The gospel according to Judas?

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The Lost Gospel : The Quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot

Herbert Krosney

National Geographic, $13.95, 352 pages

Reviewed by William Murchison

There's just something so Now -- so Today -- about the buzz and bustle created by all the current ventures in the deconstruction of orthodox Christianity. First "The Da Vinci Code," three-years-plus on the bestseller list, accompanied this spring by the Tom Hanks movie; then the well-covered legal row over whether "Da Vinci" author Dan Brown copied the "architecture" of another reinterpretation of Jesus' life. (A British judge ruled he didn't.)

At the end of April, the New York Times bestseller list sported not only "Da Vinci" but a novel about the imputed heresies of Leonardo himself; and a novel about the Knights Templars; and a nonfiction account (by one of the parties who sued Mr. Brown) of how Jesus survived the crucifixion; and a book wising us up to what Jesus really said and meant; and -- just in time for Easter -- a long-lost "Gospel of Judas," together with a companion book recounting how this great prize of biblical archaeology came to light.

Is this a quirky theological moment we are living through, or what? A lot of Americans who buy books lack for one reason or another any interest in better understanding what we have long known.Their passion instead is for scraping away layers of paint that conceal The Things They Don't Want You to Know. "Things" like what? Alternatives to the Christian narrative, of course -- Jesus as married man, Jesus as the guy they couldn't kill, Judas as Christian hero. "They" (the custodians of orthodoxy) don't want you to know because if you knew, they might lose their power (and might have to kill you).

Fear not. Dan Brown is on the job. Not to mention the National Geographic Society. I swallow hard as I write that last sentence. Of all publishers to burst into print with the Gospel of Judas -- National Geographic! The Geographic, famed for its yellow-bordered magazine covers and sponsorship of expeditions to the top of the world and the bottom of the sea, threw in its lot with the deconstructors for reasons I am sure the trustees would justify as rooted in scientific excitement but which smell suspiciously of lust for media attention.

The Gospel of Judas -- written on 13 sheets of papyrus in the Coptic language, and which languished for centuries in a jar in the Egyptian desert -- typifies the thought of a discredited (in orthodox Christian terms) school of early Christian thinkers called the Gnostics. The Gnostics were a weird bunch, to say the least. The hidden knowledge and secret teachings, to which they pretended, were in their own heads -- a swirl of strange beings and powers attested to nowhere else, including a dynamic duo of gods.