I had the chance to watch the National Geographic’s Gospel of Judas documentary this evening, thanks to a friend recording it for me. It was interesting, and as could have been predicted, frustrating at the same time as it was used as a platform for knocking the historicity of the biblical gospels at every point, while presenting the Gospel of Judas as a much more worthy candidate for our belief.

The beginning part in particular built on the idea that the church had suppressed the truth and now the Gospel of Judas would save the day and set the record straight. You can read the gospel of Judas if you like for yourself on the National Geographic’s Lost Gospel site. It’s worth a read, just so you can get a feel for quite how different it is to the New Testament gospels.

I’ll mention just a few things that irritated me about their presentation.

First, the assertion that in the gospel of John, the latest gospel, Judas is portrayed as an evil monster, while in the gospel of Mark, the earliest gospel, Judas is positively saintly by comparison, and not even mentioned as the traiter in the last supper scene. Judas therefore is said to have been progressively vilified over the years. And the tired old assertion that the gospels are thoroughly anti-Semitic was trotted out again.

It sounds impressive enough until you actually read the gospels for yourself. To be sure Mark doesn’t mention Judas much, but he’s a baddie on every occasion, and is identified as the betrayer immediately before the Last Supper scene (Mark 14:10,11), making it painfully obvious who Jesus is talking about when he says “one of you will betray me” (Mark 14:18). John does mention him a bit more, telling us that Judas was the treasurer and was embezelling funds. He also says that it was Satan who inspired Judas to do what he did, but this is balanced with the fact that John emphasises the sovereign plan of God behind the betrayal as well.

Second, the presentation of Irenaeus’ rejection of the gospel of Judas as heresy was odd. You can easily read the reasons he gives for rejecting it online, but the ones the program gave were quite different. They said that he had arbitrarily decided that there should be four gospels simply because there were four corners of the earth, and also that he didn’t like the idea of Judas being a goodie. They made out that the gnostics were these wonderful ‘enlightened’ people, and the church was just angry that they couldn’t control them, so announced that they were heretical.

Third, they made it sound as though the fact that other gospels existed apart from the four biblical ones, was a major revelation, a fact previously hushed up by the church. And also that the church had desparately tried to cover up the contents of these gospels. In fact, the opening of Luke’s gospel readily admits to the existance of many other gospel records, and both New Testament books and early church fathers not only acknowledge the existance of heretical teachings, but show remarkable willingness to give a synopsis of what those teachings were.

Finally, when they eventually let Craig Evans say that he felt the gospel didn’t shed any light on the historical Jesus or Judas, they then cut straight to Elaine Pagels refuting him with the argument “but how does he know?”. Of course, we never got to hear his response to that. If you’re interested in what that response would have been, people such as Scot McKnight, Mark Roberts, and Ben Witherington can explain it far better than I could.

I could add more, but that’s enough for now. Suffice to say that National Geographic probably payed a decent price to have the rights to the Gospel of Judas, and they needed to make it’s contents sound as epoch-making as possible, to help them recoup their outlay in book, DVD and t-shirt sales. Expect Judas the Hero movie to come to your screens soon.