Moonbase

It seems like the press has been writing quite a bit lately about the rediscovered Gnostic Gospel of Judas. Despite the way some writers are sensationalizing the document, it shouldn’t be regarded as a “missing book of the Bible” for two reasons:

1. It’s a much younger work than the Biblical gospels.
2. It belongs to an entirely different belief system to the one that produced the Bible.

The original Gospel of Judas was the second-century product of a Gnostic sect called the Cainites. We’ve known about its existence for a long time (Irenaeus, a bishop in what is now France, first wrote about it in AD 180), but until now no copies were known to have survived into the present day.

We know Gnosticism to have been a syncretic religious system which borrowed some of its names and ideas from Christianity, combining them with many other traditions. An esoteric system, it had its own very distinctive vocabulary—which the Gospel of Judas displays in spades:

Judas [said] to him, “I know who you are and where you have come from. You are from the immortal realm of Barbelo. And I am not worthy to utter the name of the one who has sent you.”

And later:

“The twelve aeons of the twelve luminaries constitute their father, with six heavens for each aeon, so that there are seventy-two heavens for the seventy-two luminaries, and for each (50) [of them five] firmaments, [for a total of] three hundred sixty [firmaments …]. They were given authority and a [great] host of angels [without number], for glory and adoration, [and after that also] virgin spirits, for glory and [adoration] of all the aeons and the heavens and their firmaments.”

(Taken from the NYT’s excerpt of the document [PDF]. Like many esoteric texts, it goes on like that for a while…)

Once you see mention of concepts like Barbelo and aeons, you know you’re dealing with a specifically Gnostic text. While the unearthing of this manuscript is important because it gives us another ancient source on Gnostic beliefs, it has little to tell us about Christianity.