The Jesus Conspiracy (Part 2) w/Dr. Clinton Arnold

Here is a question, what was the most displayed book in book stores over Easter weekend? The answer, The Gospel of Judas, it’s in hard back for $22 from National Geographic and for $27 more they’ll also gladly sell you a commentary that takes an anti-biblical approach. I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today where we’re telling the great story, it’s all about Jesus. The problem is, since the early church, the Gospel of Judas has been known as downright heresy. In a moment we’ll be joined by a well known New Testament scholar and Gnostic gospel specialist Dr. Clinton Arnold. Later I’ll tell you how to get his paper offering a balanced yet forceful response to this document that was conveniently released the week before Easter. We also have resources that I’ll tell you about by Lee Strobel. First though, would you join me and let’s worship the Lord together?

Song:
Performed by:

This is Haven Today and welcome back. We get to worship the Lord together and this is part 2 of a program called, “The Conspiracy of Jesus”. Yesterday we were joined by the head of the New Testament department at Talbot School of Theology. We heard that the Gospel of Judas was a Gnostic book that claims Judas was Jesus’ best friend. It’s getting so much attention that you and I need to know about it. And so Dr. Clinton Arnold welcome back to the program and first, let me ask you to tell us about this word that we don’t use much today. What is Gnosticism all about?
CA: It’s a very important question to ask with regard to the Gospel of Judas because it clearly is a Gnostic document. And Gnostic, or gnosis, is a Greek word that means knowledge. But the key issue is what kind of knowledge, because we’d all agree that we need knowledge and we need to know Christ, but what kind of knowledge are they talking about? Well they’re talking about a secret and hidden knowledge and they purport to give insight into a second god. There’s a second god in Gnosticism that’s unknown, that was prior to the God that made the heavens and the earth, that’s greater than the God that made the heavens and the earth, and this is the god that they want to reveal. And they view creation essentially as a mistake and they want people to believe that their physical bodies, the physical universe is not true and ultimate reality, but there is an invisible reality in a hidden kingdom that they want to reveal through their secret knowledge. This has huge implications for how you understand every single doctrine of Christianity.
CM: And more than that, you can easily see why none of these Gnostic documents, which were around in the 2nd and 3rd centuries were included in the Bible we have today. They’re different, aren’t they, from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?
CA: they’re very different. Yeah, they’re very, very different. These documents are documents that take us into the whole Gnostic world view, and that world view would tell you that sin, for instance, is not an offense against a holy and righteous God. Sin is ignorance; sin is not realizing that you have this divine spark living with inside of you. These documents would tell you that the incarnation of Christ is utterly unimportant, in fact that’s abominable to think that a divine being would take a flesh and blood form. These documents would tell you that the death of Jesus on the cross, well in some Gnostic circles it never really happened, because Jesus never really did take a bodily form, it only seemed like he did. These documents would put down the whole idea of resurrection because if Jesus didn’t die bodily, or he left the body before it was crucified on the cross, well then there was no need for a bodily resurrection. They tell you that any kind of bodily existence in the future is absurd. They keep putting down the body in favor of this spiritual existence.
CM: You have just rattled off about every major tenet of Orthodox Christianity
CA: Exactly.
CM: And Gnosticism denies every one of those.
CA: It denies every one of them, yeah.
CM: Wow. We talked about this yesterday. You said there really is no proof that Judas even wrote the Gospel of Judas because we believe he died, but what would have motivated a Gnostic to have written this document that has just now been translated and released?
CA: That’s a good question and I think there’s a, there’s a reasonable or plausible answer that we can give to that. Because the Gnostics despise the body, they would have seen – if Jesus truly became flesh in a bodily form – they would have looked at Jesus’ moment of escaping from that body, death, as the best thing that could have happened to him. So the person who would hand him over so that he could experience this separation from his physical body is not a villain, he’s doing a very good thing. He’s helping Jesus flee the constraints of his physical body so he can ascend to the unknown god.
CM: It’s interesting, because there are a lot of people that are in the country where you and I live, but are not believers in Jesus Christ, that this will feed an almost anti-biblical, anti-Christian view point. In fact do you mind sharing, you don’t have to say where he was or the name, but you had a secular reporter call you for a comment after this was released and what did he ask you? Would you tell me again?
CA: Well, he asked quite a number of things, but the thing that kind of surprised me was his question of, “Dr. Arnold, doesn’t the Gospel of Judas essentially eviscerate –
CM: Big word!
CA: the meaning of Easter for you, in other words, doesn’t it render it meaningless for you?”
CM: To which you replied?
CA: Absolutely not!
CM: There also is this history of the Gospels of Jesus that we have today, Matthew, Mark, Luke in the synoptics and then the Gospel of John, there are Old Testament references as well, about Judas, and he wasn’t a good guy in these. I’m thinking Psalm 41 predicting a friend would betray – that’s a Messianic psalm quoted by Jesus in John 13. We have evidence even before the 4 Gospels that there was going to be someone that would betray the Messiah.
CA: We do and the other thing that we need to keep in mind is that the betrayal and the whole notion that Jesus would die is something that did not catch Jesus by surprise at all. It was a divine that Jesus would die. Jesus knew he was going to go to the cross. And he said repeatedly to his disciples that, “It is necessary for the Son of Man to suffer many things and then to die.” But then he would be raised after 3 days and he continually repeated this which demonstrates to me that this was in the mind of God. It was in the plan of God. Jesus knew it and he was fulfilling the role that the Father had given him to perform, ultimately to take away the sin of the world through that death.
CM: There are a lot of scholars out there that are talking about how Americans, North Americans love conspiracy theories and this is adding to that, but it also ties in with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. Why are we so enamored? Why does a public relations move for the Gospel of Judas take hold so much, and it really is in the eyes of many people?
CA: Yeah, I think it, it does relate to making our life a little bit more interesting with thinking about the potential of conspiracies, especially involving the church, but I think there’s something even more significant going on here. I think it’s reflective of the desire of a lot of people not to come under any authority. And if they give credence to the fact there is a God and that he’s revealed himself in the scripture, then the scripture has a claim on my life. And if I want to live my life a certain way that doesn’t line itself up with God’s way, that makes me feel uncomfortable and I don’t want to feel that way. So, maybe, maybe I’ll say that there’s, we just don’t know enough about this Bible. We don’t know enough about this God so heck with it.
CM: If you’ve just joined us, we have Dr. Clinton Arnold on the program with us today. He’s the head of the New Testament department at Talbot School of Theology. We’re talking about the Gospel of Judas, the Da Vinci Code and this is part 2 of a program called, “The Conspiracy of Jesus”. Clint what truths that the Gnostics would deny are revealed in the Bible about us and Jesus Christ?
CA: The Bible reveals that we have a very serious problem and that is a disease that we have inherited that is terminal. And that disease is called sin. And Jesus is so significant and so terribly important for us because he is God’s solution to this disease, this problem that we have called sin. And it’s through his death on the cross and his resurrection that God has brought resolution to that problem and enabled us to have a relationship with him. So it’s extraordinarily important to know what Jesus has done and who he is.
CM: When you said people are resisting authority, isn’t that because people think of that as negative and limiting? But isn’t what God desires for us something very liberating and very positive?
CA: Yeah, it’s a problem that we all have in our tendency to rebel against God. “I want to order my life the way I want to order my life. I want to live the way I want. I want to have fun. I want to have my toys,” and all these things. And yet Jesus promises the forgiveness of sins, but he wants to refashion us, he wants to transform us, he wants to make us into the image of the Father in living with integrity and purity and holiness before him, and that’s not something everyone connects with. Not everyone wants to submit themselves to an authority, even if it’s the Creator of the universe.
CM: Dr. Arnold, we live in a day where, as you said a while ago, authority is something that we don’t want to be under. What do you tell your students? How do they communicate the Christ of the scriptures to people?
CA: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s a significant challenge. Of course, all of our students here love the Lord and they are preparing for ministry and they want to serve believers in the local churches. But one of the great pulls they have is the culture we live in because there are so many distractions and then there’s so many onslaughts of challenges like this that are more direct, and so we’re up against a lot of different things that want to pull us away from the scripture, they want to pull our attention away from the church and pull our attention away from the truth of the Gospel.
CM: Do you see the hand of the evil one behind, here’s a document that rested in the sand of a cave for centuries and centuries and all of a sudden 20 years ago or whenever it was found; do you see the hand of Satan at work here in this?
CA: Well, it’s interesting you should ask that because in light of this controversy coming I looked back into Iraneus and some of the church fathers to see what they had to say about this question. They saw the fingerprints of the evil one all over it. You don’t have to read very far into Iraneus for him to say, repeatedly, how the evil one was involved in inspiring this and that and so on. They had a firm conviction, every single one of them that the fingerprint of Satan was here.
CM: So we’re pretty safe to see the hand of Satan, the evil one in this is just part of just his move to try to destroy humanity.
CA: Well, like we talked about earlier, within Gnosticism you see every single major doctrine of the Christian faith attacked: the incarnation, the crucifixion, the bodily resurrection, the bodily return of Christ, and understanding what sin it, and understanding what redemption is. Every single major doctrine is turned on its head with Gnosticism and it seems like the mode of operation of the evil one is simply to subvert what our God is trying to do in his work of redemption now.
CM: Well, thank you for helping us out these last 2 days. It has been very helpful. And we’re going to tell people how to go up on our website. You’ve actually written a document in response to the Gospel of Judas. We’re going to put that up by you and thank you for making that available to us as well. And Dr. Clinton Arnold here at Talbot Seminary, thank you for blessing all of us on Haven Today.
CA: You’re welcome

Song:
Performed by:

We are ministering to you in the name of Jesus Christ, that’s what it’s all about and thanks for joining us for part 2 of “The Jesus Conspiracy” with Dr. Clinton Arnold, head of the New Testament Department at Talbot School of Theology. Dr. Arnold has written a perspectives paper on the Gospel of Judas and we’ve put it up on our website at haventoday.org. We have his permission, and thank you Clint, for letting us do this, so please feel free to run it off and make copies and pass it on to others. If you’d like a copy of yesterday and today’s programs you can order those online at haventoday.org and we’ll send it to you on either a CD or a cassette. Now in light of the Gospel of Judas and the soon to be released movie The Da Vinci Code, which of course follows the book that we’ve talked about for a long time, we have a resource kit by Lee Strobel. You can read all about the 4 part DVD he’s prepared, and it comes with a leader’s guide and a book, “Exploring Da Vinci Code”. They’re all together in a kit and we have those kits available as a thank you for your gift of financial support to Haven Today. We also have just the book, “Exploring Da Vinci Code” by Lee Strobel and we have them available in 6-packs too, for ministry use. All of that at haventoday.org, or you can pick up your phone and call us, toll free in North America, 1-800-65-HAVEN, that’s 1-800-654-2836. And finally I haven’t given our mailing address to you in a couple of days and I want to do that. Perhaps you’d just like to write us and send us a prayer request and send us a financial gift too, that would be welcome as well. You can write to us, but let us pray for you by getting in touch with us at:
Haven Today
Box 5100
Costa Mesa, CA 92628
That’s:
Haven Today
Box 5100
Costa Mesa, CA 92628
Or you can contact us in Canada at:
Haven Today
Box 6800
Vancouver, BC V6B4C9
That’s:
Haven Today
Box 6800
Vancouver, BC V6B4C9
I’m Charles Morris. God’s blessings be on you. Come back again tomorrow and again we will be telling and sharing the great story, the story that’s all about Jesus here on Haven Today.