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The Fate of the Apostles in the Gospel of Judas

Introduction

Transcript

Shirley Paulson

Hi everybody. Welcome to the January 20, 26 Bible and Beyond Discussion. Today we are tackling one of the most unusual of the ancient Christian texts, the Gospel of Judas. I’m your host Shirley Paulson, and I’m really happy to introduce our guest scholar, Dr. Lance Jenott. He’s talking to us about “The Fate of the Apostles in the Gospel of Judas.” Dr. Jenott teaches at Washington University in St. Louis as a senior lecturer in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies. He studies Christian origins and Second Temple Judaism and specializes in the gospel of Judas. So this book—the Gospel of Judas—is, I would say so peculiar, and yet it holds the key to understanding so many facets of the early Christian world. And I’m really glad that we have Dr. Jenott with us tonight who is such an expert on this one text. He’s going to help us dig into this rather startling text. And so welcome to the program Lance. Glad you’re with us.

Lance Jenot

Thank you very much for having me this evening.

Shirley Paulson

 Alright, well, I suppose people might not pay as much attention to this ancient text, the Gospel of Judas if it weren’t for such a universally disdained figure as Judas being at the center. Christians have almost no pity for him. So I wanted to ask about why we’re even talking about him. If there is a gospel about Judas, does he come across as a good guy or a bad guy or somewhere in between? What do you think?

Lance Jenott

Yeah, well there was a lot of interest in that question of “What is Judas character in this book?” When the book first came out to the public, which was actually relatively recently—this book came out to the public in 2006—it maybe still the latest gospel to have been discovered. And the initial reading was that Judas is completely rehabilitated into Jesus’s most loyal disciple. And by betraying Jesus, it sort of leads to a way of helping Jesus release his soul from his body. So this was kind of the initial reading that Judas is really cast in a good light in this gospel. And then other scholars immediately reacted to that and said, no, Judas is actually demonized in this gospel, even more than he is in the canonical gospels. He’s clearly called a demon, which is true. And it says he takes money to betray, which is also true.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I mean, the more I read this text, I think about how Judas… the story is really playing with the character of Judas that we already have in the New Testament, and it’s really exploring the kind of complexity of that character. But this idea when Jesus in the gospel says the Son of Man goes as is written of him, but woe to the one who betrays him! So in some sense, Judas is guilty for betraying Jesus. Yes, but clearly in the Gospel of Judas, just as in the Bible, it’s also part of this larger divine plan.

So it’s not just as simple as that. He’s doing this for money or out of greed. So I think the Gospel of Judas is exploring that theme that there was part of a larger divine plan and Judas’ character was part of that. But ultimately what I’ve always thought is that this really isn’t about the ‘gospel’ of Judas. I’m sorry that the Gospel of Judas isn’t about the character of Judas. It’s really more about the other disciples, and that didn’t receive as much attention, really.

Shirley Paulson

Right. So that’s an interesting point then that you’ve been focusing on the other disciples when it’s called the Gospel of Judas. Let me just ask you before we go there, when it’s a gospel, is it about Judas or by Judas?

Lance Jenott

Yeah, it doesn’t say it’s the “Gospel by Judas.” In fact, even to get into sort of the nitty gritty, the way the title is phrased—and I won’t get into the languages of it— but it really does suggest it’s sort of the gospel about Judas, not by him. And it doesn’t claim to be written by him or anything, it’s just about Judas, but I think it really is more about the other disciples.

Shirley Paulson

Right, okay then, so if it’s really about the other disciples, maybe you should give us a broad overview of what’s going on in this gospel that has Judas in there somehow.

Lance Jenott

Yeah, so it’s said about a week before the crucifixion, that’s where it starts. And I think it’s really about the other disciples. It’s a criticism of the other disciples. It makes them out to be unfaithful. They don’t understand who Jesus really is. They don’t understand his divine figure. And Judas is the only one who actually does know who Jesus is, that he’s the representative of this more supreme God.

I might have to back up a little bit here. This is sort of one what people call one of the “gnostic” gospels, or I call them “dualistic Christianity.”

So the whole theological framework of this text is that there’s the creator God, true to the Book of Genesis, but the creator God is not the supreme God in the universe. There’s a more transcendent supreme deity, and that’s the God that actually sent Jesus into our world to save us from the creator of God who’s depicted as sort of nasty and malicious and wrathful.

So this is the whole view taken up by the Gospel of Judas, and it says that Jesus’s disciples didn’t understand who Jesus was. They thought that the supreme God was the creator God, but they were wrong. They didn’t understand that Jesus was sent by the more supreme deity. It’s just caused by the invisible spirit. But Judas, it says, was the only person who actually knew this, that he had some kind of extra insight into spiritual reality, which again is part of the complexity of the text, right? Judas does know more than the others, yet he still betrays Jesus and he is called a demonic figure, but it’s part of this larger divine plan.

And I think Judas—it’s really about Judas because the point of the gospel is to say the other disciples—if Judas is bad, they’re even worse than he was, and we’ll get into that more so. So I think Judas is there to be a kind of foil or contrast to the others, really put them down.

Shirley Paulson

And in the Bible, the male disciples are often depicted as not getting it anyway. Is that the same true picture here?

Lance Jenott

 Yeah, so that’s really interesting actually. So the more I read the Gospel of Judas and think about it, I’m actually reading it more along the lines of Mark’s gospel. So people who have read Mark really carefully have noticed that Mark in particular gives a very unflattering portrayal of Jesus’ disciples. They’re constantly misunderstanding Jesus. They don’t understand his teaching, they claim that they’ll never betray him, and then they do. And then if you read the short ending of Mark, they’ve all kind of run off, and they never meet Jesus in the resurrection. So Mark’s depiction: pretty lousy of the disciples. I think the Gospel of Judas actually knows this. And again, it’s set in that week right before the crucifixion, and I think it’s actually picking up on Mark’s critical portrayal of them when they’re on their way to Jerusalem from Galilee.

The disciples are arguing with each other who’s going to be the greatest in the kingdom, and then they get angry. It says they get angry at each other and are rebuking each other. And I think this is actually where the Gospel of Judas begins—that this is who Jesus’s disciples were. Then it puts it in this dualistic theological frame and says not only that, but they didn’t even know who the real God of the universe was. They didn’t even know who Jesus’s divine father was. They thought he was sent by the creator God, but he’s actually sent from this much higher spiritual world, and only Judas knew that. And Judas carried out the mystery of the betrayal, so to speak, to fulfill this divine plan.

Shirley Paulson

 So it’s kind of odd, I guess, that you’re telling us that Judas understood the plan, but he went along with the betrayal.

Lance Jenott

 But Judas isn’t happy with the plan, but this is all in the New Testament. It’s suggested that this is all according to scripture or Judas’s role is there to fulfill prophecy, but it’s never really explored. But in the Gospel of Judas, there are whole conversations where Jesus takes Judas aside and says, “This is your fate,” and even alludes to that story in Acts where Judas’s place is taken over by Matthias, where they cast lots and so forth. So the Gospel of Judas refers to that. And so Jesus tells Judas, “Your fate is to be separated from the other disciples. You are going to betray me.”

So of course, Judas isn’t happy about it. At one point, he even says, “Well, what do I get out of this?”

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, so… I’m sorry to interrupt you. You had said that there were two  scenes in the Gospel that really specifically make them look bad. Can you distinguish those two stories for us?

Lance Jenott

Yeah, so the first one, Jesus finds his disciples before the crucifixion, and they’re worshiping, essentially. And the word it uses is eukharistia, so it’s really a eucharist… it’s an allusion to the Eucharist ritual in the early church. The Gospel of Judas was written probably in the middle of the second century, so nobody would have missed that reference. But it depicts the disciples, a week before the crucifixion, gathering together and holding a kind of Thanksgiving worship—Eucharist—and Jesus chastises them, saying, ”You don’t know who I am, none of you know who I am. You think that I’m the son of the Creator. And I’m not.” I’m paraphrasing a little bit, but…

And then Judas says, “Well, I know who you are, you’re sent from the higher spiritual realm.” and so forth.

Then Jesus challenges his disciples. He says, “If any of you can show me spiritual perfection, stand up in front of my face and do it.” And they all say, “yeah, well, we can do that, we’re strong enough.” and then it just says, but none of them could. They actually all failed to do it. So it depicts them as really… they don’t understand Jesus’ identity, nor do they have the kind of spiritual qualities that they should.

Then, this whole depiction of them gets amplified in another scene, where they come to Jesus, and they say, “We had this dream last night, and we saw a bunch of priests at a temple, and an altar, and there was a crowd bringing sacrificial animals, and there were twelve priests.” That’s important. “The twelve priests received the animals, and they sacrifice them on the altar, and they continued in devotion.

And Jesus says, “Well, what are these priests like? And then they said, “Well, they’re really horrible, sinful people, they’re committing murder, and sacrificing their own children, and their wives. And committing all kinds of sin” and so forth.

And then Jesus says, “Well, this is you. You’re the 12 priests that you saw. And the animals and the vision that you saw being brought to the temple and sacrificed are the crowd, the multitude that you’re leading astray.” And then after that, he even launches into kind of a prophecy about the text that is unfortunately a bit broken, but it seems clear he’s saying that people will come after you—sort of your successors—and they will continue to commit all these sins in the church. And all of this is in the service of the wrong god. So it’s a criticism that the disciples are worshipping a false god. And also that they’re thoroughly immoral.

Shirley Paulson

Oh, boy, so this is a very sad story. I mean, a really sad story, so… With all this criticism going on, what in the world is this author after? Is he just… does he… not like them? What’s it about? Why is he doing this?

Lance Jenott

Yeah, so to me, and I’m not the only one who’s seen this, but, I and other historians of the church, early on saw…well, we think this is actually a criticism of the doctrine of apostolic succession. So we know from church fathers, the whole idea of apostolic succession is that Jesus transferred his authority to the disciples, and then they went out and preached to the world, and founded the churches, and then before they died, they picked their successors. And that becomes the Episcopacy and the bishops, and the bishops chose their successors, and so on and so forth. So I think what the Gospel of Judas is doing is actually criticizing the doctrine of apostolic succession. Saying that, really, at the root of this, the disciples themselves were confused. They were worshipping the wrong god, and in fact, they were really immoral people.

And so the whole succession that the orthodox church started to claim is faulty. I think that’s the sub-message.

Shirley Paulson

Wow, that’s a pretty strong way to do it. Yeah, so you mentioned this Eucharistic idea which seems to be a key issue here. I’m not sure everybody really knows what the ceremony of the Eucharist is about, or where it came from, or when it has started happening. Could you give us a brief introduction to that. And then why this author would be so worked up about it.

Lance Jenott

Yeah, I mean, of course, it goes back to the institution of the Lord’s Supper. In the Gospels, the way Paul talks about it in 1 Corinthians, it seems a little more egalitarian. I mean, he only criticizes the Corinthians in Chapter 11, for sort of wealthy people going on with the meal, and leaving poor people out. It seemed to have been a little bit more egalitarian early on. So, like I said, the Gospel of Judas, I think, was written around the middle of the 2nd century, at a time when the clergy was emerging as a fairly new institution. The clergy with bishops, then priests, and deacons—the three-part clergy. We see that coming around the beginning of the second century, in the letters of Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, for example. And I think the Gospel of Judas is responding to the development of the clerical office.

Shirley Paulson

So how is this related to the Eucharist?

Lance Jenott

Well, historians of the early church say one of the ways that the bishops and the priests, the clerics solidified their authority was to tell people, you can’t meet and have communion without the bishop present. Ignatius even has this great line that he tells the Smyrnaeans. He says, “The congregation is where the bishop is.” And he even says people are meeting without the bishop, and he says that’s invalid. Those are invalid church meetings.

So you cannot have communion without the bishop or his representative presiding over it. And I think that’s why the Gospel of Judas starts with that scene where Jesus finds the disciples having a eucharistia, a communion Thanksgiving, and then Jesus just says, “You don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know who I am, and you don’t even know what God you’re worshiping. It’s all false.

Shirley Paulson

Wow, so, okay, so you’re taking us into the early thinking about which way the church is going to go. Like, there wasn’t any Nicaea yet, so we have just people disagreeing over those things. So at least it feels like it’s leading to the question of just simply “authority for clergy.”

Does the Gospel of Judas give us any insight on that? Like, just what it should be?

Lance Jenott

No, it doesn’t, really. So, it clearly attacks the memory of the twelve disciples as being people who worship the Creator God and have that legacy. But it doesn’t really give us a clear alternative, because it’s all a story set back, you know, in the week leading up to the crucifixion. So it doesn’t really give us a clear idea of whoever wrote it—some Christian sectarian in the 2nd century, maybe.

It doesn’t give us a clear idea of what he or she thought things should look like. Although I can speculate a little bit, if you want me to.

Shirley Paulson

I think that would be helpful, too.

Lance Jenott

We do know from some of the church fathers, like Irenaeus, and particularly Tertullian, writing around 200. Tertullian, he wrote this book called The Prescription Against Heretics. And he says there… he doesn’t say which heretics in particular, so maybe it’s kind of generic, but he complains that these people don’t take the hierarchy of the clergy seriously, and that they share. One week, he says the laity does the job of the bishop; one week, this guy’s the bishop, and then next time he’s the laity; and they just take turns doing these positions having these Eucharist meetings, and even a hundred years before that. Like I said in the Letters of Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, he’s complaining about Christians meeting, and he says they’re invalid meetings, they don’t have the bishop, but clearly, they’re meeting.

And he says they’re even taking Eucharist and having communion— with no clergy present! So I think, actually, people were just continuing what they did in the early Pauline churches, where the community would gather. And they didn’t need an official clerical person to preside over it. And I think the Gospel of Judas, whoever wrote it, is angry that the new positions of the clergy are coming in and saying, you can’t have service unless I’m present. And I received this truth and this office, in a descent of succession from Jesus’ disciples, the apostles. And so it goes after them.

He wants to sort of… it’s like a political smear campaign. A hack ad, if you will. They were bad, and they didn’t understand Jesus from the beginning.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, well that actually sheds light on whether there’s a speculation or not, but I think it helps us to think about the fact that there was a struggle over authority going on, and they didn’t have anybody telling them what it’s supposed to be or what it’s supposed to do. So, some people want authority like that, and some people don’t.

Lance Jenott

Yep.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, so I’m curious about the part of the story where the disciples who have been severely chastised. Do they actually express remorse?

Lance Jenott

Yeah.

Shirley Paulson

And then they ask Jesus to cleanse them from all their evil ways? Do they actually get forgiven, or are they… forever seen as bad people who got in the way of Jesus’ mission?

Lance Jenott

So they’re not explicitly forgiven. It’s a very ambiguous sort of ending. So in the final scene in which the disciples appear, they actually do express remorse, which is really startling, and I need to back up on this.

The Gospel of Judas is in a very broken manuscript. And early on, different parts of it were separated. So when this was initially published in 2006 and 2007, we actually didn’t have the fragments where the disciples ask for forgiveness, and say… (I’m paraphrasing again), but they kind of tell Jesus, “We get it now, you know, help us and save us from this error that we’ve committed and this sin.”

Scholars didn’t have access to those fragments until about 2010. And so in a lot of the initial work, we saw the depiction of the disciples as really negative, And even my early book, which was published in 2011, I have the fragments by that time, but I hadn’t had time to really think through them yet.

So one thing I’m working on now is, what really happens in this final scene? Are the disciples really as negative and sort of cut out of salvation as we all initially thought, because they do actually say, well, help us, Jesus, we get it now, you know, we accept that we’ve done wrong, help us and save us, they say.

Jesus’ answer to them is really ambiguous. I gave it in the reading that I distributed. He basically tells them, “Well, I didn’t come for everybody. I came only for this one particular holy race.”

And he says, you know, when the apocalypse happens and the stars move and so forth, that race will be the one that doesn’t get shaken and moved. And he suggests that the disciples are still kind of under the powers of fate, under these asteroids. There’s a lot of astrology in the Gospel of Judas, you know, it’s an ancient book – it thinks in terms of ancient astrology.

But the striking thing to me is Jesus doesn’t explicitly damn them. And that’s really striking to me that the author would actually have them say, “Help us and save us,”—not just once, but twice. And then Jesus kind of says, “Well, I didn’t come to save everybody, I just came for the holy race.”

So here’s what I’ve been thinking. If the author really wanted to just say the disciples and their fate—there was no redemption for them at all, why would he or she (I don’t know who wrote it) why would the author have them say, Ooh, well, we get it now,” right? “Help us and save us!” Why would he have them repent? And so what I’m playing with is the idea that it’s actually leaving open the fate of the disciples. Maybe that they could be rehabilitated later.

Not in the Gospel of Judas—a story—but in a sort of Christian memory. And some of you might be familiar with the book that Shirley has worked on a lot, the so-called Secret Book of John. And this is exactly the story. The Secret Book of John is set after the crucifixion and the resurrection, and Jesus appears to at least one of his disciples, John the son of Zebedee, and sort of teaches him the truth from that author’s perspective.

And so what I think the Gospel of Judas might be doing is leaving the door open, saying, okay, even before the crucifixion, they listened to Jesus and they accepted his correction. And they said, “We get it, please help us and save us.” And then they just kind of disappear from the story. It doesn’t really say what happens with them.

But maybe the Gospel of Judas is leaving the door open to say, Jesus then could have appeared after the resurrection to disciples like John the son of Zebedee, and revealed the full truth.

And so then what we’re actually talking about isn’t discrediting the disciples themselves. But it’s discrediting the orthodox church’s memory of who they were. That they went out and they taught this sort of rule of faith. And that they were the foundations of this apostolic succession. I don’t know if that completely made sense, but I think it’s actually, like, a debate over, how do we remember the disciples? Who were they? What did they actually teach, and what did they transmit to later generations of Christians.

Shirley Paulson

That’s really helpful, because I think that it’s hard to know what to think about them when we’ve inherited the saints, who are statues on cathedrals, who look down upon us as if they are the very Word of God, and that’s all we know about them. So I think it’s… helpful to, to see them, really, in an important role—people who are learning.

And then how do humans learn things that are divine, and what happens if you don’t get it right? I think those are interesting questions alone. Let alone what the church is going to do about it. So these are great questions you’re raising for us.

I wonder if you could go back a little bit, and you were talking about the holy race. What do you mean by the holy race? What is that about?

Lance Jenott

Whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas, I think of them as a sort of ancient sectarian. They have a very sectarian vision of the world.

The author divides everybody in the world into, sort of, the human races (plural) and the holy race. We have other books from this sect. We typically call them the Sethians. Some people call them Gnostics. They seem to imagine that Adam and Eve’s son, Seth, is kind of their spiritual ancestor, and they speak in their books about the holy race of Seth.

I think this is symbolic language, because in the Bible, Seth is like a moment of renewal for humanity, right? After the tragedy of Cain and Abel, you have Seth, a sort of a renewal. And I think that meant a lot to these people that wrote these so-called Sethian books, and we don’t know a lot about them, because we only have their kind of mythological writings. We don’t know…we don’t have stories about who they were in the second century, and so forth.

But the author of the Gospel Judas is one of them. He really thinks in terms of us versus them—that there’s this one holy race of people, the spiritual descendants of Seth. That’s the saved group, and everybody else is the damned.

Not that there’s no hope for them. Some modern interpreters think this is a very elitist kind of religious movement that you somehow have to be born into. I don’t think that’s the case. I think the author probably did allow for people to join the holy race.

What’s even the point of having a religious community if you’re not going to be open to converts, right?

But in mythological language, it’s put in these very fixed terms of race, you know.

Shirley Paulson

So, in the Secret Book of John (or Secret Revelation of John) that we’ve talked about, there are the people who repent—who get to also join the holy race. Yeah. So they have a chance.

Lance Jenott

Yeah, and exactly. When I think through Judas, I don’t try to interpret everything in Judas based on other texts. But sometimes you do have to turn to other sectarian literature from the Sethians and say, well, they do have this concept of repentance, spiritual progress and so forth. So I think even though the author speaks in what we might consider biologically fixed terms of race, In reality, the author’s probably very open to people converting to the holy race.

And I think, actually, that might be what Jesus is suggesting to the disciples. Because Jesus, when they asked for salvation and forgiveness, he said, “Well, I wasn’t sent to the human races, I was sent only for the holy race.” And that might sound kind of elitist or exclusive? But actually, I read that in terms of Matthew’s Gospel. Remember Matthew’s Gospel, the Phoenician woman asked Jesus to heal her child. And he says, “I’m not sent for you Gentiles. I was sent only to the house of Israel.”  And I think the Gospel of Judas is actually playing with that concept out of the Gospel of Matthew that the Messiah, himself, was only sent for the one holy race, sort of the insiders.

But Matthew has more than that. It says that the Messiah is sent for the holy race, but then Jesus’s disciples are sent to save the rest of the world, and I think the Gospel of Judas has the same scheme. Jesus Messiah comes for the holy race, but then it’s up to the holy race to go out and make converts of the rest of the world.

And so maybe Jesus is telling his disciples, “Don’t look for me. I’m about to be killed and go back to heaven. You need to turn to the holy race. That’s where you find salvation.”

Shirley Paulson

Wow. What I really appreciate about this, Lance, is that, by thinking through these different issues, it helps us kind of read the Bible in a bigger way. Because you’re bringing us back to Mark, and with Matthew. I just really appreciate the way you’re helping us to see why all these texts are important for our bigger picture of what was going on. I’ve got one more question before we turn it over.

What is your takeaway from your study of this gospel? You’ve been deep in the weeds with it. Do you like its message, or how do you feel about it?

Lance Jenott

Yeah, I mean, that’s a really complicated question. It’s sort of funny becauseI consider myself a historian of religion, less a theologian. I wouldn’t say I really like its sort of dualistic theology. I think that’s a… it’s a very ancient version of Christianity. We don’t really have any more, in the modern world, where the sort of the Creator God is malicious, and the supreme God is…. So, I don’t really like that part of it.

David Brakke wrote a really excellent commentary on the Gospel of Judas, and he also kind of concluded that really, it doesn’t have that much theological value for the modern church except maybe beyond challenging us to think about what gods we worship. And I think that’s important. But I would only add to that I think it’s also an important voice from the early church:  calling into question these hierarchical leaderships. And this sort of rigid hierarchy. And I think it has value, even if we don’t agree with its theology. I think people can find value in it with controversies over clerical leadership, and these really hierarchical structures of authority have always been there in the Christian religion. That’s not modern; that didn’t start just with the Protestant Reformation and so forth. So I think there is still value in that.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, that’s a really an interesting take on this, because I think we’re learning to find value in something even if we don’t totally follow it, as when we’re accustomed to taking the Bible and finding its inspired word—what’s the value of these other texts?

For me, what I’m hearing from you is that there’s value in thinking about this to understand the bigger picture of what was really going on there that helps us get a view of what’s happening there. Anyway, I’m interested in your questions, your thoughts in just a moment here. It’s just about time for everyone else to jump in here.

And you (participants) can start to get your questions ready while I pause for just a moment to remind everyone that your participation as a Bible and Beyond Patreon subscriber is a win-win for you and for our Bible and Beyond production team. We clearly rely on your support to make events like this happen. And we want to make it a special experience for you, too. When you become a monthly paying subscriber on Patreon, you’re entitled to a variety of special gifts, and you’re part of an important community.

Let’s turn it over here. Pat, you’re all ready to go. Your hand’s up, go ahead.

Pat

Yeah. I was curious, is there evidence that this gospel was regarded as a central book for a particular community? I mean, and did it come from some geographical region of Christianity at the time?

Lance Jenott

You know, these are all really difficult questions. It’s so hard to know where… I’ll take the second question first. Where this could have been written. So it’s only preserved in Coptic Egyptian. But that’s just a translation that happened to be preserved in Egypt. It almost certainly was written in Greek. Which means it could have been written really anywhere in the Roman Empire, right? As Christians traveled and spread. Like, even Bishop Irenaeus wrote in Greek, but he was writing in Western Roman Empire in France, in Gaul. It could have been, I mean, maybe Rome, or maybe Asia Minor where we first start to see this sort of mono-episcopacy, and the sort of claims of the clergy emerge. But really, that could have been anywhere. Was it seen as kind of an authoritative book for a religious community? Well, the funny thing is, it knows the canonical gospels, and probably the book of Acts.

It knows the story, and it wants to set its story within the general framework of those, so it at least takes the canonical gospels seriously. Whether it was read as kind of an alternative canon or an alternative Bible, probably not. I think it’s more about taking familiar characters from the Christian tradition and getting out its own message using those characters. “Let me tell you sort of a news story about what happened before the crucifixion.” “How Jesus’ disciples really didn’t understand who he was,” and that “Judas actually knew better than they did,” and so forth.

Shirley Paulson

That’s very interesting. Thank you, Lance. Okay, we have Zuzu and Tony, and I don’t know which one of you wants to talk, but go ahead.

Zuzu Freyer

Yes my question is about—I am going to mispronounce it—Barbelo? I’m just only learning about those characters only recently, and I don’t know much, and I was wondering if  that was part of just these sectarian writings, or did it have a life apart from them?

Lance Jenott

Yeah, so, just for members of the audience who aren’t familiar with the figure, “Barbelo,” we usually say.  Barbelo is a unique mythological figure. She’s actually kind of a goddess figure in these sectarian books. So, what I mean by these sectarian books is what scholars typically call the “Sethian” sect. And older scholarship called “Gnostics.” Some scholars still call it that. One of the unique features of Sethian theology is a Barbelo figure, feminine, called a mother figure. She’s in the Secret Book of John—which is a more detailed theology of this group—she’s represented as the divine image of the invisible God, itself. So the concept is that there is an invisible God—that’s the supreme deity—but it’s invisible, right? You can’t see it.

So the Barbelo is the first visible manifestation of this God, in the universe. And then you have a sort of Father and a Mother figure, and then they, through their union, give birth to a child, and that child is the divine, anointed One, Christos, a heavenly Christ figure. So then you actually have a kind of Sethian trinity, if you will, with a Father, a Mother, and a Child.

So the Barbelo is a unique feature to Sethian mythology. She doesn’t really come up in other books—Jewish or other Christian sectarian books. Is that more or less what you were asking about?

Zuzu Freyer

Yes, and what was her part in the Gospel of Judas?

Lance Jenott

So, she’s mentioned once in the Gospel of Judas, but doesn’t actually play a big role there. She plays a much bigger role in the Secret Book of John. She is mentioned one time in the Gospel of Judas, that’s part of how we identify Judas as a kind of sectarian book. When Judas says to Jesus, “I know who you are and where you’ve come from. You’ve come from the immortal place or realm, eon, of Barbelo. And so clearly, it knows Barbelo. The only thing Barbelo…the only role Barbelo plays in Judas’ story is that that’s the name of the heavenly place that Jesus has come to Earth from.

Zuzu Freyer

Okay, thank you.

Shirley Paulson

Another helpful question. Thank you so much, Zuzu. Okay, Maureen.

Maureen Blake

Well, once again, we have a teacher who’s opening my mind at least. I have a question, but just asking, am I hearing this correctly? I try to see connections. I hadn’t heard of Creator God before, but wondering if that is a search for an explanation of “Well, how is there bad, or where does evil come from?” “Well, there’s a… Creator God for that.” Well, and then I’m thinking about  Nicodemus… and his time with Jesus, and a lot of the translations say, “You must be born again,” but the one I love is, “You must be born from above.”

Which always means you have to pick: You’re not of this… You’re not, by the Creator God, you are of the higher realm. But I’m also wondering, too, it feels like what is happening in the Gospel of Judas is that it’s kind of like an everyman story.

That it meets me where I am, that if I can be a clumsy, bumbling disciple as well, and still be heading toward, you know… and the other thing is, when you talked about the hierarchy starting. There’s that sense of the early days, after Jesus was on earth, we’ve been learning that there’s this great freedom, and everybody’s learning and sharing with each other. And maybe the group gets really big. And somebody starts to think, well, we gotta have a leader, but it’s gonna be me.

I mean, were they all self-appointed? And they begin to say, “You can’t get to God except going through me!”

Lance Jenott

Yeah, and that is kind of what they did with the communion ceremony is, the priests mediate between the laity and God, right?

Maureen Blake

Exactly, and the sense of… the people just yearning to know the answer to things. But some of their people are saying, “you gotta go through us.” And it starts to become squished and elitist, or what have you.

Lance Jenott

It’s good, I mean, I want to play a little devil’s advocate, too. I’m not here to bash the Catholic tradition and the priesthood and stuff. I think we can all sympathize with religious communities that need a little bit of leadership, and so forth. I think part of the message of the Gospel of Judas is also about morality, because it really paints the disciples, at least pre-Easter, as being very immoral. And they don’t even know it, right? They’re worshipping their own god, they’re terrible. I don’t fault any religious community for saying, “Yeah, we need some standards, and we need some leadership roles.”

But I think at the same time, the criticism here is of the really rigid hierarchy that emerged. That’s exactly what you said, using the first communion ceremony where it’s sort of like, you can’t access God without the priest. And I think whoever wrote the guide for Judas was really angry about that.

Maureen Blake

Well, yeah. I can see how… As the group begins to get larger and larger, you need leaders and some sub-leaders. But to me, if those leaders just say, “Okay. Here’s how you get to God.” But this sounds like you’re saying, I now stand between you and God. You know, that’s a whole different kind of leadership work where begins to be exclusive rather than inclusive.

So am I reading this right about? I said so many things. It’s very heartening to me to hear about how there’s room for me—any of us—to come from a misbelief, or disbelief, to a wider understanding.

Lance Jenott

That’s a great way to think about the role of the disciples in this story. Because there is a little bit of redemption for them, right? The author puts in their mouth, like, well, we understand now, help us and save us, and…

I hadn’t even thought about how you could read that, how any reader might just look at that and say, “Well, actually, in some sense, the disciples are role models”.

They had the wrong idea, and they actually were redeemed, you know? I wish it told us more about what the author thought their fate would be.

Maureen Blake

But maybe that’s for each of us to be free to not try to be like them. But to be our own true self with God.

Lance Jenott

And again, when I put this in the second century, I’m imagining the author wrote that and left their fate a little bit ambiguous, so that they could say, “Well, the disciples eventually were rehabilitated, maybe by post-resurrection revelation,” as they are in Luke and in Matthew actually. I mean, that’s actually not a non-canonical story. What the content of the revelation is, it may be different, but I think what it’s doing is actually competing with the orthodox church’s memory of the disciples in saying they were righteous people, God and Jesus chose them to be the foundations of the church, and they transmitted this one particular creedal truth, and then set up this hierarchical clerical authority. I think the author wants to say, “If that’s the way you remember the disciples, that’s wrong.”

Maureen Blake

Because it’s not what Jesus did.

Lance Jenott

You can’t remember them if you read the Gospel of Judas saying, “Okay, we accept it. We’ve been worshipping the wrong god all along.” And then, you know, the Gospel of Judas just kind of leaves their fate undetermined. But other Sethian books—like the one that Shirley studied, the Secret Book of John—I mean, that goes all the way and says, “Then he did appear to John the Son of somebody after the resurrection,” and reveal the kind of gospel of the Sethians. And then the disciples, or at least John, is rehabilitated then, and can kind of be accepted as an authority figure in the Sethian group.

Maureen Blake

One last comment, having been raised in the tradition to think that the 11 disciples were great, and Judas was the one bad guy over there. Now this feels like it’s opening a door on the Judas figure. And I realize there’s a whole bunch of more people there that wouldn’t, at the time, become disciples, but could later. I mean, it takes him from being just this black mark on what… on the discipleship, to saying. “Well, kind of… I’ve got something to teach you.” There’s room for everybody, in essence.

Lance Jenott

Yeah. Again, I don’t… I don’t think it really makes Judas out to be a good guy as some early interpreters thought. But I think it really does explore the idea that it wasn just kind of out of greed that he did this. He did this because he was fated to do it, so it makes it a little bit more ambiguous. And maybe was even possessed demonically to do it, but it was all part of this greater divine plan that led to the crucifixion, which, in turn leads to human betrayal, the so-called mystery of the betrayal.

Shirley Paulson

Thank you, Maureen. Nice series of questions there. I want to just make a comment about how—picking up on John there—how in the beginning of the Secret Revelation of John, John is not the one who knows everything. He’s distressed right like where Judas leaves off with him, so that’s kind of an interesting connection.

Tina, go ahead, you’ve been waiting there. Go ahead.

Tina Owen

Well, I was thinking that when they talk about the Creator God. Yaldabaoth is an example of the Creator God. Is that?

Lance Jenott

Yeah, yes.

Tina Owen

Okay? And then… when I read the Gospel of Judas, I thought Judas asked Jesus, “What about my children? Or my offspring?” Yeah, I don’t hear an answer to it.

Lance Jenott

Part of that is the text. I mean, this is kind of a boring answer, but the text is so broken, there’s so many holes in it. A lot of the sentences are incomplete, and it’s just unclear so many times what the answer is. But there is a passage where Jesus is explaining to Judas, after he betrays Jesus, his fate is actually to become—he’ll actually take over the position of the Creator God. I mean, now we’re getting kind of into this mythological eschatology. Judas is going to—his fate is to be elevated to the position of the Creator God in the cosmos.

And it caused the Creator God, Yaldabaoth. But, and in its imagination, this is the God of Genesis, and so forth. And then Judas is confused, and he does ask, “how is it that my ‘sperma’—I think he uses the Greek word for offspring—how could my offspring possibly dominate over the kind of cosmic rulers of the universe?”

And then Jesus kind of just launches into more about Judas’s fate. And he doesn’t give them a clear answer about all that, but the only thing I can… I mean, it is clear enough that this book imagines, and I think it’s all part of the polemic and the criticism that Judas actually fated after the betrayal. And his suicide, which is assumed from the gospels that he’s going to take the position of the Creator, God, in the universe.

But the real meaning of that is that it’s part of the subtle criticism of the orthodox church. It’s saying, well, the God you’re worshiping is actually Judas Iscariot, himself.

I mean, it’s a really kind of in-your-face statement.

Shirley Paulson

Definitely. But then again, Irenaeus was kind of in your face too, wasn’t he?

Lance Jenott

Well, yeah, very much. I mean, he wrote a catalog of heretics and condemned them as the servants of Satan. That’s pretty in-your-face, too. They criticize each other in different ways, right?

Shirley Paulson

Well, that’s why I bring it up, is that I think that we are experiencing some pretty strong language.

And some pretty strong anger about things, but… I think that’s what was going on. I mean, they spoke to each other that way through their literary contributions.

Lance Jenott

Yeah, and some people, you know, there’s different literary genres, so a bishop like Irenaeus chose the more, I’m just gonna write a catalog of heresies. And I’ll describe, I’ll kind of summarize what the heresy is, and other people, like the author of the Gospel of Judas, wrote a gospel genre. I’m going to take familiar characters from the Bible and tell a new story with them with all these polemical undertones, right?

The church is actually worshiping Judas Iscariot, who’s sort of become their god. The disciples actually didn’t know as much as Judas Iscariot did. They’re actually worse than he is.

But, I mean, ultimately, it’s also just a theological controversy over who the true God of the universe is. Fundamentally, that’s the controversy, and it’s not a really complicated one. This isn’t about the Trinity or anything really ambiguous, it’s an early 2nd century controversy over who is the true God, and these sectarians who wrote books like the Gospel of Judas and the Secret Book of John.

They really believed that the Creator God of Genesis was a malicious, kind of satanic figure. And I… how did they get to that idea? Well, I think they read the Old Testament, and they read it literally. They looked at the flood, and the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the wrath, and they said, we take this seriously. We can’t just explain this away allegorically the way our orthodox brothers and sisters do. So if you take the stories about the wrath of God in the Old Testament seriously, that’s how you arrive at the idea that this must be this Creator God who must be a malicious figure.

There’s actually a God of goodness and love that Jesus announced in the gospels, and that has to be a different God. That’s the God that sent Jesus into our world to save us from the God of wrath, right? That’s the fundamental theological controversy that’s going on in the second century.

Shirley Paulson

Well, that’s why I appreciate this kind of conversation, and the study of a book like this, because I think it does help us understand the issues they were thinking about, and why they lead into what we have inherited, why we have what we have.

Lance Jenott

Yeah.

Shirley Paulson

I want to go back to another topic, unless someone else has a hand up. Oh yeah, Peggy, go ahead.

Peggy Williams

Yes, I want to be sure that Karen Hagan got a satisfactory answer in the chat box. I appreciate that people stepped up and answered.

Karen Hagen

Actually, the last thing that was just shared… it’s very helpful. I’ve been struggling with “Why would someone—I’ll just use the word ‘devise’ as two strata—God. And that last answer was really helpful for my understanding. Previously,I couldn’t remember another gospel that did that, and Katie was kind enough to help me connect some dots.

Lance Jenott

That’s, in a general way, the heresy that scholars,for centuries, have called the Gnostics, right?—that the God of creation is a lower god, at least, often depicted as very malicious and wrathful.

And then there’s another god, more supreme, and that’s the God that sent Jesus to the world to save us from the wrath, and so forth. That’s kind of the traditional so-called “Gnostic theology.”

Many scholars today are trying to get away from this Gnostic business, because it’s full of cliches and…confusing. I talk about them as sort of the Sethian…I try to use the language they used of themselves, where you have the spiritual children of Seph.

I think it’s a symbolic, a renewal for humanity. I think that’s why they like Seth.

Shirley Paulson

So, two questions I think might help us… oh, Katie, do I see a hand up?

Katie Brown

I’m just trying to keep it clear in my thought. So they kind of had two gods. And this contest between which one is real, which one that Jesus came from the all-good God, and then there was the more Genesis-God, which was the god of, like, good and evil, is that right?

Lance Jenott

Exactly, right.

Katie Brown

And that’s with the contest that was going on. And that was in this book.

Lance Jenott

Yeah, I think the book is sort of the outpouring of that… I mean, it’s it’s an outcome of that contest. Somebody who had that theological view wrote the Gospel of Judas to criticize the orthodox Christians who were worshiping the Creator. And to criticize any memory of the Apostles—that they were faithful to the Creator God and transmitted that gospel, right? That’s sort of the orthodox view of things.

Katie Brown

When you say the Orthodox view, what exactly do you mean by the Orthodox view?

Lance Jenott

Okay. That the God that sent Jesus into the world is the Creator God of Genesis. And then, more or less, the creed that Jesus was born of the Virgin, he died, was resurrected, will come back for Judgment Day. And so forth. That’s what the early bishops, like Irenaeus, called the Rule of Truth, or the Rule of faith. And they claim that that was transmitted from the apostles through all the bishops down to them. And that’s the authoritative core of doctrine that defines Christian truth.

And so, whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas says, I don’t believe in any of that. And even before the crucifixion, the disciples were already worshiping the wrong god. They didn’t even know that Jesus came from the more transcendent God. They had it all wrong, right. So that’s the criticism in the Gospel of Judas.

Katie Brown

That is very helpful, thank you.

Lance Jenott

Okay, yeah. I know it’s hard, this whole sort of dualistic thing, until you get your mind wrapped around it, and then there’s all these questions about who and how would they even come up with that, and…

Scholars have debated that for a long time, you know, some people have theories that failed Jewish apocalyptic hopes led some marginal Jewish groups to sort of demonize their own god.

I don’t see it that way. I think it was probably as more and more Gentiles join the church in the second century, they brought philosophical ideas about God as pure goodness, God as pure love.

They brought that in to the church with them, then they read the Old Testament and said, well, if you take these stories seriously, the greater God can’t be that god.

So, there has to be two different Gods at work here. And really, they don’t even consider the Creator God the…  They wrote these mythological stories to explain that the Creator God says he’s a God, but he’s not. He’s actually just a fallen angel, essentially. And the different stories put it differently, but that’s how they explain where the Creator God came from. He’s a fallen angel.

Lance Jenott

I really appreciate your explaining all these things, because we’ve had so many little bits and pieces of stories that you’re helping us to put it all into one picture that we can digest a bit, so thank you for that.

Honor, go ahead, your turn.

Honor Haase

Okay. First of all, I find myself asking, “What good is knowing about this Gospel of Judas to us.

I think it probably is what I’ve been learning from Shirley’s discussions like this, is that what we know for sure is that Jesus was extraordinary. And most people didn’t understand him.

And for a while, I thought, well, it was just for several centuries that people were working to understand it. Well, it’s more like 20 centuries they’re working to understand it, because we’re still working on it. And so this particular piece of literature— what did you just say? It was, like, year 150 or something is, indicating that someone was wrestling with that same question.

And maybe…I don’t know what it was supposed to do for people at that time…but for me, maybe it is “Don’t rely on human personalities to understand Jesus—because they’re most likely to be wrong.

Lance Jenott

Yeah.

Honor Haase

And then you would be joining the group of humanity that was responsible for the crucifixion, because it was that lack of understanding, which was responsible for Jesus’s trial in that way.

And then, one thing that you said earlier was, you referred to Jesus, in this gospel, talking to Judas and saying, “Well, you’re going to do this, and this is… this is your function, and…too bad for you, or something like that.

Lance Jenott

Right, that’s essentially it.

Honor Hasse

And, what came to me at that point was that perhaps…it was a perception of this author that he felt Jesus knew this, but it was the author’s perception that a lack of understanding of the Christ—which Jesus represented—would not be a good mark on humanity’s chart, and so Judas is really just a personification of that.

Almost like Abraham arguing with God about if there are only 20 people, or 15 people, or 12 and a half people in Sodom, would you save it?

Does that sound reasonable?

Lance Jenott

Yeah, I think so. I really like what you opened with. It made me think just the way you… the way you put it, that it just goes to show how complex of a figure Jesus is.

And then how this isn’t just people arguing over who Jesus is now, but have been right from the beginning, and that’s always been part of Christianity. And I guess as a historian of religion, that’s why I study these books, because I want to see all the different responses to who Jesus was over the centuries.

It makes Christianity a much richer tradition, even if I disagree with whatever theology or mythology they come up with, it’s useful for me to see all the different ways people imagine Jesus over the years.

And I guess, fundamentally, it’s just a reminder that any one claim to truth has always had competitors.

Shirley Paulson

Thank you. Yeah, very interesting. Before we go, Peggy, you get your last say.

Peggy Williams

I know we’re close to time. You might want to look at the chat. Philip Garvers has got a very interesting remark in chat.

And just want to remind you, there’s a couple of links, too. Lance Jenottt’s books. And there’s also links to support this organization.

So, I know you need to do your wrap-up, Shirley, but I wanted to mention that those are there.

Shirley Paulson

Can you just quickly, since I don’t see it right away, can you quickly bring us to Philip’s point and tell it to us?

Peggy Wiliams

Well, Philip is talking about: Isn’t this budding community a great example, of disparate beliefs that is still trying to define itself and with some communities beginning to be marginalized even within this early Christianity? And he goes on and makes a good argument about this and explains what he’s talking about. And there’s a few people that agree with that idea. So, it’s worth your read.

Lance Jenott

Yeah, no, I think Philip’s right. This is also how I see things, that this sort of…

Peggy Williams

It’s well written, well written.

Lance Jenott

…marginalization of different groups in the second century, as the orthodox church is taking form, these other alternatives are being pushed to the margins. And I wish we knew more about how they organize themselves, because, you know, just thinking like a sociologist, communities that organize well, tend to have longevity, and I think a lot of these communities that got branded “heresy” and marginalized probably didn’t have strong forms of organization. I think they wanted it that way. I think they actually were a little bit more toward that this is a community. We don’t accept these rigid hierarchies that are being introduced in the orthodox church.

So, I could leave it at that, but I think what Philip wrote her is really spot on.

Shirley Paulson

Excellent. Well, thank you, and thank you, Peggy, for bringing it up, and thank you, Philip, for your comment. In fact, thank you, everybody, for participating this evening, and I will wrap things up right now. This was the January 2026 Bible and Beyond discussion, titled, “The Fate of the Disciples in the Gospel of Judas,” with our guest scholar, Dr. Lance Jenott.

Thank you so much for being with us tonight, and if you’d like to hear more from Dr. Jenott, he has a wonderful Bible and Beyond podcast interview with me a few years ago that was titled, “Was Adam the Original Sinner?” That was also a fascinating conversation. And you can easily find that in our archives. Just go to Bible And Beyond Podcast and type in Jenottz—spelled J-E-N-O-T-T—in the search bar. So, just to be clear about where we are, these Bible and Beyond Discussions are led by a knowledgeable scholar who provides a thoughtful overview of one or more early Christian texts. And for the last half hour, participants have a chance to ask their own questions. We usually meet on the fourth Monday of the month, from 8 to 9 p.m. Eastern Time.

But please note that next month. Our Bible and Beyond discussion will be earlier than usual. We’re going to meet on Monday, February 16th, the third Monday of the month. because of my own travel schedule.

And, I want to remind you. Please don’t forget to go to patreon.com/BibleAndBeyond to sign up and become eligible for Bible and Beyond course discounts. I have a brand new mini-course called Jesus the Storyteller, and that will take place on Sunday, March 7th. Bible and beyond participants at the $15 level or higher are eligible for a discount on both of our mini-courses.

So now, let me tell you who’s coming next month to our Bible and Beyond Discussion. This will be Professor David Bracke. who is going to take us to some of his current studies on King Solomon. He’s another important, but very strange figure in the history of Jewish and Christian traditions. So, we hope to see you next month.

And now, please join me in a special thanks to Lance for opening up a whole new picture of the disciples and what their lives were like before and after Jesus’ crucifixion. Many, many thanks for being with us tonight, Lance. Thanks so much.

Lance Jenott

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.