Watched the National Geographic Gospel of Judas show. So..here’s the summary.

Lots of cheesy re-enactments of the finding of the document, the scholars’ encounters with it, as well as various ancient events. Like, you know, Irenaues SWEEPING the scrolls he’s just finished condemning off the table.

The program is split between the story of the discovery of the codex, its analysis, and an explanation of what it is and what it means.  In terms of this last part, the treatment is dramatically lacking in context and begs all sorts of questions. I’m going to quote some of the more telling statements, both from the narration and the experts.

But before I do, one mistake and one very strange statement.

In a recreation of the martyrdoms at Lyons, the story of Blandina is highlighted, but she’s portrayed as being there with her "son" –  about whom the governor asks if it is really necessary for him to die too, just because of Blandina’s stubbornness. "My son will live forever," she says. Blandina is not recorded as having a son.  A younger brother who was also a martyr, but no son. The fabrication of that episode was striking to me because it implied that Christian fidelity was not only rather pointless (since, you know, there were many Christianities), but cruel – as the kid is dragged away, arms outstretched.

And then one expert declares that there are German Jesuits lobbying for the canonization of Judas.

Really? Those durn Jesuits.

For more – to the extended post:

"Why would early Christians write a gospel of Judas in the first place?" – note the conflation and lack of specificity. As if the author of the Gospel of Judas is part of the same group that wrote the Gospel of Mark. When, of course, neither would identify with the other.

There were more than 30 gospels. (What? Dan Brown says 80?)

Elaine Pagels says that the early Christians were wondering…who is Jesus and what is the good news about him. Many people saw that question in many ways, she says.

Literally dozens of conflicting versions were written and circulated.

This text…gives us a look into kinds of Christianity we’d never seen before. Many people had thought that the only gospels we’d had were Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In fact, there were many more than that…there were dozens.  There wasn’t one early Christian narrative, there were many.

One faith or many? Christianty grew explosively….there were no churches yet. Instead followers mjet in private homes, where some heard gospels named for people that would surprise us today.  Some of the early Christians are now called "gnostics."

A quick break: I’m not quoting every line, but this is really capturing the gist: the "many Christianities" school is at the forefront here. That there is no identifiable core to the Jesus story, that apparently not one of the early witnesses to Jesus’ life and ministry had anything they agreed upon. Apparently.

An expert whose name I don’t remember: The Gnostics were mystics who thought they could have direct access to God. Insight…intuition…the ability to know something about yourself, to know that you have a spark of the divine inside of you..the god outside is the God within you. Many of the gnostics were Christian.

Me again: The program’s description of gnosticism (oddly enough, not provided by Elaine Pagels, who is an expert on the show) is quite selective, making it sound all New-Agey, which in some ways, of course, it is, which is why it’s always resurging in popularity. But it ignores the elitist, esoteric, selective and highly structured aspect of many gnostic sects, making it sound like a "salvation is for everyone, ’cause everyone’s got God in them" kind of deal, when it was not that at all.

Pagels reflects on her graduate education: …we were told these were heretical. We were told that gnostiscs were people who were bascially wrong. Like we used to talk about the communists. It’s a way of dismissing them. They didn’t call themselves that. They called themsleves Christians.

Back to the narration:

Ideas like this were too shocking for early church leaders…they kept them out of the New Testament.

Its secrets were so explosive that early church fathers branded the gospel heresy. But why?

Caption on a scene: Lyon 180 AD (er…no. Lyons)

A bishop will clarify the Christian message by rejecting most of the gospels.

He will do this by…attacking the competition. One of his targets: the authors of the gosepl of Judas.

For the gospel of Judas contains an outrageous idea that disappeared for 1800 years and almost disappeared forever.

Now a summation of the Gospel of Judas, complete with re-creations.

Bart Ehrman: In the early gospels, it is the death and resurrection that really matters for salvation. That stands completely at odds with what happens in the GofJ, no account of death and resurrection. What matters is that the body is going to die and the spirit is going to live on.

Narrator: In the eyes of the orthodox Christians, that interpretation sealed their fate as heretics.

Finally, we get an evaluation: Does this matter: Flash to Robert Schuller, grinning maniacally, who says something like, "What else do we NEED? We’ve got Matthew, Mark, Luke and John! What could we add to that?"

Pagels says: People who discredit these gospels insist that they come from the 2nd century or later. What we don’t know is the dates of the originals. It’s impossible to know that.

And finally, we get a Catholic. Fr. Donald Senior, who says, not very helpfully, on what Gospels are authoritative: "It’s a question of faith. It’s not a historical authority, it’s religious…it’s a discernment of the community as a whole."

And finally, we’re back to Pagels, who assures us:  You don’t have to choose. They are puzzling, and not meant to be publicly read. They are meant to be advanced level teaching. They don’t have the same function as Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.

Well, Elaine, that’s very uh…GNOSTIC of you.

So, in essence, what we have is a program that essentially very aggresively promotes the "many Christianities" school of early Christian studies, that gives absolutely no alternative paradigm, that cannot be bothered to suggest that the attachment to what became the New Testament canonical gospels had anything to do with, you know, what happened or the strength of the apostolic witness (as in – there was a story about Jesus that had been told by the apostles. The four gospels that "made it" were those that were consistent with the apostolic witness – with all of the tensions within that story intact.), and completely discount the possibility of knowing anything about 1st century events with any degree of historical certainty. The program is all about different "interpretations" but fails to take a hard look at what the canonical Gospels say about Jesus’s life and ministry, how that is different from the gnostic interpretation and in what universe, exactly, these could be reconcilable. The Diatessaron was simple. These guys want to harmonize everything.

Plus, it sensationalizes and mischaracterizes the reaction to the G of J and other gnostic works. These are not "secrets" that Christians were "afraid" would be revealed. They were condemned because they were wild misrepresenations of what they embraced as the authentic apostolic witness and were, among other things, an unbalanced portrait of Jesus. Among other things. A lot of other things.

Here’s a good, short piece by Ben Witherington on Why the "Lost Gospels" lost out.