The Jesus Conspiracy

First the Da Vinci Code in book and movie, now the Gospel of Judas released with a public relations flourish by National Geographic. Was Judas really the friend of the Son of God or was he, as the Bible portrays, one of the major villains of all time. I’m Charles Morris and this is Haven Today, telling the great story, it’s all about Jesus. In the next few minutes we’ll be joined by a world famous New Testament scholar, a specialist on the Gnostic gospels. This is an important program called, “The Jesus Conspiracy”. First though, we need to worship the Lord and let’s do that with the music of Avalon.

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This is Haven Today and I’m Charles Morris here at Talbot Seminary which is in greater Los Angeles and I’m sitting in the office of Dr. Clinton Arnold who’s a well known New Testament scholar. And for you pastors out there listening, you probably have something that he’s written in your library. Dr. Arnold, or Clint, welcome to Haven Today.
CA: Great to be with you Charles.
CM: It’s good to have you on. A friend of mine told me a couple of years ago that we should have you on, that you’re a good man and I think now is the day to have you on because one of your specialties is Gnosticism. You’ve studied that. You have a PhD from the University of Aberdeen and have been teaching at Talbot for a number of years. So why don’t I just break out in the first question of why we even have you on today? What is all this buzz about? What is the Gospel of Judas?
CA: The Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic document, so it’s appropriate to lead with a mention of the gospel as a Gnostic document. It is a document that purports to be a gospel, but if you were to read it you would find that it is missing many of the elements that would traditionally be a part of a gospel. There’s no indication of Jesus’ earlier life, there’s no discussion of his earthly ministry, there’s no mention of his death and resurrection. It’s basically just a conversation – alleged conversation – that Jesus had with Judas at one point in his ministry.
CM: So it differs from some of the other Gnostic gospels that have been found that would give more of a history of Jesus then?
CA: Well it’s interesting Charles, because if you look at any of the other gospels coming from the Gnostic collections, none of them really give a history of Jesus. Most of them tend to be collections of sayings. Some of your listeners may have heard of the Gospel of Thomas.
CM: Right.
CA: It’s simply a collection of sayings that again allegedly go back to Jesus, but tend to be more the kinds of things that would be advocating a Gnostic world view, especially when you get to things like the Gospel of Phillip and the Gospel of Truth they call it, where there’s a very brief framework where it seems like it’s a historical story, but it becomes more of an excuse then for the Gnostic author to give his world view and Gnostic teachings.
CM: OK. And I think we need to return a little bit later to talk about Gnostic gospels and what they mean, where they came from, let’s date them a little bit, but let’s talk about how this Gospel of Judas came to be. Why is it important right now? Is it important? National Geographic got a hold of it, they bought it from an antiquities dealer. It’s been translated with computer enhancement and wouldn’t you know, it happened to be released just the Friday at a news conference before Easter week 2006, and there was going to be, amazingly, a TV special and guess what the May issue of National Geographic is going to be about? What’s the history on this document?
CA: The document was discovered quite a number of years ago. I can’t remember exactly how many it was, but it was discovered in a cave along the upper Nile River in Egypt. And the man that discovered it wanted to make a few bucks off of it so he tried to sell it on the antiquities market and the antiquities dealer was not able to sell it and so it lay away in a safe deposit box in America where it began deteriorating very rapidly. And then eventually someone approached him about buying it, they bought it and it eventually made its way into the hands of the National Geographic Society.
CM: I guess the point now is it was just recently translated because you needed a lot of money for the computer enhancement to be able to read it in the first place, I guess.
CA: yeah, and a lot of people never knew of its existence because it was just in the collection of an antiquities dealer and once it became known then there was people that wanted to work with it. And the National Geographic Society commissioned some scholars to do so, which is every scholar’s dream
CM: Sure.
CA: To have the opportunity to look at a document that’s never been translated before and to make this known to the public at large and it’s a great opportunity that way.
CM: Even the Gospel of Judas.
CA: yeah.
CM: All right, now why has this created such a buzz? Why the stir? You were telling me a story just even before we got together for our interview. Does anybody care?
CA: Well it is interesting, a gospel by the major villain of the New Testament? It seems kind of crazy the whole notion of Judas writing a gospel and so I think that thought is what has captivated the public and certainly it seems that the Nation Geographic Society has wanted to run with that to get a lot of people watching the special and buying the books that came along with that, but a lot of the media have really, it seems to me, have sensationalized this and looked at the irony of, wow, the villain of the story of the gospels becoming the hero, because one of the things that is characteristic of this gospel is that Judas has the secret knowledge of the fact that death is going to be good for Jesus because he’ll be released from his physical body. And Jesus ostensibly asks Judas to hand him over to the authorities so that the passion sequence can begin and ultimately he can be released from his physical body.
CM: Do you believe that is the case?
CA: I do not believe that is the case.
CM: Why?
CA: The Gospel of Judas very clearly gives us a Gnostic world view and at the heart of Gnosticism is a belief in 2 gods. A Gnostic would believe that there is a God of Genesis 1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” But what the Gnostic would say is, “That’s not the only god. There is a god that’s unknown that I want to tell you about.” And so in their way of looking at it the redeemer figure, Jesus came to reveal this secret knowledge. But the redeemer figure did not want to be in flesh and blood body. The redeemer figure wanted to be released from that, Jesus wanted to be released from that. And so for Jesus to suffer death is a good thing because finally he can be released from this prison which is the body that he was stricken with while he was here.
CM: Now, I’m with you there. When this first came out a little over a week ago, a lot of the more electronic media was portraying this as being written by Judas himself, but I’m holding in my hand the German news agency, DPA and they say this Gospel of Judas is going to be returned to Egypt after 36 years abroad, the original. But they say this gospel is not recognized by Christian churches and its author is anonymous. We don’t know for sure, do we, if this was written by Judas?
CA: No, we don’t. And again, I would say it’s not a gospel really, even though it claims that it is. It simply purports to be a conversation between Jesus and Judas but if you stop and think about it, how would Judas have written this if he killed himself shortly afterwards.
CM: Yes. If this is the same one that was around in the early church, it has been known, we just never had a copy of it. In fact the church father Euranius, he wrote about Heretics and didn’t he label this as a heresy, this book?
CA: And even more specifically, he referred to it as a category of Gnosticism called Canite gnosis or Canite Gnosticism and so he knew all about it. He even knew what the content was about and said, you know what, it’s like all the others that come from this group. It’s a spurious document. It’s not accurate, it does not portray the Jesus we know and the Jesus we worship. It does not accurately portray the God of the Bible.
CM: And Euranius is not someone that just lived 50 years ago. He was back, right there at the beginning, wasn’t he?
CA: Right. He was writing in the 2nd century – or the 3rd century, and he very close to the facts. He knows what the Gnostics are all about. But more importantly, he knows the real Jesus.
CM: Amen. Amen to that. Let me ask you about just the Bible in general. We’ve done some programs about the Da Vinci Code. We’ll be talking about that again more when that movie opens. In fact there’s one scholar at Cambridge University, Graham Stanton who said, “I think the massive media interest in the Gospel of Judas is related to the whole Dan Brown phenomenon.” Would you agree with that?
CA: I would agree with that, Charles. Da Vinci Code, as you read through it, speaks of a number of gospels that were written that nobody knows about, that it appears that the church has put a lid on these and kept them from circulation and then these are just waiting to be revealed and I think this is what is being eluded to here by Graham Stanton, but what the reality is is that these are all Gnostic documents. There are a number of documents in the fines of Gnosticism that purport to give information about Jesus, about what he did and what he said that are really simply Gnostic documents that we’ve known about all along and that the church fathers knew about
CM: And rejected!
CA: And rejected. And they were writing against them and telling us what they were about and saying how unhealthy they were how inaccurate they were and how inappropriate they were for the church.
CM: I know your answer to this, but I feel like I just have to ask it. Dr. Arnold, are you convinced that the Bible as we have it today is a closed canon of scripture, it is God’s Word to us today?
CA: I am convinced that the Bible we have in the 66 books of the Old and New Testament is THE Word of God and this has been the conviction of the church all through the ages. It is nothing new; it is not a new conviction. It’s not a new idea that we’ve come up with this has been what the church is built upon.
CM: And this has been almost a return to what was going on in the 2nd and 3rd centuries when the canon had not been totally formed at that point, but yet there were all these spurious documents. There was great debate then about saying, well this letter of Thomas or Phillip or Mary or whoever should be included. So questioning the validity of the Word has been around a long time, hasn’t it?
CA: it has been around a long time, but Charles I think the church has always recognized what the true Word of God is even in those early stages in the 2nd century and the 3rd century. I think the canon was based on what was more of a formal recognition process of what the church fathers were saying, “Hey, this is, these are the documents we’ve recognized all along as inspired, inerrant, authoritative and have been used in the church.” And we need to be careful never to look at that canonization process as a time when some powerful church leaders were arbitrarily choosing what they wanted to be in and what they wanted to be out as some scholars today are trying to suggest.
CM: Well, I don’t want to say he’s a scholar because he’s not, but Dan Brown would have us believe that there was a vote and it was by a very narrow margin that the books that are in our New Testament today were included, but that’s just outright not true, is it?
CA: I don’t think that’s true at all. It’s, the church all over the Mediterranean world, all over France, and Germany and Britain, all of these churches with thousands and thousands of Christians were using this certain set of books that they had been using and recognizing as inspired by God and were the basis of their faith and so what we have in the composition of the canon is simply a recognition. And what the catalyst was for this debate were certain figures who came along like a guy named Marcion and said we need to take books out. And then there were other books that came along and people said, well shouldn’t we have these? And they were rightly recognized by the church as being in error when these challenges came.
CM: Dr. Clinton Arnold at Talbot Theological Seminary I just want to thank you for being with us. We’ve talked some about how the Gospel of Judas relates to the Word. Would you come back tomorrow so we can talk about how the Gospel of Judas relates to Jesus Christ?
CA: I’d be delighted to.
CM: Thank you. Would you mind, before you go, leading us in prayer? Because we’ve probably got some people listening who have their doubts and they’ve read Dan Brown and now they’re going to read the Gospel of Judas. Would you mind praying for people listening?
CA: I’d be very happy to. Father, we thank you for your Word and in spite of the fact that it is being challenged today, we know that your Word is settled. And we are here as your people seeking to understand the truth and we pray that you will give us wisdom and insight into responding to these new challenges that have come. And I pray that you will give us all a settled confidence in the word that you’ve given us and help us to grow in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. It’s in his name we pray, amen.

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The music of Metropolitan Opera singer Jubilant Sykes a guest we had on this program last week and that was his song called, “Give Me Jesus”. I’ll tell you how to get his CD in a moment but I want to also give special thanks to Dr. Clinton Arnold for taking the time to be on this program. I’ve got to admit to you, I wanted to do this program last week, Easter Week, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it and help support the public relation effort of National Geographic. But I do need to underscore, the assertions coming out of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and now the National Geographic’s release of the Gospel of Judas, these issues are subtle as well as direct attacks on the Bible and Jesus Christ. These assertions are not easily going away. You need to know what you believe and why. I’d like you to have a copy on CD or cassette of both today and tomorrow’s programs called, “The Jesus Conspiracy”. We’re asking for a modest gift of $10 or more and we’ll get it out to you as quickly as we can both programs. Just call us at 1-800-65-HAVEN, that’s 1-800-65-HAVEN. Or go online at haventoday.org, that’s one word, haventoday.org. There on our homepage you’ll find a place to order your copy of the program. Please also let us know the station where you’re listening when you get in touch. And you can ask for it under the name “Jesus Conspiracy” or just give us the date that the program was on. If you’re a Bible teacher or pastor or just interested in the Gospel of Judas, Dr. Arnold of Talbot School of Theology has prepared a perspectives paper on this just released Gnostic gospel. You can read and even make copies by going to our website, haventoday.org and you’ll find it under the “Going Deeper” section. This is good stuff. It needs to be in the hands of God’s people. We also have the CD called, “Jubilant” by that wonderful baritone Metropolitan Opera singer Jubilant Sykes. And you can have that by getting in touch either on the internet or by calling us and making your gift to help Haven Today to tell the Great Story that’s all about Jesus. I’m Charles Morris. Thank you for being with me and Dr. Clinton Arnold. Don’t miss an important part 2. So please come back tomorrow, same time, same place, together here on Haven Today.