Judas' Testimonial
As expected -it has been always the same- the Catholic Church has launched a hard attack on the Gospel of Judas, which has been recently delivered to humanity by the National Geographic Society. The Vatican has held this position since the Council of Nicaea in the third century. From that time onwards, all the primitive Christian communities -which had been in truth the cofounders of Christianity as a doctrine -were considered as heretics. Undoubtedly, most of those communities were Gnostic by that time, and around A.D. 180, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, in what was then Roman Gaul, “wrote a massive treatise called Against Heresies. The book was a fierce denunciation of all those whose views about Jesus and his message differed from those of the mainstream church”.
History knows very well that those groups -attacked by the bishop of Lyon- were really Gnostics, and they knew very well that Jesus had not come to found a Church, but in order to deliver a doctrine which could clarify the indispensable knowledge needed to attain the Kingdom of Heaven. Andrew Cockburn writes the following paragraphs in his recent article titled “The Gospel of Judas”, and published by the prestigious magazine National Geographic in its issue on May 2006:
Irenaeus -bishop of Lyon- had plenty of heresies to contend with. In the early centuries of Christianity, what we call the church, operating through a top-down hierarchy of priests and bishops, was only one of the many groups inspired by Jesus. Biblical scholar Marvin Meyer of Chapman, who worked with Kasser to translate the gospel, sums up the situation as “Christianity trying to find its style”. Many of these groups were Gnostics, followers of the same strain of early Christianity reflected in the Judas Gospel.
It is interesting for our reader to know some details related to the Gnostic contribution to the figure of Jesus and his creed:
The Nazarenes were known as Baptists, Ebionites and Christians of Saint John. Their belief was that the Messiah was not the Son of God, but he was just a prophet who wanted to follow John.
Origenes -Book II, page 150- noticed that “there are some people who say that John was the Anointed -the Christ”.
When the metaphysical conceptions of the Gnostic groups -which saw in Jesus the Logos and the Anointed one- began to be accepted, the primitive Christians separated from the Nazarenes, who accused Jesus of corrupting the doctrine of John and of changing the Baptism in the Jordan -Codex Nazaraeus II, page 109.
It is an undeniable that during the reign of the emperor Constantine, the Catholic Church was established as official church of the Empire. At that time in history, the Church clearly possessed religious and political power. Since then, the Church has claimed to be the mediator between God and men, to such an extent that we already know its proclaimed dogma: nobody can get close to Jesus or God, if he does not accept the Mother Church with all its bureaucracy and uncountable mistakes along history.
It is a well-known theological fact that “the Gnostics believed that there is an ultimate source of goodness, which they thought of as the divine mind, outside of the physical universe. Humans carry a spark of that divine power, but they are cut off by the material world all around them. While Christians like Irenaeus stressed that only Jesus, the son of God, was simultaneous human and divine, the Gnostics proposed that ordinary people could be connected to God. Salvation lay in awakening that divine spark within the human Spirit and reconnecting with the divine mind. Doing so required the guidance of a teacher, and that, according to the Gnostics, was Christ’s role. Those who grasped his message could become as divine as Christ himself”.
Precisely, this was and always will be the basic error committed by the Catholic Church, that is to say, not to show the doctrine of Jesus as he delivered it. It would have been a different story, if the other Gospels -the ones called today “apocrypha”- would have been accepted in the First Council of Nicaea. In that case we would have known much closer the Christian doctrine. For instance, we would have known that Jesus loved Mary Magdalene and therefore, he was never a man of “castrated sexuality”. There is an invaluable wealth of theological data in the Gospels of Thomas, Philip, James, etc., etc.
History always teaches us some lesson and, today, to the surprise of everybody, the Judas's figure has reappeared before the world, rectified through his own Gospel. Even though during centuries the Catholic Church sold us the image of Judas as a traitor, egotist, non-solidary with his Master, etc., etc., the truth has come up and, as the popular proverb says, the truth is like the tempests, it causes desolation when it arrives!
Gnosis has asserted during centuries that Judas had been the most exalted disciple of Jesus, because of having accepted -within the drama that Jesus was going to represent- the role of traitor. Hence the Gospel of Judas contains a conversation between Judas and Jesus Christ in which Jesus says: “You will exceed them all. For you will sacrifice the man who clothes me”. For this reason, “You will be cursed!”
The problem has been and always will be that the apostolic Roman Church never understood that the drama represented by Jesus was carefully planned by Jesus and his twelve apostles, in order to leave historical constancy of what each person has to live within oneself, in his/her inner, particular, individual life, that is to say, to reintegrate all parts of his/her own Being with the help of his/her intimate Christ. The Vatican Church held to the historical figure of Jesus, but never understood nor wishes to understand that the important thing is the interpolation of the historical drama to the intimate life of each Christian.
For this reason, the father of contemporary Gnosticism, Samael Aun Weor, in one of his lectures held in 1977, expressed the following concepts in relation to the drama experienced by Judas and in relation to the spiritual repercussions of this drama within the human being:
Judas, that inner Apostle, is in fact one of the Twelve Potencies that we carry within us, one of the twelve parts of our Being. It is the part that is lively interested in the BUDDHIST ANNIHILATION, and this is extraordinary...
I do not deny the existence, 1977 years ago, of that apostle who represents our intimate Judas. He is real. He existed. He is one of the Greatest Masters, the most outstanding Master, the most exalted Adept who lived with Jesus of Nazareth; Judas Iscariot teaches us, in a very clear way, THE DOCTRINE OF THE DISINTEGRATION of the EGO.
JUDAS ISCARIOT is not -as many people think- a man who betrayed his Master. No, he just played the role that his Master had taught him, and that is all. The very Jesus of Nazareth prepared that role, and Judas learned it by heart and represented it to full consciousness, publicly.
The Judas's doctrine teaches how to attain the elimination of all our psychic aggregates, that is, the DEATH of the EGO. That is the reason why Judas hanged himsel, in order to indicate that the Ego has to be reduced to ashes.
Judas played a role, and that is all; he carefully prepared for it.
In order to avoid any contradiction with the Holy Scriptures, he essayed his role for several times before publicly performing it, as an actor plays his role and nothing else.
Judas was and is the most exalted disciple of Jesus Christ. Judas attained Christification...
It is a pity that among the arguments that are brandished against the Gospel of Judas -recently published-, the gospel is dismissed as having no value for understanding the historical Judas because it was written around A.D. III or IV, meaning that the gospel does not have enough historical rigour. However, that concept is as poor as the one used by atheists or sceptics when saying that Jesus never existed because nobody has found a document written by Jesus that could attest his presence in history.
We conclude this work inviting to our kind reader to accomplish a profound research about this exciting theme in order to fulfil words of the great Nazarene: “Know the truth, and the truth will set you free!...”