IN THE early years of this century, the newspapers were full of a story about a newly discovered ‘Gospel of Judas’. It is an intriguing document and contains some genuine religious substance. But speculation about the character of Judas has been going on since the first Good Friday.
There was a sect called the Cainites who lived in southern Judea not long after the time of Christ, and they revered Judas Iscariot as their Patron Saint. How strange that anyone should revere Judas! What we do know – what is actually true and historical – is that the Cainites were one of many Gnostic groups around the Middle East at the time.
We have met these Gnostics before, religious and philosophical luminaries who claimed to be in the know. They were dualists: they believed that the universe is governed by two equal and opposite supernatural principles, light and darkness. When we can take a plane to the Middle East again, enjoy a trip to Israel and go into southern Judea, near the Dead Sea and the caves at Qumran where the Dead Sea scrolls were found. Here you can see why Gnosticism was popular: the climate. It is blindingly light by day and utterly dark at night. The Gnostics’ extreme form of religion mirrored their environment: either ferociously light or pitch black. No twilight. No shades of grey. No nuance. No subtlety. I expect you know people like that!
You might say the Gnostics are always with us. The world is full of such spiritual types: people so heavenly-minded they‘re no earthly use.
They also believed that all material things, including the body and the flesh, are bad and that only spiritual things are good. They were apocalyptic. They believed that the end of the world was coming and that at the end a mysterious Divine Redeemer would appear from the realms of light. This world of material things would be destroyed and the true believers – themselves, of course! – would be transported to a spiritual heaven. A lady like that turned up every week to my philosophy class in York, and made all our evenings a torment.
The Cainites believed that Judas Iscariot was the prophet of the Divine Redeemer. They thought that Judas saw Jesus as this Redeemer and that Judas had believed Christ would come down from the Cross and show himself to be the Promised One. When Jesus did not do this, Judas hanged himself out of disappointment. There may be some truth in this tradition.
But the Cainite religion – Gnosticism – was not limited to one particular place and time. Gnosticism is an all-pervading heresy, and it is a constant threat to the life and very being of the Church and society. G K Chesterton said that we nearly died from Gnosticism no fewer than five times. St Augustine dedicated his life to fighting it in the form of the Manichees. It emerged again with the Cathars or Albigensians.
It awakened again in modern times at the Enlightenment in the 18th century. Gnosticism thrives wherever Puritanism thrives. It is a form of bloodless idealism – the notion that we can escape from the things of the flesh and retreat into the pure world of spirit. It is the delusion of human perfectibility. It is present wherever people are, in T S Eliot’s words, ‘dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good’.
It’s there in spades in political correctness, wokery and the whole pathology of abstract idealism. The NHS with its bureaucracy and its systems is just one example. Psychoanalysis is another: the disease that pretends to be the cure.
The problem is that Gnosticism and Puritanism actually sound rather respectable and virtuous, principled and high-minded – and there is something of it in all of us, in the thought that we ought to deny the flesh and hold to things that are purely spiritual.
The trouble is that this is impossible, because we are creatures of flesh and blood and we live in a material world created by God. The Bible tells us that the world was created good by the good God. No doubt Good Friday contains a violent story, but it is at Christmas that we read some of the most violent words in the whole of the New Testament. These are the opening words of St John’s Gospel when he speaks of God and the world: ‘All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.’ So important is this message that St John rams it home, repeating it in words of one syllable.
The Christian faith might seem superficially to have something to do with Gnosticism and pure spirituality. Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans thought so and they suppressed fleshly pursuits and even banned Christmas. But Puritanism and Gnosticism are the opposite and the enemies of Christianity. The Christian faith is the religion of the Incarnation – the putting into flesh. It is certainly the religion of penitence and tears but it is also the religion of cakes and ale. Christianity is emphatically notthe creed of abstract idealism. When God came to redeem the world, he came as a human child of flesh and blood and on Good Friday he died in the flesh on the Cross. It could not be put more plainly than that. And he gave us Sacraments which are spiritual things in material form.
In short, the Cainites’ Judas was mistaken. Gnosticism is false. And, like all perversions of the truth, it is not merely harmless, but a lethal threat to the truth. Particularly on this Fifth Sunday in Lent, Passion Sunday, we give thanks that Jesus was not a discarnate supernatural being of pure spirit, the impossible Redeemer looked for by Judas and the Cainites. He was truly a man with a body, parts and passions – a man who eats, drinks, sleeps, weeps and loses his temper.
Unlike the puritans and the idealists, Jesus got his hands dirty.
In the Creed we give thanks for the fact that to save us Jesus did everything that the Gnostics despise: ‘He came down from heaven . . . was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary . . . suffered under Pontius Pilate . . . was crucified, dead and buried. He descended into hell. And the third day he rose again according to the scriptures.’
