Secrets of Judas

by James M. Robinson

  People back then wrote on the surface with the horizontal fibers, since one wrote horizontally and thus with the flow of the fibers, rather than having to bump across from fiber to fiber going against the grain. One wrote in columns about the width of a column in a book today, then left a space of an inch or so, and then wrote the next column, and so on, for as long a book as one wished. Then one rolled up the long papyrus strip into a roll, with the writing surface protected by being on the inside, and voila! there you have a papyrus scroll!

  A rolled-up scroll would be hard to identify, especially if one had more than one lying side by side. So on the outside, at the end that was visible when the scroll was rolled up, one wrote some identifying phrase, at right angles to the text on the inside, so as still to be writing in the direction of the fibers, for on the outside these were in the opposite direction to the fibers on the inside. This is the origin of what we would think of as a book “title.” It may not have been chosen by the person who wrote the text of the book itself, but probably by the copyist, or the person who needed to distinguish this scroll from other scrolls. The original author would tend to suggest in the body of the text itself, at its beginning or ending (or both), the gist of what the book was all about. Sometimes it would be this that the later scribe would summarize as the label on the outside of the scroll.

  These papyrus scrolls had been used for thousands of years (literally!) by the time Christianity began. But technology was advancing, and scrolls were, after all, rather cumbersome. Rolling and unrolling a scroll every time you want to put it away and then resume reading the next time was a time-consuming chore. And rolling and unrolling was hard on the papyrus, durable though it was.

  About the time of the beginning of Christianity, people had developed a kind of notebook for schoolchildren, first attested in Rome: two thin small planks of wood were each lined on one side with wax, then laid together with the wax surfaces on the inside, to protect them. The schoolchild would write on the wax surfaces, then scrape it clean and write again and again, adding overnight new wax to keep it ready for use. (I remember as a child having my own small blackboard and chalk for the same purpose!)

  Then it occurred to them that they could replace the wax between the planks with a few leaves of papyrus to write on. The leaves were then attached together, and to the wooden planks, so they would not fall out and get lost. The boards developed into leather covers, the few papyrus sheets became quires, and there you have something that is like a modern book: pages you can turn! They called it a codex, plural codices, to distinguish them from scrolls. That just meant a “fistfull,” a book you could hold in your fist and turn pages as you read, rather than a long thing to lay out on a table and unwind with both hands.

  Bit by bit books that had been composed to fit the length of a not-too-long scroll were copied into codices. Usually a scroll had to be relatively short, so that one did not have to scroll and scroll endlessly to find one’s place. But a codex was easier to use—one could simply open it in the middle and go on reading where one had left off, especially since one usually numbered the pages. So several scrolls could be copied into one codex.

  That is why the “books” of the Bible can become one book, the Bible—they had been written on separate scrolls (which is still today the preferred Jewish form of book for their scriptures). Now they could be copied into a single codex! This is why we have the habit of talking about the “books” of the Bible—they were originally composed each as a book in its own right, though in the Bible they are really just the length of what we might call chapters, or, as we call them in the case of the Nag Hammadi Codices, “tractates.” This is also the case with the newly discovered copy of The Gospel of Judas, since early reports are to the effect that it is in a codex that also included at least two other texts, of which there are parallel copies in the Nag Hammadi Codices. And one may recall that Epiphanius referred to it as “a short work.”

  The phrase that had been put on the outside of a roll to identify what text was inside could be carried over to the codex. When a number of “books” or tractates are included in a single codex, they need to be distinguished one from the other. That identifying phrase would be copied at the beginning or end (or both) of a text, set off by blank space and hatch-marks as decoration, as a superscript and/or subscript title.

  You can see what I mean by “hatch-marks,” by looking at the photograph facing the first page of the Preface of the book in your hands, at the end of the last line of the text of The Gospel of Judas, as well as on the otherwise blank line between the end of the text and the subscript title.

  “GOSPELS” AND THEIR “AUTHORS”

  Since the author of the individual book was usually not the person who wrote the label on the outside of the scroll or the title that was set off at the beginning and/or end of a tractate in a codex, there is often a slight discrepancy between the text of the tractate itself and its secondarily attached title. This is even the case with the four “Gospels” in the New Testament. Their titles inform us that they are the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But the body of the texts of these four tractates are all anonymous. In John 21:24 we are told that the beloved disciple wrote the tractate, which is why we are sure John wrote it—until we notice that the beloved disciple is never identified as John. In fact, John is never mentioned in the Gospel of John!

  There may be reasons why a Gospel was associated with a certain apostle. The calling of Levi the tax collector in Mark 2:13–17 becomes the calling of Matthew the tax collector in Matt. 9:9–13, and so, in Matthew’s list of the Twelve, the apostle “Matthew” (Mark 3:18) becomes “Matthew the tax collector” (Matt. 10:3). This may have been intended as a hint by the person who wrote the Gospel, irrespective of whether it was the tax-collector Levi/Matthew or not. In any case, it would have been taken as sufficient reason to ascribe this Gospel to Matthew. But there is no place in this Gospel, or in any of the others, where the name of the Evangelist is actually said to have been the author. Rather, one now assumes that the name of the apostle to whom a Christian community appealed for its own “apostolicity” was ascribed to the Gospel that the community used and cherished as its authority. Usually by this time one no longer knew who had first composed the text.

  The same situation prevails with regard to the name “Gospel” that we automatically associate with the four Gospels in the New Testament. The word gospel of course means “good news.” Paul contrasts his good news with the false good news of his opponents, which is not to be believed, even if it comes from angels (Gal. 1:6–10). But he is not referring to a book entitled Gospel that he (or they) had written. In Paul’s time, no Gospels had been written!

  Mark’s Gospel begins with the word gospel in the very first verse. But he is not saying that the book that follows is a Gospel, but rather that he is writing down the good news. Hence in Mark 1:1 gospel is somewhat of a mistranslation (down to and including the Revised Standard Version), or at least misleading: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” The New Revised Standard Version has more correctly translated: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.” Mark’s first verse means that his whole book is the beginning of the good news that Christianity has to offer. To be sure, that use of the word gospel in the first verse of the oldest Gospel is no doubt the reason that copyists in later centuries used Gospel in the titles ascribed to each. But that means that the title Gospel is a creation of copyists, not of the Evangelists themselves.

  When one looks at the opening of the other Gospels, we find them describing what they are doing with other nouns, indicating that they do not yet have in mind Gospel as the name for what they are writing. Matthew begins (Matt. 1:1): “Book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ.” Luke bases what he is writing on records from those “compiling a narrative” (Luke 1:1), who were “eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Luke 1:1). And at the opening of Acts, Luke refers back to his first volume, which we call the Gospel of Luke, as “the fi
rst book,” literally “the first word,” their way of saying Volume One, not as his “Gospel.” the Gospel of John begins its Prologue with “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). Thus they are thinking about the message, when they introduce their “Gospels.” They were not aware of creating a literary genre to which their book belongs, namely: the Gospel genre.

  However, the name Gospel did get attached to the four Gospels, and as they moved toward the authoritative status of being included in the New Testament, the designation Gospel could readily be attached to other writings, in an effort to accredit them as being of equal authority. But here too an examination of the body of the text of such noncanonical “Gospels” indicates that they were not called Gospels by their original authors.

  This can be illustrated by the four “Gospels” to be found outside the New Testament in the Nag Hammadi Codices. The best known by far is The Gospel of Thomas. It exists, almost completely intact, both in a papyrus codex of the mid-fourth century in Coptic translation (Nag Hammadi Codex II, Tractate 2) and in three very fragmentary Greek vestiges from the third century (Oxyrhynchus Papyri 1, 654, and 655). Here Ralph Pöhner, in an essay entitled “Judas the Hero,”7 quite correctly comments:

  This dialogue of Jesus with Thomas counts today as very important for the history of religion: Some researchers name it “the fifth Gospel,” and it could be that here even lies the original text on which the official Gospels built.

  Though The Gospel of Thomas is less a “dialogue” than a collection of 114 sayings ascribed to Jesus, it is indeed a very important discovery, no doubt the most important Gospel outside the New Testament. It may well have older readings than the same sayings in the canonical Gospels, and in this sense be nearer to Jesus himself. In fact, I for one have made just such an argument.

  Saying 36 contains at one place an older text than does the New Testament. In the familiar sayings about the ravens and lilies that demonstrate their trust in God in that they do not work (Q 12:22–31), the first instance of the lilies not working is… “they grow”—hardly what one would expect! But in The Gospel of Thomas, Saying 36 reads (in the Greek original, P.Oxy. 655): “they do not card.” This is precisely the first work women did back then, in moving from the wool of the sheep to the clothing they wore. The difference in spelling is very slight. It seems probable that here The Gospel of Thomas has the correct text, and the New Testament has the corrupted text. I have published seven articles arguing this point alone.8

  A further instance is the Parable of the Vineyard, which in the New Testament (Mark 12:1–12) has a secondary allegorizing interpretation imbedded in the parable itself, whereas The Gospel of Thomas, Saying 65, presents the original form of the parable prior to that allegorization.

  But there are also sayings in The Gospel of Thomas that seem to presuppose the New Testament Gospels, such as Saying 16, where the number of five in the household that disagree among themselves seems based on Luke 12:52–53, though Luke seems here to have made a late addition to the Sayings Gospel Q.9 The current scholarly view is hence that The Gospel of Thomas contains some material that is older than the canonical Gospels, and some material that is younger.

  The idea of calling The Gospel of Thomas the “fifth Gospel,” to which Pöhner refers with obvious approval, is in fact the title of a book I edited, though the idea was not original with me, containing a new translation of the text and an essay I wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of its discovery.10 But that is not what the original author/collector of these 114 sayings ascribed to Jesus would have called his tractate.

  Another instance that Pöhner lists of noncanonical Gospels is The Gospel of Mary (Magdalene). This is a very important second-century apocryphal Gospel, and plays an important role in the modern feminist movement. The author of this standard kind of Gnostic dialogue refers to them preaching the “gospel of the kingdom,” but also of Jesus’s words and a vision, so it is not clear whether the original author chose the title Gospel of Mary or whether this was secondarily added. It so happens that I was the first to make The Gospel of Mary available in English, in The Nag Hammadi Library in English.11 The Gospel of Mary is not among the Nag Hammadi Codices, but is found in a similar Gnostic codex, Papyrus Berolinensis 8502. Hence I thought it would be well to include it with the Nag Hammadi Codices, especially since it had been available for a long time in German but not yet in English.

  I mention here such details of my involvement, not to draw attention to my work, but rather to make it clear that my criticism of Pöhner is not the standard conservative prejudice in favor of limiting oneself to the canonical Gospels to the exclusion of the noncanonical Gospels. My concern is quite the reverse: the attention we are giving to the noncanonical Gospels today should not be discredited by those who make use of this scholarly material in a nonscholarly way, such as Pöhner.

  We name it The Gospel of Thomas because the subscript title at the end reads The Gospel according to Thomas. But this tractate does not tell the stories of Jesus, as do the canonical Gospels, but is limited to sayings of Jesus. This has led scholars to make a distinction between Narrative Gospels, that tell the story of Jesus (as do Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), and Sayings Gospels (such as the source used by Matthew and Luke called Q, and The Gospel of Thomas).

  The Gospel of Thomas consists of 114 sayings ascribed to Jesus, each introduced with the stereotypical phrase, “Jesus says:…” The word gospel occurs nowhere in the text! Rather, sayings themselves refer to Jesus’s sayings or words.

  Both saying and word are translations of the same word in Coptic and Greek. It is just a distinction we make sometimes in translating. For example, where it occurred at the opening of Luke and John, we translated it word.

  Saying 19 of The Gospel of Thomas reads:

  If you become disciples of mine and listen to my sayings, these stones will serve you.

  Saying 38 reads:

  Many times you have desired to hear these sayings, these that I am speaking to you, and you have no one else from whom to hear them.

  The opening of the text of The Gospel of Thomas reads: “These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke.” The term sayings actually occurs in the very first saying:

  Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.

  It is clear that the author or collector of these sayings thought that the work he or she was producing was a collection of Jesus’s sayings, not a Gospel.

  The saying that is no doubt responsible for The Gospel of Thomas being ascribed to Thomas is Saying 13:

  Jesus said to his disciples: “Compare me and tell me whom I am like.”

  Simon Peter said to him: “You are like a just messenger.”

  Matthew said to him: “You are like an especially wise philosopher.”

  Thomas said to him: “Teacher, my mouth cannot bear at all to say whom you are like.”

  Jesus said: “I am not your teacher. For you have drunk, you have become intoxicated at the bubbling spring that I have measured out.”

  And he took him, and withdrew, and he said three sayings to him.

  And when Thomas came back to his companions, they asked him: “What did Jesus say to you?”

  Thomas said to them: “If I tell you one of the sayings he said to me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me, and fire will come out of the stones and burn you up.”

  As a result of this preeminence given to Thomas, The Gospel of Thomas begins:

  These are the hidden sayings that the living Jesus spoke, and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them down.

  And the very first saying elevates Jesus’s sayings to being what actually saves:

  Whoever finds the meaning of these sayings will not taste death.

  From all of this it is clear that The Gospel of Thomas was hardly designated by its original author or compiler as a Gospel. Rather he or she would have called it a collection of sayings. But then, in the effort to get it accredited by the church as being on a par with the Gospels
gaining canonicity in the emerging New Testament, this collection of sayings of Jesus was secondarily named a Gospel.

  The situation with another Nag Hammadi tractate, The Gospel of Philip, is similar. It too does not narrate the stories of Jesus, as we might expect of a Gospel, based on what is in the Gospels of the New Testament. Rather, it is engrossed in other issues, though at times referring to a saying or action of Jesus. The text never even uses the word gospel. However, there is one saying ascribed to Philip, which is probably why the whole text came to be ascribed to him:12

  Philip the apostle said: Joseph the carpenter planted a garden because he needed wood for his trade. It was he who made the cross when he planted. His offspring was Jesus and the planting was the cross.

  Normally a Nag Hammadi tractate has a title separated off from the body of the text, at the top or bottom (or both), surrounded by blank papyrus and with hatch-marks to decorate it, as we have described earlier, and as you can see on the photograph opposite the Preface. But the title The Gospel according to Philip is jammed into the end of the last line of the text. This suggests that it was secondarily added, as a kind of afterthought, by the scribe of Nag Hammadi Codex II who copied out this tractate. It was apparently not the title intended by the anonymous author of the tractate.