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Seek

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Editor’s Note As human beings we all share at least one distinguishing feature: our ability to look for meaning. Sometimes our discoveries are as wild as our impulses, and other times we quietly nod to our version of reality. This column explores the ways we seek, and what our seeking finds.

Elaine Pagels is one of those rare and impressive people–-an incredibly smart scholar who is genuinely looking

for answers to the big questions, and who is willing to share her research about the largely unknown “other” gospels with the rest of us. As the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University, Pagels was awarded the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships in three consecutive years. She is also the bestselling author of several books, including The Gnostic Gospels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, and most recently, with Karen King, Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity.

Professor Pagel’s new book on Judas not only brings to light a whole new, and surprising, perspective on the rela-tionship between Jesus and Judas, but also examines the very nature of biblical texts, truth, and faith. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with her.

InsideOut: What do you think is the headline news of this find-ing about Judas?

Elaine Pagels: First of all, it is remarkable to find a different perspective on the story about the betrayal. Then you see the early Christian movement, not as my wonderful teacher at Harvard, Christopher Sandel, used to call it—“play bible land”—the way Christians think of Jesus and the little children coming around him, a very nice simple story. Instead you see complex, conten-tious, powerful issues being discussed and argued by people in the movement for very high stakes. The gospel of Judas challenges the

leadership, challenges the interpretation of the death of Jesus, what the gospel means, whether the resurrection means the body gets out of the grave or not, whether it’s necessary that Christ died for your sins, and what kind of God you have in mind if you say it is. I think it’s enormously exciting to have a much wider picture of what the early Christian movement looked like.

IO: What do you think Jesus meant when he said to Judas, “I will tell you the mysteries of the Kingdom?”

EP: According to this gospel, the most succinct version of that would be when Jesus says “Judas, bring forth the perfect human.” Judas has a sense that he means something, but he’s not sure what. Jesus goes on to explain that the complete human, which is maybe a better translation than perfect, means that we are spiritual beings and created in the image of God. To me, the most succinct way of expressing it is that of a theologian who said that one of the funda-mental theological questions is whether we come from nothing and go to nothing when we die, or whether we come from something and go to something. In the gospel of Judas, the mysteries of the kingdom is that we come from God, are created in his image—we have a spiritual origin—and when we die we step out of the visible world. We don’t go into nothing but we go into the divine light, into the source of light, into God’s presence, whatever that means. Nobody claims to know what that means, but it is a statement of

some kind of confidence and hope in the face of death. That’s the good news, I think. According to the gospel of Judas, after Jesus finishes teaching Judas, he acts out and demonstrates this teaching by presenting his death as an example of how one dies and how one goes into God.

IO: How would you describe the Judas in this as different from other versions? He has been isolated in the past, but in this account, he’s isolated because of his spirituality and holiness in some sense.

EP: This text suggests that handing him over is what Jesus required him to do, and that he alone understood just what you said, where Jesus came from, and

what kind of God Jesus proclaimed—not one who would require the torture and death of his only son before he would forgive sins. I don’t think it’s a new light on the historical Judas so much as it’s some Christian in the second century saying, you know, if Jesus could come back and see what you’re doing and what you’re preaching in his name—namely that he had to die on the cross to forgive sins like a sacrificial animal, and that you eat bread and drink wine, as if you were eating a human being when you worship, and you say that the death of the martyr is the best thing, because

By Bethany Saltman

Elaine Pagelson the

aboutGood News

Judas

Photo by Jerry Bauer

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it’s imitating Christ—he would say it is barbaric. If Jesus were here, he would laugh at the way you are doing this and he would be hor-rified.

This author is somebody who thinks that encouraging young people to go and die as martyrs is complicit in murder. There are

other texts we have from the same discovery that agree with this entirely. They are not aimed against martyrs. They are aimed against people who glorify martyrdom and say this is the quick and certain route to salvation. It’s not just that it may be necessary some-times, for example, like Martin Luther King realized when he had to stand up for what he felt was God’s truth. He took that into consideration as a possible ultimate price, and I think that’s been true for many people in many situa-tions, Christians and others. Instead, these people are say-ing martyrdom gets you spe-

cial rewards in heaven, the highest seats, guaranteed resurrection and the surest route to salvation, because everybody else might be following Christ, but you’re following him more clearly and literally than anybody else. That’s what this author sees as both misleading and dangerous.

It’s as though an Imam would say to the radical fringe Muslims who encourage people to take on suicide missions, which they call martyrdom missions, participating in those missions is not a glory to God, it’s murder, and people who encourage it are encouraging murder. The comparison breaks down in the sense that Christian martyrs were dealing with giving up their own lives, and certainly weren’t involved in killing others or themselves, so that’s a big dif-ference.

IO: What kinds of different responses have you gotten from writing this particular book? Obviously, if you read the book and take its content seri-ously, it’s going to challenge a lot of assumptions people have.

EP: This is how all the gospels are written—as stories—and people are trying to understand this very powerful strange story of Jesus’ arrest and execution and betrayal. It shows people things they never knew about how gospels are written altogether. Many people find that very exciting. Others say, “Well look. These aren’t the real gospels. These are bad gospels, late gospels. They don’t really tell us anything about Jesus.” They ignore the fact that it’s

questionable how much the others actually tell us about Jesus, be-cause they all tell us about their own time as well. Secondly, they’ll say that the texts are late, unimportant and blasphemous, and the people who publish them are attacking Christianity and trying to destroy faith. If you believe the gospels are the word of God and this is the transmission of the truth then [your faith] depends on reading those and believing what you find in them. Any historical study of the gospels can shake that up.

If you want to take the gospel literally, you really don’t want to talk about when they were written and who wrote them. People say, “Well you’re just saying it’s a lot of spin.” It isn’t just spin. It’s his-tory read through people who are trying to discover the meaning of history, but there are many arguments about that meaning, and even within the New Testament, there is a great deal of variation, but people who want to take these texts literally and want to simplify the issue don’t see that. They don’t look at that.

IO: Is it encouraging as a woman of faith to study this, or do you find it at all destabilizing?

EP: I don’t find it destabilizing. The question about faith or con-viction is how do you find anything that’s true? Is it just a bunch of different stories, nothing truer than the other? That’s a relative view that I don’t share. We always have to figure out from evidence what we think is true, but I don’t think faith, whatever we mean by that, turns on historical evidence.

IO: How do you understand the relationship between evidence and faith?

EP: That’s a really good question. It’s a question I ask myself a lot. I don’t know what we mean by faith. I am thinking of Paul Tillich’s The Dynamics of Faith. He says it’s not a matter of believing a bunch of things. Do you believe that Jesus died for your sins? Do you believe in God? To me, those are propositions. Faith is about trust in whatever process or presence one understands to be God. That’s quite different. I think it can be verified in experience. It certainly doesn’t rest on his verbal premises. It can’t be proved. I was asked by a news show some time ago to appear and talk about the resurrection, and it turns out they had somebody who claimed he’d just written a book with historical proof that could validate the resurrection historically. They were expecting me to say that I could validate that it didn’t happen. I said, “That’s impossible. I don’t have videotapes or evidence. There is no way you can possibly validate that it did or didn’t happen.”

IO: So in other words, you believe that both can exist simultaneously?EP: I think that whatever one thinks about life after death, or

if you are going to talk about resurrection, you cannot base it on historical evidence.

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