Observatório Bíblico

O jornal israelense Haaretz, em sua edição online em inglês, faz severa crítica ao artificialismo marqueteiro que foi criado em torno do escrito gnóstico denominado (impropriamente) de Evangelho de Judas.

Graças a Jim West, tomei conhecimento do artigo Gospel or manipulation? By Benny Ziffer – Apr 14, 2006.

Americanism in the bad sense of the word means, inter alia, a kind of simple-mindedness verging on stupidity that makes a documentary television program about Christian theology sound identical in tone to a stewardess explaining to airplane passengers how to fasten their seat belts. Americanism in the bad sense of the word is the striving for maximal clarity and the eradication of nuances that interfere with it, even when the issue under discussion necessitates nuances and contains questions that have not been resolved. These prefatory remarks are a delicate way of expressing the disgust I felt at the National Geographic Channel broadcast (Monday, 23:00), which the whole world anticipated expectantly, about the “Gospel According to Judas” that was supposed to overturn the Christian faith and absolve Judas Iscariot of the blame for betraying Jesus.

This expectancy was fed by a public relations mechanism on behalf of National Geographic and ensured that all the headlines in the Israeli newspapers and on the television news broadcasts reported last weekend on the exciting discovery and prepared the audience for the broadcast in which the full details would be revealed. In Europe, incidentally, there was much less excitement about the matter, and what I managed to see of French television was a few scholars who described the text of The Gospel According to Judas as idiotic, in that it depicts Jesus as a psychopath who orders Judas Iscariot to organize his death. This is to say: Not every ancient text on papyrus found in the sands of the desert is necessarily wise, and if the church shunned it in its day, perhaps there was justification for this.

What we had here, then, was to a large extent much ado about nothing. Or at least – the inflation of an issue that should be of interest to a few experts into a thriller with many participants. When all is said and done, this is a Coptic manuscript that was discovered in Egypt, stolen from an archaeological site and passed around the antiquities market until it came into the possession of an American dealer who decided to make a fuss about it and depict it as a document that would change human history. This dealer appears in the National Geographic television film as a savior figure, as someone who has rescued this sensational and important document from the barbarians who did not recognize its importance. She is interviewed at length in the film, bearing the righteous smile of a Christian saint on her face, and she does not hesitate to say that she feels that divine providence wanted her to find the document that would exculpate Judas Iscariot of blame.

In what way is this dealer less barbaric than the Egyptian antiquities dealer who possessed The Gospel According to Judas before her? The main difference is that she is American. It is important to know that the trade in archaeological antiquities is a dubious profession anywhere because by its very nature it feeds off antiquities theft, excavation robbing and museum looting. The National Geographic film presented, in a kind of infantile show, the Egyptian antiquities robber with whom it all started as a kind of terrifying figure taken from the Hasamba books, thrilling adventures for Israeli children two or three generations ago, who purloins from a cave in the desert a stone coffer containing the manuscript. The Egyptian dealer who eventually receives the coffer is also presented as a villainous and obsequious creature, fat and ugly and bearded, just as a Middle Eastern trader is portrayed in the stereotypical American imagination, and perhaps the Western imagination at large.

Alongside the melodramatic and kitschy – and to a large extent also racist – spectacle of the manuscript’s adventures, National Geographic presents the story of the last days of Jesus, the Last Supper and his capture by the Romans. Jesus and the apostles are portrayed by young, bearded actors wearing Bedouin robes and speaking a kind of Arabic-accented Aramaic. For the sake of piquancy and in order to increase the stimulus for the viewer, the producers added a few horror scenes with a plastic depiction of the cruel tortures that the Romans inflicted on the first Christians.

The great deception in this kind of pretend documentary is in the dangerous mix of scientific hypotheses and New Testament stories, and of historical facts and religious beliefs. The viewer of the National Geographic film is led to think that there is no doubt that Judas Iscariot and the other apostles were historical figures for whom there is historical proof of their existence. This is not the case, as there is not a scrap of historical evidence that the apostles really existed. Even concerning Jesus himself there is hardly any external evidence of the deeds attributed to him in the New Testament. One could expect that a documentary film with scientific pretensions would distinguish between legend and historical truth. This was not done, so as not to detract from the drama of the story or hurt the feelings of believing Christians.

Another deception in the film, which is in its entirety the fruit of that Americanism in the bad sense, concerns the active role of the Jews in Jesus’ crucifixion, as related in the New Testament. This was completely ignored for the sake of political correctness. After all, every sensible person who has read from the New Testament knows that its “anti-Semitism” is based not on the character of Judas Iscariot, but rather on the scene in which the Jews urge the Roman governor Pontius Pilate to crucify Jesus. The Catholic Church has expressed its opinion about this in our own times, when it declared officially a few decades ago that today’s Jews do not share their ancestors’ guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus.

But most ridiculous of all – and here it really does seem to me that the film is making a fool of the viewer – is the way in which it proves the gospel is authentic. It is quite possible that the text is indeed authentic, but the proof that was offered to the viewers is ridiculous: What they showed us was a Carbon-14 dating test performed on a bit of the papyrus on which the gospel was written. This is utter nonsense, because forgers have often used ancient and authentic writing materials, be they papyri or ancient inks, whose antiquity was proven by Carbon-14 dating. Another proof of the antiquity of the Coptic text was provided by scholars – who knows who they are? – who were seen bending over bits of the text and then raised their heads and ruled: “Authentic.”

In short, the discovery of The Gospel According to Judas is a nice curiosity that has been inflated into a big balloon. It is an archaeological finding of dubious origin of a heretical text that was rejected in its day from the church canon. The expectation that it will change the attitude of the church toward the figure of Judas Iscariot is absurd. And from some of the sentences that were read aloud in National Geographic’s English translation, it was also not made clear to the viewer what the poetic beauty of the text is. A lot of stereotypes, a lot of racism and an awful lot of shady commercial interests made the film, which the world watched expectantly on Monday, come off mainly as manipulation.

Em The Jewish Week, Lawrence H. Schiffman – Edelman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and chair of the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University – escreve sobre o Evangelho Copta de Judas.

Judas, Reconsidered

Despite its alleged kosher certification of Judas Iscariot, the Gospel of Judas is part of a literature that represents a sort of alternative anti-Judaism to that which developed in the era of the Church Fathers. Much has been made of the fact that this text describes Judas as having been particularly close to Jesus, who revealed to him esoteric teachings. However, the content of this revelation is a series of Gnostic teachings that are totally at odds with Christianity as we know it (…)

The Gospel of Judas discovery may lead some to read the New Testament in a way that further reduces its anti-Judaism by interpreting Judas role as part of what Christians see as the divine plan. If so, this text will have turned out to be good for the Jews. Texts such as the Gospel of Judas can help to remind us of alternative explanations and guide us towards greater understanding, but they cannot be taken as the basis for any kind of historical understanding of the first century.