How we got the
Bible and Why the Gospel of Judas was left out
By Moses Flores
We come now to the second part of our study on the Gospel of Judas to essentially answer two questions
1) Why were the books that are in the Bible in the Bible?
2) Why was the Gospel of Judas left out?
The topic we are dealing with is, in theological language, known as the “canon” of Scripture. The word “canon”, comes from the Greek word kanon which means, “rule” or “standard.” As it was applied to books, it came to mean the body of literature which was the standard. For example, the “canon” of C.S. Lewis would include all of his literary works, notes, etc…which would be the standard, or canon, of C.S. Lewis. So when we speak of the Canon of Scripture, we are referring to those books which are authorative in regards to the revelation of God.
But now we must ask, why were some books accepted as Scripture and other rejected? In order for this question to be dealt with, we must recognize two aspects of the canon of Scripture: the theological canon and the historical canon. Both canons refer to the same books but the theological canon refers to the nature of Scripture, or what kind of books belong to this category, while the historical canon is the historical process by which God directed the Church to recognize the theological canon, or the specific books that make up the Bible.
I. The Nature of the Canon
Regarding the theological view of the canon, we turn to two clear passages of Scripture in the New Testament that give witness to the nature of Scripture: II Timothy 3:16 and II Peter 1:19-21.
First in II Timothy 3:16 we read,
“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction and training in righteousness.”
Getting technical for a moment, most translations use the word “inspiration.” When we think of “inspiration”, we think of having a motivation or emotional willingness to do something. Thus, we tend to call the writers of Scripture “inspired” and even great works of literature as “inspirational”. But is this the correct view of the text of Scripture? In order to answer this question, we must delve into the languages of Scripture for a moment.
The word “inspiration” comes from the Latin word “inspirare” used in the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible which means “to breathe into”. This Latin word, however, is insufficient to convey the meaning of the original Greek word used here, which is Theopneustos. Theopneustos is more properly translated by the NIV as “God-breathed”. The differences between the words are significant. For instance, the Latin word “inspirare” is a verb which would function as saying what has been done to Scripture. The word Theopneustos, however, is a noun and serves as a predicate thus speaking of what Scripture is. The Latin actually gives the sense that the words of Scripture could have been written and not have been “breathed into”, giving the sense that they become “inspired” after an act of inspiration. The Greek word, however, gives the idea that the words of Scripture are the very breath proceeding forth from the mouth of God as He speaks in the very writings of Scripture through the writers. Therefore, theopneustos speaks of the very substance, or nature, of Scripture whereas the Latin would convey how the text has been acted upon. A huge significance, indeed, for our understanding!
It is important that we see that Paul is talking about what “all Scripture” is and not merely “some Scripture”. This is clearly a categorical statement about the true nature of Scripture. This becomes important when considering the nature of the canon of Scripture. Since only Scripture is God-breathed, it is logical to say that only those writings that are God-breathed are Scripture and those that are not God-breathed are not Scripture, thus not part of the canon. The canon of Scripture, then, is not revelation itself. That is, the Church has never claimed to have a “divine table of contents” that was revealed by God that helps us to recognize which books are to be part of the canon. Rather, the canon is what could be called an “artifact of revelation.” Thus, the nature of Scripture as God-breathed revelation serves as the foundation for the existence of a “canon of Scripture” – a standard collection of writings.
Another Scripture that reveals the nature of Scripture is found in II Peter 1:19-21 which says,
“And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.”
Here, Peter is exhorting his readers that in light of his upcoming death and the passing away of the apostolic authority, His readers are exhorted to follow the Scriptures as their “light” that shines in a dark place. However, lest his readers follow Scripture blindly, he wants them to know about the nature of Scripture and the origin of its contents.
Most translations read that “no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation.” The word “interpretation” here can be a little misleading. For instance, most take this to say at face value that no one has the right to “private interpretations” of Scripture, but instead should be submitted to an infallible interpreter. But this is not what the text is saying at all. Continuing within the context into verse 21, the reader should understand that “being of one’s own interpretation” is meant to say that Scripture does not find its origin in the will of man, but rather Scripture is the product of holy men of God who were moved, or carried along, by the Holy Spirit.
Interestingly enough, Peter wants us to know “above all” (NIV) or to know first, about the nature of Scripture. Particularly that Scripture is not the product of men but of the Spirit of God.
This is entirely consistent with II Timothy 3:16 in that Scriptures are “God-breathed”. Thus, Peter’s identification, or categorical statement for Scripture, are those writings by men who were carried along by the Holy Spirit. This statement of Peter’s is synonymous with Paul’s about the Scriptures being God-breathed. Thus, only those writings of men who were guided by the Spirit to write and speak the things they did are Scripture.
Summing this up, there exists a category of writings authored ultimately by God through the Holy Spirit. These writings are known to God and comprise what we have called the “theological canon.” Whether these writings are acknowledged or not by other men, they still remain what they are by nature: God-breathed Scripture. Thus, the “theological canon” exists whether or not it is recognized by any other.
In other words, suppose that I have written several works. The totality of these works comprises what would be called the canon of Moses Flores. Whether or not, anybody believes them to be written by me or even reads them. The fact would remain that I did write those works and they are what they are by nature, and not by recognition from any other external source.
With such a view and understanding of the nature of the canon, it should be obvious that no external authority, such as a Church Council, nor even the Church itself, can make a book to be God-breathed anymore than someone could make the writings of mere human origin into the Word of God. Instead, what the Church does is recognize which books are God-breathed Scripture and passively receives those works as part of the canon of Scripture thus, giving us the Holy Scriptures or what we know as the Bible.
II. The historical Canon: an artifact of
revelation
But we still ask the question, how did the God-breathed writings come together to give us the Bible that we have today? How did the early Church recognize the Canon of Scripture? Here is also where the question gets answered about the Gospel of Judas as well, and why it was left out.
First we should understand how the Old Testament canon came into being. It is recognized by strict Jewish tradition that body of writings that came to be known as the “oracles of God” was closed by about 400 B.C. The Jewish historian Josephus acknowledges that there was no more authorative communication from God through prophet to be put on writing after the time of Malachi [1]. Thus, by the time our Lord, Jesus Christ, began his ministry, there was already a generally accepted Canon of Scripture referred to by its three fold division of “the Law, the prophets and the Psalms” (cf. Luke 24:44-45). It is notable that Jesus never debated with the Pharisees or Scribes what was or what was not Scripture. It was recognized already that there was a body of writings that were the very words of God. But how did this happen? The answer: God simply led His people to recognize them for what they were.
There was no council that met and
discussed which works seemed to be or could be the Word of God. Rather they were accepted as they came
through the prophets or those who penned the words of the prophets which were
the very words of God. Essentially, by
about 200 B.C. the Jewish canon was completed with 22 books (which are the same
39 books in the Protestant Old Testament[2]).
But what about those of the New Testament? How did we come to recognize those writings as God-breathed? In a very general way, the immediate followers of Christ through the ministry of the Apostles believed that it was the closest followers of Jesus who were divinely appointed to authoritively declare the person and work of Christ. Thus, in a general way, it was their writings that were accepted as authorative. Thus, almost immediately, the writings of Paul are accepted as Scripture as acknowledged in II Peter 3:15-16. This text says,
“…and consider that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation- as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you, as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures.”
When Peter says that Paul’s writings are twisted with the “rest of the Scriptures”, Peter is showing that he counts Paul’s writings to be on par with the known authorative Scriptures of the time, namely the Old Testament.
Peter is not alone in acknowledging other writings of the New Testament era as Scripture. In I Timothy 5:18, Paul is instructing the church to “honor” their elders who labor in the Word and in doctrine. He substantiates his exhortation by saying,
“For the Scripture says, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain,’ and ‘the laborer is worthy of his wages.’”
The first quote is recognizable from Deuteronomy 25:4 while the second quote comes from the Gospel according to Luke 10:7. It is generally accepted by New Testament scholars that I Timothy was written around A.D 62 – 64, which would mean that the Gospel according to Luke was already accepted and functioning as Scripture along with the Old Testament as well. The final writing from an apostle would be the Apocalyptic work of the Revelation of Jesus Christ, written as late as A.D. 95. This final writing of the last remaining apostle essentially ended the revelation of God in Christ to the Church. With the coming of Christ and the exposition of His person and work by the apostles, God was fully revealed in Christ (cf. Hebrews 1:1-3). Thus, those writings written by the apostles, or their close followers, that were God-breathed were recognized for what they were, the Word of God.
Two issues need to be dealt with here: the exploitation of apostolic authority and the geographical locations of Scripture. First: the misuse of apostolic authority.
The apostolic Church recognized the derivative authority of the Apostles from the Lord. So did false teachers. Hence, it was not uncommon for false teachers, like the Gnostics to pretend to be apostles themselves or, eventually, to write epistles under the semblance, or name of apostles. Hence, there are works like the “Gospel of Thomas” or the “Gospel of Phillip”. There are even Gnostic works that bear the names of those closely associated with Christ, like the “Gospel of Mary Magdalene.” A surface examination of these other Gospels will reveal a familiarity with the work of the true apostles, but will also reveal the Gnostic tendencies mentioned above.
The Gospel of Judas is a product of these Gnostics groups. The work was not truly written, nor endorsed, by any apostle, much less Judas himself for the date of the work clearly lies beyond the date of his death. Neither is the Gospel of Judas, nor these Gnostic writings, consistent with the teachings of the prior revelations of God as revealed in the Old Testament Scriptures. In fact, the first move for a “Christian canon” was actually by a Gnostic, named Marcion, who proposed that the entire Old Testament was not Scripture!
The “tests” of
New Testament canonicity
It was actually in reaction to this falsely proposed canon of Scripture that the Church started to concern itself with what was true Scripture, though only for a moment since persecution and issues about the Deity of Christ and his relationship to the Father took more precedence. Another thing that these Gnostic Scriptures lacked was a general acceptance by the Church, especially those who were either familiar with the apostles themselves or their teachings as they had been handed down either by word of mouth or by Scripture.
Secondly, we must consider the geographical locations of Scripture as well as its transmission. Scripture was primarily written on Papyrus and arranged into a “codex.” Due to the lack of printing presses available at the time, the transmission of Scripture took place through scribes. What would essentially happen is that an apostle, or one sanctioned by an apostle, would deliver a letter to a local Church in a given geographical area. From there, the letter would either get copied by a scribe and passed on to another Church in the geographical area. This process took time. We must also consider that some works did not reach others until much later. Hence, when it came time to consider some of these letters as Canonical, there were some Churches who had not heard of such works as Revelation, or 2 Peter or Jude. Hence, the historical disputes of these books. One book, Hebrews, did not even bear a name, and so it was disputed whether or not it was apostolic in origin, and hence an authorative communication from God.
Now, this is not to say that the Church did not have a functioning canon before there was ever an official recognition of which books were God-breathed and which ones were not. On the contrary, there is clear evidence from the writings of the early Fathers and their many appeals to Scripture that though there was no existing formal declaration of what was Canonical and what was not, the Church already knew by the wisdom and guidance of the Holy Spirit what Scripture was and what was not.
We should not take lightly the word of Jesus when He said in John 10:3-5:
“…and the sheep hear [the Good Shepherd’s] voice; and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. And when he brings out his own sheep, he goes before them; and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. Yet they will by no means follow a stranger, but will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.”
The verse is certainly a revelation that the Church, the sheepfold of God, knows the voice of their Lord and they have heard him in the writings they recognized as Scripture. The verse also says that the Church will reject those other “voices” that would come through strange teachings and writings. Hence, the rejection of not only the Gospel of Judas from the Canon, but hundreds of other works that reveal the marks of Gnosticism and not of the Lord of the Church.
The Gospel of Judas stands as Gnostic literature and not of the Christian faith as commonly recognized and taught by the apostles and their immediate followers of the time. In fact, several works accepted in the New Testament are actually apostolic responses to the early forms of Gnosticism that they had to deal with including the letter to the Colossians and I John. Some theologians have even suggested that the Gospel of John is a response to the Gnostic teachings of Cerenthus, a Gnostic whom John often had dealings with during his life. One of the early Church fathers, Polycarp, had the privilege of learning from the apostle John himself. It has been recognized that Polycarp was also the teacher of Irenaeus. Irenaeus, surprisingly, makes a passing reference to the Gospel of Judas in his most famous work, “Against Heresies.” Irenaeus wrote,
“Others
again declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge
that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to
themselves. On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator,
yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying
off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas
the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone,
knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal;
by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion.
They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.[3]”
It has been surmised that the Gospel
of Judas was purposely withheld from the public in order to suppress a truer or
simply another form of Christianity. But
this is not the case. The book was never
intended to be included in the canon of Christian Scripture because it was not
Scripture. It was a fictitious account of what took place between Judas and
Christ. Scholars themselves have
recognized that this work could not have been produced by Judas nor anyone in
the time period. The date given for the
writing of the Gospel of Judas is around 150 A.D., near when Irenaeus wrote
“Against Heresies” (182-188 A.D.). The
writing was not given apostolic authorship or origin in any way. Thus, it was rejected as Holy Scripture.
III. The Gospel for Judas
The Gospel of Judas is not new; neither has it ever turned Christianity on its head. It still stands today as what it was and always has been: a distortion of true Christianity and a false Gospel!
What is the true message of Judas? That there are those who profess to follow Christ on the outside, but inwardly are corrupted; that there are those who profess to be followers of Christ but will perish in the end. If there was a Gospel for Judas, it is the same Gospel that was once for all delivered to the Church through Christ and His apostles.
That Gospel is that though we are totally
unable to neither produce anything righteous nor incline ourselves to the will
of God, that though we are “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), God has
sovereignly and graciously decided to draw men and women unto Himself through
the quickening and regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. Through this regeneration, we can experience
freedom from our sins to be able to truly and savingly believe in the Lord
Jesus Christ. It was Jesus Himself who
said, “Unless a man be born again, he cannot enter the
This is the Gospel that Judas rejected when he chose to betray Christ. Judas refused the greatest news in the world. That others would not be condemned with him, false teachers have fabricated a Pseudo-Gospel bearing His name. Do not be deceived. Judas was condemned as a sinner as we all rightly deserve to be. But Judas was offered the Gospel, indeed walked with Christ Himself. The good news lies not in what is falsely called knowledge (cf. I Tim. 6:20). The Good news lies in Jesus complete atonement and victory over sin on behalf of sinners. We can be saved through faith in Jesus Christ alone as God come to us in the flesh. This, much we should take from the example of the true account of Judas.