Review by Choice Review
Readers could not ask for better guides to this material than Pagels (Princeton) and King (Harvard). Their volume consists of two main parts: a jointly written essay of four easily navigable chapters, and a carefully annotated, accessible translation of the text. Their goal is to present the Gospel of Judas, or rather its author, within a second-century context in which issues of who Jesus was, what he taught, and how his followers should act often assumed life-and-death importance. For other Christians, Jesus's death and resurrection, as reported in the canonical Gospels, could be understood as a template for those who believed in him. However, as Pagels and King amply demonstrate, the author of this gospel, who was familiar with these earlier writings, saw the spirit, apart from the flesh, as immortal; all other teachings (including the canonical Gospels) were wrong and all other teachers (including the other disciples) wrong-headed and ultimately dangerous. This author was angry with others in his time, and the discovery and publication of his words have angered many in ours. This volume is the (almost) perfect way for today's readers to make up their own minds and, in the process, learn a good deal about early Christianity. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers, and general readers. L. J. Greenspoon Creighton University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
AS anyone who has read Gregory Maguire's "Wicked" or seen the subsequent Broadway show can attest, the Wicked Witch of the West was framed. Elphaba, as Maguire calls her, wasn't really wicked at all. She was a good girl set up by the powers that be (in this case, the Wizard) for, among other things, the green color of her skin. So it goes with the recently unveiled Gospel of Judas, which posits a theory as impertinent as Maguire's about the wickedest character in Christendom. In the New Testament, Judas Iscariot is a Satan-possessed traitor who turns Jesus in for 30 pieces of silver; the other disciples are the heroic founders of the church. In the topsy-turvy Gospel of Judas, branded heretical in A.D. 180 by the church father Irenaeus, the disciples play the goats and Judas the hero. The other disciples, who go by the ganglandish name "the 12," are murderers and fools. Judas is Jesus' closest confidante, the one man who truly understands "the mysteries which are beyond the world and the things which will occur at the end." Since the fourth-century Coptic version of this second-century Greek text was released last April by the National Geographic Society, a variety of books have appeared promising to decode it. In "Judas and the Gospel of Jesus," N.T. Wright offered the conservative critique, insisting that the man in question was a villain after all, and that the early Christians chose well when they decided to put their faith in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In "The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot," Bart Ehrman tells the cloak-and-dagger story of the papyrus codex from its discovery by an Egyptian farmer in the 1970s through the vagaries of the antiquities market, including a stop in a freezer along the way. "Reading Judas," a collaborative effort by the Princeton professor Elaine Pagels, best known for her book "The Gnostic Gospels," and the Harvard professor Karen L. King, the author of "The Gospel of Mary of Magdala," focuses exclusively on the meaning of this last-shall-be-first text. It includes a co-written essay on this gospel's key themes, followed by an English translation and an extensive commentary by King. One of the genuine puzzles of early Christianity, and of much subsequent Christian history, concerns who is to blame for Jesus' death. The Gospels make it plain that it was God's plan, and that Jesus carried out this divine plan in order to save human beings from the wages of sin. And yet Judas and the Jews (to whom the word "Judas" is etymologically linked) are blamed for setting this divine plan in motion. As Pagels and King note, there is something amiss here. How can Judas be branded evil for carrying out God's plan? Is his infamous kiss, depicted on the dust jacket of "Reading Judas," really a betrayal if God had the crucifixion in mind from before Jesus' birth? Pagels and King do an excellent job explaining why, according to the author of this renegade gospel, mainstream Christianity has gotten it so wrong for so long. Along the way they introduce us to, among other things, a goddess named Barbelo (for some Gnostics, a divine mother figure who often symbolized heaven) and try to make sense of teachings that to most readers today will seem like nutty musings on numerology, cosmology, astrology and eschatology. On the perennial question of death and the afterlife, Pagels and King explain that whereas other early Christians affimed the doctrine of bodily resurrection, the Christians to whom this gospel is addressed believed in the immortal spirit. Here the body is suspect. Jesus is not reborn in the flesh but simply appears. The eternal life he offers is lived in the spirit alone, and it is won more through Jesus' teachings than through his sacrifice on the cross. Thomas Jefferson, in his own cut-and-paste version of the Gospels made in the White House in 1804, depicted Jesus not as a savior who died to pay for our sins but as a great moral teacher who lived to show us how to live ourselves. The Jefferson Bible, as this anti-supernatural Scripture is called, concludes abruptly, as Jesus is being laid in the tomb, without a hint of the Resurrection. The Gospel of Judas ends even more abruptly - before Jesus begins his trek to Calvary. Like Jefferson's Bible, it scoffs at the notion that God would sacrifice his son to atone for the world's sins. It too depicts Jesus as a teacher rather than a savior, though its esoteric theology, laced with numerological musings on the "72 luminaries" and the "five firmaments," would have revolted Jefferson, who preferred to take his morality neat. I prefer to take my religious history free from demands for contemporary relevance, so whenever someone in the historical-Jesus fraternity makes Jesus mutter moral maxims that might as easily have been uttered by President Bush or Oprah Winfrey, my anachronism antenna goes up. In this case, Pagels and King massage the multicultural sensibilities of their readers by opining that the Gospel of Judas represents a "sharp, dissenting voice" against the "single, static, universal system of beliefs" of official Christianity. Preaching to the "spiritual but not religious" choir, they tell us that, like other noncanonical texts they have championed elsewhere, this gospel aims to "encourage believers to seek God within themselves, with no mention of churches, much less of clergy." The most intriguing effort to enlist this ancient text in the contemporary culture wars comes in the authors' discussion of sacrifice and martyrdom. According to Pagels and King, the Gospel of Judas may well have been buried on behalf of a community that disagreed sharply with other Christians about how to make sense of Roman persecution of the faithful. Those who would come to seize control over the Christian movement and its core narrative understood the sacrifices of ancient Christians mimetically, as imitations of the sacrifices of their Christ. And leaders like Tertullian urged their followers not simply to endure martyrdom but to seek it out. The Gospel of Judas denounces this cult of the martyr as "hideous folly" and calls for religion "to renounce violence as God's will and purpose for humanity." In the process it offers a prophetic "no," according to Pagels and King, to "our world of polarized religious violence." Any critique of martyrdom will sound plausible in light of 9/11 and the riot of mass death visited upon Virginia Tech by a self-described "martyr" who died, at least in his own mind, like Jesus. But the particular combination offered here - the paean to diversity, the suspicion of organized religion, the denunciation of violence in the name of peace - sounds too suspiciously close to contemporary multicultural pieties to be taken as ancient gospel. Although Pagels and King attend with care to the ironies of a text that both attacks Christian martyrdom and sets Judas up as the first Christian martyr, they are less effective in dealing with the most disturbing feature of this gospel: Jesus' sarcastic laughter. In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus laughs no fewer than four times. He laughs not with his disciples but at them - for worshiping incorrectly and for misunderstanding his teachings. "Teacher, why are you laughing at us?" Judas asks. Good question. Pagels and King devote scant attention to it, responding simply that this laughter is intended to spur Jesus' disciples on to "higher spiritual vision." To me, however, it just sounds mean-spirited, turning Jesus into the sort of person you wouldn't like, much less worship. The Gospel of Judas will have its champions, not least Pagels and King, who laud its hero for inspiring a text that makes early Christianity look like contemporary American religion - more pluralistic, more wild and more contested than most imagine. But this gospel is not long for the world, or at least the American corner of it. Most Americans will rightly prefer Luke's Jesus, whose heart breaks over the oppression of women and the poor, to a smart-aleck Jesus who guffaws at the stupidity of his listeners. America is supposed to be a happy place. Americans want their Jesus to channel Paula Abdul rather than Simon Cowell, Dorothy rather than the Wicked Witch of the West. How can Judas be evil, the authors ask, when he helped carry out God's plan that Jesus die on the cross? Stephen Prothero is the chairman of the religion department at Boston University and the author of "Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - and Doesn't."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
In fall 2006, the National Geographic Society made quite a splash, bringing to light the discovery of a new gospel in the Gnostic tradition told from Judas' point of view. There have already been several books on the subject, including one by Bart Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot0 (2006), which provided an overview and placed the book in its historical and religious contexts. Now come two premier names in the field of religious writing to take a more intimate look at the gospel. Pagels, author of the classic Gnostic Gospels 0 (2004), teams with translator extraordinaire King for a compact reader's guide into the heart of the new gospel. The Gospel of Judas can be a convoluted, even bizarre, reading experience, but the combination of King's translation, which appears at the end of the book, and Pagels' text will help general readers get past the difficulties and into the fascinating message, which emphasizes spiritual rather than physical resurrection for both Jesus and his followers. Pagels also shows why this message was so noxious to church leaders and explains how the gospel fits into the body of noncanonical literature. By showing how Judas' vision of life after death should be understood, this elegantly written book makes clear the relevance of a centuries-old text for a contemporary audience. --Ilene Cooper Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This accessible, engaging book has Princeton religion professor Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels; Beyond Belief) in a dream team pairing with King (The Gospel of Mary of Magdala), who teaches ecclesiastical history at Harvard Divinity School. Together they take on the controversial Gospel of Judas, published in April 2006 after some years of languishing in a safety deposit box after its initial discovery in the 1970s. In their hundred-page introductory essay, Pagels and King date the gospel to the middle of the second century and situate it amidst the deadly persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. Such persecution, they say, drove the author of the Gospel of Judas, who "could not reconcile his belief in a deeply loving, good God with a particular idea other Christians held at the time: that God desired the bloody sacrificial death of Jesus and his followers." The key to understanding this gospel, they argue, is its relentless unmasking of the triumphant rhetoric of martyrdom. Though the gospel text appears angry and polarizing, Pagels and King have come to realize that they "cannot easily dismiss this author as either a madman or a lunatic." Instead, they delve deeply into his theological view that a pure, spiritual realm exists beyond the physical world that we see-a Gnostic chestnut that recurs in other second-century texts. Alive to irony and historical nuance, this remarkably concise primer opens readers to a plausible and often persuasive interpretation of the disquieting Gospel of Judas. (Mar. 6) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The story of Judas is one of the most fascinating in the Gospels of the New Testament. Using the recent manuscript fragments discovered by the National Geographic Society, well-known religion scholars Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels) and King (Magdala) have written a lively discussion regarding the questions this Gnostic gospel creates. They work from King's translation of the fragmentary gospel, employing their collective knowledge to present a fascinating study of the contrasts between good and evil, the still compelling stories of how Christianity evolved, and the complex nature of human suffering and redemption. Well written and researched, this book provides clues as to how the contemporary vision of Jesus compares with the view of Jesus 1900 years ago. The reading by Justine Eyre and Robertson Dean provides an excellent point-counterpoint approach to the questions of what the lost writings have to say about the nature of God, the relationship between Jesus and Judas, the complicated-and sometimes conflicting-relationships between the other disciples of Jesus and Judas, and the insights Judas has to offer into the teachings of Jesus. Reading Judas is highly recommended for both public and academic libraries with large audio and/or religion collections. [Books on Tape also has a version available: 5 CDs. unabridged. 5 hrs. 2007. ISBN 9781-4159-3629-0. $60; 4 cassettes. ISBN 9781-4159-3926-0. $40.-Ed.]-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
