biblical tradition. The whole subject of the Messiah—or more properly the Messiahs, who they are, when they are to appear, and precisely what they will accomplish—is one about which we should remain open and tolerant.  There are many diverse views and opinions held by devoted students of the Scriptures, and since the Biblical texts are not absolutely clear, one might do well to avoid dogmatism.  No one as all of these matters figured out, and I for one, find myself particularly skeptical of those who claim they do.

The great error of Christianity was to turn the Nazarene into a paganized God-Man, hardly even a human, who uniquely “suffers for the sins of the world.”  Instead of Jesus’ life becoming a call for others to do likewise, millions were told all they needed to do was “believe” that he died for their sins.  In the process, the solidarity of Jesus’ suffering, with all those righteous ones throughout the ages, who have suffered in faithfulness to YHVH, was severed.  That kind of reading of the “Servant” texts of Isaiah is restrictive and ends up undervaluing the blood and suffering of countless individuals who have died for righteousness sake down through the ages.

[Conclusion:  The Messiahs – 5 – A Heavenly Messiah?]

Image from amazon.com

[First posted March 29, 2015. What could possibly be ‘good news’ coming from ‘bad news’ Judas,  the infamous betrayer of the Christian Savior who ‘ID-d’ his Master with a kiss?  

This Foreword by author Bart D. Ehrman is copy-pasted from the  preview of the book available at amazon.com.–Admin1]

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FOREWORD

BART D. EHRMAN

In fall 2004 I received several unexpected and rather mysterious phone calls. The first was from a professional friend of mine, Sheila, who has for years worked on biblical archaeology in Israel. After a brief chat about her next dig, she raised the question that had prompted her call: Had I ever heard of a Gospel of Judas?

I had only a vague recollection of the book: It was one of the gospels that was mentioned by some of the early church fathers, but that had evidently been destroyed, or at least lost, many centuries ago. It is included in none of the standard reference works of the early Christian “apocrypha”—that is, the surviving gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses that were not included in the New Testament. I wasn’t able to tell Sheila much more about it.

Her question struck me as odd—why would she be asking me about a gospel that hardly anyone had ever heard of, and that no one had ever seen? I decided to reread the ancient discussions of the Gospel of Judas, just to refresh my memory. It did not take long, as the gospel is mentioned in only a couple of ancient sources.

The earliest is the church father Irenaeus, who in 180 CE wrote a five-volume refutation of different Christian “heretics” (that is, those who held to the “wrong beliefs”), especially groups of gnostics. The gnostics believed that the way to salvation was not through belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus, but through the secret knowledge (gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge) that Jesus delivered, not to the crowds but to his inner circle. This secret knowledge revealed how people can escape the prisons of their material bodies to return to the spiritual realm whence they came. Some gnostic groups had highly esoteric and mysterious views of the world. In one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century, a collection of gnostic writings was uncovered in 1945 near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. These Nag Hammadi documents included a number of previously lost gospels—including the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip—but they did not contain a copy of the Gospel of Judas.

In any event, Irenaeus does indicate that the Gospel of Judas was used by a group of gnostics called the Cainites. These people believed that the world had been created not by the One True God, but by a lesser, ignorant deity—the God of the Old Testament, who was not to be trusted or followed. The true God was above the inferior God of the Jews. And so, according to the Cainites, anyone who opposed the God of the Jews by breaking his law—as done, for example, by Cain, the first fratricide, and the men of Sodom and Gomorrah—was actually standing for the truth. The Cainites allegedly had a gospel that supported their rather peculiar theology. This gospel was written in the name of Judas Iscariot, known throughout Christian history as the traitor, the one disciple of Jesus who had turned evil and betrayed his master. According to the Cainites, however, what Judas had done was not evil. He alone was the one who understood the mysteries of Jesus and did Jesus’ will. All the other disciples, who worshiped the false Jewish God, failed to understand the truth of Jesus.

After doing this research on the lost Gospel of Judas, I received a second phone call. This one was from a woman who worked for the National Geographic Society. She too wanted to know about the Gospel of Judas. This time I was better prepared and could tell her all that we knew—or that I thought we knew—about the gospel. After a brief discussion, she wanted to know if I thought it would be a significant discovery if the Gospel of Judas were to turn up. I wondered, of course, why she was asking. Rarely does anyone call a scholar to pose a purely hypothetical question about an unlikely discovery. Had the book been found?

I was cautious in my response. In my opinion, if the Gospel of Judas turned up, it would undoubtedly be very interesting for scholars of ancient Christianity. But would it be headline news? It depended entirely on what was in the gospel. If, for example, the gospel was like most of the writings discovered near Nag Hammadi, a book that explained how the world came into existence and how people might escape their entrapment in matter, that would further our knowledge about early Christian gnosticism—obviously a very good thing, but not earth-shattering. If, on the other hand, this gospel included an ancient version of the story of Jesus from the perspective of Judas himself and embraced a view at odds with the one that became “orthodox” throughout the history of the Christian church—a discovery of that kind would be absolutely phenomenal. It would be one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of modern times, certainly the most important of the past sixty years.

She thanked me for the information and we ended the call.

A few days later, she called back with stunning information. As it turns out, the Gospel of Judas had turned up in Egypt, in a manuscript written in Coptic (the ancient Egyptian language that the Nag Hammadi documents were also written in). It was in the possession of a group in Switzerland called the Maecenas Foundation, which was interested in involving National Geographic in the publication and dissemination of the text. In response, the Society was concerned, first off, to learn if this was the real thing or a later forgery.

There was a range of interrelated questions: Was this new discovery the gospel that Irenaeus and other church fathers had castigated as a gnostic creation, telling the story of Jesus from Judas’s perspective? How old was the manuscript that contained the gospel? And when was the gospel itself originally composed? National Geographic needed an expert to verify the discovered text and wanted to know if I could help.

To say I was thrilled would be a profound understatement. Few scholars have the chance to be on the ground floor of a significant discovery. And this might be just that. Of course, it might also be a hoax. Hence the need to verify the facts.

I agreed to help. What the Society wanted was my expertise on early Christianity, to help them see the broad historical significance of a text like this. They were also planning to secure the services of a scientist who could provide a carbon-14 dating of the manuscript. I told them that they would also need a Coptologist—someone whose expertise was in ancient Coptic (my own research specialty is ancient Greek manuscripts). A good Coptologist could examine the text and give an estimate of its date simply based on the style of handwriting. And so, a three-person team was assembled: Tim Jull, director of the National Science Foundation–Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Facility in Tucson, the expert in carbon-14 dating; Stephen Emmel, an American-born professor of Coptic at the University of Münster in Germany; and myself, historian of early Christianity.

We flew to Geneva in December 2004 and under secretive conditions were shown the documents. They surpassed even our most sanguine expectations. There was no doubt in my mind that this was the real thing. Even though my expertise is Greek rather than Coptic, I have read enough ancient manuscripts to know one when I see one. The form of the manuscript and the style of writing looked very similar to what you can find in Greek manuscripts of the fourth century. My best guess at first glance was that this was from that period. Could it be a modern forgery? Not a chance.

Everyone on the team had lots of questions. Foremost for me was the content of the document. Turning to the final page, I could see the title (titles come at the end of documents in ancient texts):Peuaggelion Nioudas, Coptic for “The Gospel of Judas.” And I could make out a bit of the Coptic at the conclusion where the text indicates that “he handed him over to them.” But what was the rest of it about? Was it a gospel that took Judas’s side in the story of the betrayal, answering why he had done it? Or was it another gnostic text filled almost entirely with mystical reflections about the divine realm and about how this world came to be, with Judas playing at best a minor role? The significance of the document hung on these questions.

There were yet other pressing questions. Where was the text found? Who discovered it? When? Where had it been in all the years since its discovery? Why had none of us heard about it? Who so far had seen it? How did it come to be in the possession of the Maecenas Foundation, the group that evidently owned it? Could they be trusted to make the text available to the rest of the world, scholars and nonscholars alike? How would they publish it? Who would translate it? And so on.

These questions are answered in the present book—a riveting account by Herb Krosney, who first alerted the National Geographic Society to the existence of the document and convinced the Society to consider seriously its possible publication.  More than anyone else, Herb has pursued the question of the document’s discovery some three decades ago and its very peculiar pilgrimage in the intervening years.  With the tenacity of a top-flight investigative reporter, he pursued every facet of the discovery and reclamation of the text.  With an uncanny knack for piecing together isolated data, Herb has provided us with scores of details that, were it not for his efforts, would have been lost forever. This book provides far more information about the discovery, fate, and ultimate publication of the Gospel of Judas than we have for any other archaeological discovery of modern times—including such significant finds as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library.

The most significant factor, of course, is the content of the newly discovered document. As it turns out, my highest hopes have been realized. For this is a gospel that tells the tale of Jesus from the viewpoint of Judas Iscariot himself, the one who allegedly betrayed him. As one might expect, this perspective is completely different from what one finds in the canonical accounts of the New Testament Gospels. In the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Judas is the villain. In this newly discovered gospel, he is the hero.

It is worth noting that even though the Gospels of the New Testament agree in vilifying Judas, they do not agree on many of the details of his betrayal. The first Gospel to be written was that of Mark, from about 65 or 70 CE (35–40 years after the death of Jesus), and in that account, there is no clue given as to why Judas decided to turn Jesus over to the authorities, leading to his trial and crucifixion. Written somewhat later (80–85 CE), the Gospel of Matthew indicates that Judas did it for money: He was paid thirty pieces of silver for his foul deed. But when he saw that Jesus was condemned, Judas repented and hanged himself out of remorse. Written at about the same time as Matthew, the Gospel of Luke suggests that Judas was inspired by the Devil, so the betrayal was a Satanic act against the Son of God. The final Gospel to be written was John’s, in which Judas himself is said to have been “a devil.”

In all these accounts, Judas is the fallen disciple, the one betrayer of the cause, the traitor. Yet there are details within these accounts that are difficult—well nigh impossible, in fact—to reconcile with one another. For example, among the Gospels, only Matthew indicates that Judas killed himself. The author of the Gospel of Luke, however, also wrote the Book of Acts, and there we have a different version of Judas’s death—we are told that he fell headlong and his “bowels burst open.” Moreover, in Matthew’s gospel the “blood money” that Judas had returned to the priests out of remorse was used to buy a field to bury strangers in—hence it was called the “Field of Blood” (having come from blood money); in the account in Acts, it is Judas himself who bought the field, which was given its name because he poured out his blood on it.

My point is that each of the individual authors of the New Testament had his own perspective on Judas and told the stories about him in light of that perspective. That continued to be true after the time of the New Testament, as legends about Judas circulated widely. Among the most nefarious of these legends are the ones that paid close attention to the name “Judas,” a name etymologically related to the word Jew. Judas, by the Middle Ages, became synonymous with the “faithless Jew”—the one who was a greedy, money-hungry, thieving, deceitful, treacherous “Christ-killer.”

Some modern scholars have tried to resuscitate the reputation of Judas, but on rather unconvincing textual evidence. Our early records all portray him as the villain in the story of Jesus. But what if there were other portrayals of Judas available that cast him in a more positive light, that interpret his actions differently from the way they are portrayed in the four Gospels that happened to make it into the New Testament?

Now we do have a different depiction.

The Gospel of Judas is a gnostic document, and as such explains in some detail how our evil material world came into being and how we came to be entrapped here. This explanation is understood to be mysterious and secret—it is not for everyone to hear, only the insiders. But the Gospel of Judas is more than simply an additional gnostic text. It is an early gospel that provides an alternative understanding of Jesus, told from the point of view of his betrayer. In this account, Judas is the consummate insider, the one to whom Jesus delivers his secret revelation. Judas is the one faithful disciple, the one who understands Jesus, the one who receives salvation. The other disciples, and the religion they represent, are rooted in ignorance.

As these brief remarks should make clear, this gospel does not conform to traditional Christianity as it emerged in the early centuries to become the most important religious movement in the history of Western civilization. It is an alternative vision of what it means to follow Christ and to be faithful to his teachings.

In this book we learn about how, when, and where this vision was discovered, how it came into the hands of antiquities dealers and how it finally ended up with competent experts who have spent years piecing together the fragmentary text and making it available to us in a modern translation. All of us should be grateful not only for the superb efforts of the translator of this text—the Swiss Coptic scholar Rodolphe Kasser—and the work of the National Geographic Society for putting in the time and expense to make it widely available, but also to Herb Krosney, who has made the story of the Gospel’s discovery and history now accessible to everyone.

WHO’S WHO IN THE LOST GOSPEL

ANCIENT

Jesus

Judas Iscariot

St. Irenaeus, early church father and author ofAgainst Heresies

St. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria

MODERN

Am Samiah (pseudonym), Egyptian villager

Hanna Asabil (pseudonym), antiquities dealer, Egypt

Ludwig Koenen, papyrologist, U.S.

Nicolas Koutoulakis, antiquities dealer, Switzerland

Yannis Perdios, antiquities collector, Greece

James M. Robinson, early Christianity scholar, U.S.

Stephen Emmel, Coptic scholar, Germany

Boutros (pseudonym), Egyptian villager

Frieda Tchacos Nussberger, antiquities dealer, Switzerland

Father Gabriel Abdel Sayed, Coptic priest, U.S.

Hans P. Kraus, rare book dealer, U.S.

Joanna Landis (pseudonym), Alexandria resident, Egypt

Roger Bagnall, classics scholar, U.S.

Martin Schoyen, antiquities collector, Norway

Bruce Ferrini, antiquities dealer, U.S.

William Veres, antiquities dealer, U.K.

James Ferrell, antiquities collector, U.S.

Mario J. Roberty, lawyer, Switzerland

Michel van Rijn, antiquities blogger, U.K.

Rodolphe Kasser, Coptic scholar, Switzerland

Florence Darbre, manuscript restorer, Switzerland

Charles Hedrick, Coptic scholar, U.S.

Bart D. Ehrman, early Christianity scholar, U.S.

A. J. Timothy Jull, radiocarbon-dating scientist, U.S.

PROLOGUE

Truly, truly I say to you, the man who betrays the Son of God, it is better that he had never been born.

—THE BOOK OF MATTHEW

He’s one of the most hated men in history—the apostle who betrayed Jesus Christ. Judas Iscariot. For centuries, his name has been synonymous with treachery and deceit.

In the mid- to late 1970s, hidden for more than fifteen hundred years, an ancient text emerged from the sands of Egypt. Near the banks of the Nile River, some Egyptian peasants, fellahin, stumbled upon a cavern. In biblical times, such chambers had been used to bury the dead. The peasants entered the cave, seeking ancient gold or jewelry, anything of value that they could sell. Instead, among a pile of human bones, they discovered a crumbling limestone box. Inside it, they came upon an unexpected find—a mysterious leather-bound book, a codex. The illiterate peasants couldn’t decipher the ancient text, but they knew that old books fetched a good price in Cairo’s antiquities markets. This one was made of papyrus, ancient Egypt’s form of paper.

The fellahin had no idea that what they were holding was one of the greatest prizes of biblical archaeology: A document stained by the label “heresy” and condemned eighteen hundred years ago.

In April 2000, approximately twenty-two years later, antiquities dealer Frieda Tchacos Nussberger was headed to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York when she received some stunning news. She’d recently bought the ancient codex from an Egyptian dealer and had taken it to Yale University to have it examined. Now, on her cell phone, a manuscripts expert at Yale dropped a bombshell. “Frieda, it’s fantastic!” he said in an extremely emotional voice. “This is a very important document. I think it’s the Gospel of Judas!”

For Nussberger, it was the payoff for years of pursuit. She had become obsessed with the mysterious codex without ever knowing what it contained. Could there really be a Gospel of Judas?

Oddly, for someone so notorious, we know very few facts about Judas Iscariot. He was one of the Twelve Apostles. He most likely came from Judea, not Galilee like Jesus and the others. Judas was the apostles’ treasurer and, by some gospel accounts, Jesus’ most trusted ally, making his betrayal all the more contemptible.

But if the details of his life are murky, there’s no question about Judas’s place in history. “He’s the one who handed over his friend,” Marvin Meyer, one of the translators of the newly discovered gospel, explained. “He’s the one who brought about the Crucifixion, and he’s the one who’s damned for all time.” In Dante’s Inferno, Judas is condemned to the lowest pits of hell, where he is eaten, head first, by a giant raptor belonging to Lucifer himself.

“Generally today people think of Judas principally as the betrayer of Jesus, somebody who was a traitor to the cause,” scholar Bart Ehrman, noted for his studies of early Christianity, remarked recently. “Often they think of him as somebody who was greedy, avaricious, and who was more interested in making money than in being faithful to his master.”

“The word itself is despised,” Dr. William Klassen added. “I think virtually throughout the Western world, you wouldn’t even call your dog that. And in Germany, of course, it is illegal to name your child Judas.”

Christ and his apostles were all observant Jews, Orthodox by today’s standards. But in time Judas’s dark deed came to represent the supposed villainy of their entire faith. “Traditionally in Christian circles, Judas in fact has been associated with Jews,” Ehrman notes. “Not just because of his name, but also because of these characteristics that became stereotypes for Jews in the Middle Ages—this stereotype of being traitors, avaricious, who betray Jesus. And this portrayal of Judas, of course, also leads then to horrendous acts of anti-Semitism through the centuries.”

The stain that marks him is based on just twenty-four lines in the Gospels. As C. Stephen Evans, professor of philosophy at Baylor University, said: “Judas Iscariot in the New Testament doesn’t appear much, and I think it’s because he’s an embarrassment. What little is said about him is very sinister, so he’s portrayed in increasingly villainous terms as a thief who steals from the money box. Indeed, even as a person who was influenced by Satan.”

History, however, records that there was once another written source of information about Judas Iscariot. Around 180 CE, Irenaeus, a church father in what is now France, wrote a scathing attack against a Greek text entitled the Gospel of Judas. “This gospel was about the relationship between Jesus and Judas, and indicated that Judas didn’t actually betray Jesus, but did what Jesus wanted him to do, because Judas was the one who really knew the truth, as Jesus wanted it communicated,” Ehrman said.

This version of Judas’s story was too controversial for early Church leaders like Irenaeus. By condemning it, they erased it from history, never to be seen again.

But never is a long time, and the gospel was suppressed only until it could be found again. At least one copy of it had survived, laying dormant in a lightless vault in the arid Egyptian desert for most of two millennia until it was suddenly brought forth again, eventually finding its way decades later into Frieda Nussberger’s custody.

This codex—one of the greatest discoveries in Judeo-Christian archaeology—did not head straight to a museum, nor even to the library of a rich collector. The gospel’s removal from its burial place was just the beginning of a bizarre cloak-and-dagger journey. The Gospel of Judas, treated like a piece of merchandise, would be shopped around on three continents over the course of the next twenty-five years, its contents glimpsed only a few times between long periods of inactivity in far from ideal storage conditions. Every step of the way the precious document would deteriorate, until much of it was reduced to fragments of papyrus fibers.

The people who discovered it, bound together with three other texts, knew only that it was very old and would be worth good money. They sold it to a dealer in Cairo, who couldn’t read the ancient Coptic either, but knew that it was extremely valuable if only he could find the right buyer.

The humid air of Egypt’s capital city contrasts sharply with the arid climate of the desert where the codex was found, and humidity, combined with heat, is a factor that contributes greatly to the deterioration of perishable matter. The papyrus documents would languish while the dealer demanded millions of dollars for their purchase.

The manuscripts were then stolen and landed in Europe—more precisely, Switzerland—where, exposed to the Alpine air, the process of deterioration would continue. Not for the last time, the texts were left to molder in a bank vault. They were subsequently examined by experts who flew in from the United States to determine their authenticity. Already at that stage, warnings were raised about their state of deterioration. The scholars wanted the damage brought under control through careful management and the provision of proper environmental conditions, but that would be years in coming.

The codex next journeyed to the United States for a possible sale. A famous manuscript dealer in New York examined the text yet again but, uncomfortable with the Egyptian seller’s price and the cost of restoration, decided against buying them. Despairing, the Cairo dealer finally put the documents in a bank vault on suburban Long Island, where no one had any idea of their condition or even their existence. There they would deteriorate for sixteen long years.

At last, Nussberger rescued them from the bank vault and turned them over to Yale University to be translated. There, a scholar identified the subject of the texts and some of what they said. For a brief period it seemed the codex—its importance discovered—had found a home at last. Yet Nussberger has spoken of the text as “a curse,” and it did seem that way. The stigma of the great betrayer would linger on long after the discovery of the manuscript. It was almost as though the text didn’t want to be read.

Despite the fact that they contained the fabled Gospel of Judas, Yale was worried about possible legal issues and declined to buy them. Instead they were sold to an antiquities dealer in Ohio. They disintegrated further when they were briefly stored in the freezer compartment of a refrigerator.

A botched sale led to the manuscript’s return to Nussberger and Switzerland, where they would finally find a home where ambient conditions would be adjusted to ensure their future preservation. By this time the fragile papyrus had deteriorated dramatically, with fragments dropping off at the touch. Not only that, but scholars found that pages of the priceless texts were missing, ripped out, possibly to be sold separately.

Each stage of this journey had brought additional damage. Each stage caused the increasingly frail strands of papyrus to deteriorate further, threatening the loss of additional letters, words, and sentences of the ancient texts. Each stage of the journey might cause the voice of Judas Iscariot, now arisen from its centuries-old tomb, to be degraded to the point where it might never be heard.

From the moment Frieda Tchacos Nussberger had learned from the Yale experts what was contained in the mysterious codex, she had been in a race against time to find a buyer who would be able to preserve its pages before they turned to dust. She eventually turned it over to the Maecenas Foundation of Ancient Art in Basel, Switzerland, which specializes in supporting archaeological study projects in ancient cultures or antiquities such as this. Together with Maecenas she engaged Rodolphe Kasser, one of the world’s preeminent translators and scholars of Coptic, the rare and ancient language in which the text is written. Seeing how badly it had deteriorated, he joined forces with a superb document restorer, Florence Darbre.

In 2002, in her studio in Switzerland, Darbre opened the box containing the Gospel of Judas for the very first time. “I had to look at it. I had to open and close the box several times,” she said. “One often needs to have nerves of steel in order to touch certain objects.” In thirty years of work, she had never seen an ancient document in such bad condition. Its fragile papyrus pages had broken into thousands of fragments. “Whatever document you work with, there is always a story. One always wonders who wrote it, where did it go, who had it, and who read it?”

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Book Description

Publication Date: July 4, 2006

Judas Iscariot.

He’s been hated and reviled through the ages as Jesus Christ’s betrayer– the close friend who sells him out for 30 pieces of silver.

But history also records other information about Judas Iscariot. One such reference was written in 180 by an influential Church Father named St. Irenaeus who railed against the Gospel of Judas for depicting the last days of Jesus from the perspective of the disgraced apostle. In its pages, Judas is Christ’s favorite. 

It’s a startlingly different story than the one handed down through the ages. Once it was denounced as heresy, the Gospel of Judas faded from sight. It became one of history’s forgotten manuscripts. 

Until now.

In this compelling and exhaustively researched account, Herbert Krosney unravels how the Gospel of Judas was found and its meaning painstakingly teased from the ancient Coptic script that had hid its message for centuries. With all the skills of an investigative journalist and master storyteller, Krosney traces the forgotten gospel’s improbable journey across three continents, a trek that would take it through the netherworld of the international antiquities trade, until the crumbling papyrus is finally made to give up its secrets. The race to discover the Gospel of Judas will go down as one of the great detective stories of biblical archaeology.

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[Originally posted December 9, 2013, reposted March 29, 2015; a timely clarification of where the idea of messiah originated.

This is second to the last subtopic, so please bear with us . . . there is so much to study (and check out) in James D. Tabor’s absolutely SOBER and thoroughly researched claims.  As a resource center we are committed to sharing what we’ve learned and have embraced for ourselves, so we have chopped up a whole chapter in chewable doses and in doing so, even those who have already bought their copy and read through it are astonished as to how they missed details they rediscover in this series. Please check out these related posts;

• Revisit: The Messiahs – The Origin of the Messiah Idea
• The Messiahs – 2 – The Davidic Messiah
• The Messiahs – 3 – The Second Coming of YHVH
• The Messiahs – 4 – Restoring the Biblical Balance
• The Messiahs – 6 – Was Jesus the Nazarene the Messiah?

Continuing Chapter 4 of Restoring Abrahamic Faith . . . edited, reformatted, highlighted for this post.–Admin1.]

—————————-

Later Jewish and Christian traditions begin to focus on the Messiah as a heavenly figure, a cosmic Christ, who will be sent to earth from the heavenly realm.

[Footnote: We see the beginning development of this idea in the book of Enoch and in other writings from the 2nd century B.C.E. onward.  See Jacob Neusner, ed. Judaism and Their Messiahs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), for a good scholarly discussion of the relevant materials.  Many sections of the New Testament reflect this type of mystical speculation current among Jewish groups at this time.  See the excellent summary articles on the Christology of Paul and John in the appendices to Hugh Schonfield, Those Incredible Christians (1968).]

There is a clear shift in these latter materials from the concrete and the earthly, to the speculative and the heavenly.  We have seen that there is not a trace  of any such idea in any of the Prophetic texts we have examined dealing with the Messiah, nor in the TORAH itself, which should always serve as the foundation of BIBLICAL FAITH.  This should make us very wary of such texts and traditions, whether Jewish or Christian, most of which develop only late, from the Second Temple period onward (3rd century B.C.E. up through the early MIddle Ages).

How then did such ideas come about?  We can attribute such developments to philosophical and mystical interests in the nature of God.

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For example, the Logos doctrine contained in John 1:1-8 is not even a Christian invention.  It was first developed by the Stoics centuries before the time of Jesus, and refined by the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria who was in love with Hellenistic thought and language.  The entire Logos doctrine attempts to deal with the problem of how God, who is perfect and unchanging, can deal with our transitory material world.  Such traditions are quite esoteric, appealing to the Greek philosophical mind, but contributing nothing to the practical Hebraic/Biblical task of realizing the Kingdom of God in concrete history!  Parallel discussions of this type were also carried out over the centuries among Jewish mystical and esoteric circles as witnessed in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Pseudepigrapha, and the kabbalistic traditions now preserved in the Zohar.

The main text in the Hebrew Bible that has lent itself to such speculative developments comes from the book of Daniel:

 I was watching in the night visions, and behold one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven!  He came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought him near before Him.  Then to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.  His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away.  And his kingdom the one which shall not be destroyed (Daniel 7:13-14).

During Second Temple times many groups began to identify this “son of man” (Aramaic—bar enosh) figure with the Davidic Messiah.  The connection is obvious.  He appears before God in heaven and is given rule and authority over an eternal Kingdom.  Who else could this one be but the Messiah?

However, what these interpreters overlooked was that this text is part of a dream or vision given to Daniel.

It is full of symbols (beasts, horns, etc.) which all must be interpreted.  However, the inspired interpretation is given in this very chapter.  We do not have to speculate as to the identify of this mysterious “Son of Man” figure.

Daniel is plainly told in verse 27 that the “Son of Man” represents the people of the saints of the Most High” (7:22,27).  In other words, like the idea of the “Servant” in Isaiah, it is a collective  term that symbolically refers to the chasidim  or “holy ones” who faithfully serve God and do not follow the ways of the “Beast” (successive Gentile powers that oppose the WAY of TORAH).

Clearly this symbol of the “son of Man” does not refer exclusively to any individual, but to the faithful people of God of all ages, the “Servant” of YHVH.  There is an emphasis throughout the book on the persecuted faithful ones who resist pagan ways (11:32-33; 12:3).  The setting up of the Kingdom is described as the direct action of God Himself (Daniel 2:44).  The specific role of a Messiah is not mentioned in this text.

This language about the “Son of Man coming in the clouds” was removed from its symbolic, visionary, context and mistakenly taken to refer to an arrival of the Messiah from heaven (whether first or second coming).  Such a view ignores the interpretation given in the prophecy itself, and misses the metaphorical meaning of the language.  The “Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven” clearly refers to the arrival of the Kingdom of God.  It is not to be taken literally, as if the Messiah drops out of the sky.

There are no texts dealing with the Messiah in the entire Hebrew Bible that speak of him as anything other than—

• a human being,
• of the line of David,
• who rules as King over Israel and the nations.

The root idea of the Davidic Messiah

is based on God’s promises and faithfulness to David—

not on cosmic speculations about the heavenly world.  

This is a vital point.  In other words the Prophets do not develop their messianic ideas from speculations about the cosmos and ideas about heavenly beings or the nature of the Godhead.  They are concerned with one dominant image, one that is wholly social and political—the realization of the promises to David and the fulfillment of the ideal reign of such a King.  Even the language about the Messiah sitting at the “right hand of YHVH,” or as first born “Son of God” is obviously metaphorical (Psalm 2:7; 110:1).  King David, as YHVH’s anointed, “sat at His right hand” and was called “son of God.”

Indeed, all the Kings of Israel were understood to be sitting on the “throne of YHVH” and were called “sons of YHVH” (1 Chronicles 29:23; 2 Samuel 7:14).  Obviously, this does not mean they lived in heaven or that they were the divine offspring of a god.

This language is then applied ideally, by extension, to the Messiahs of the last days.  It refers to the intimacy and powerful exaltation YHVH will give His anointed ones to carry out the rule of the Kingdom of God over all nations.  It surely does not mean that the Davidic Messiah will literally sit up in the clouds of heaven, on a throne.