Not a gospel; not by Judas

The so-called "Gospel of Judas" is not a gospel and was not written by Judas. The mighty fuss made about it is nothing but a huge media spin whose only beneficiaries will be the owners of The National Geographic. It will also create more sensation and publicity for The Da Vinci Code. Fr Raniero Cantalamessa was correct to note that "Christ is still being sold no longer by the leaders of the Sanhedrin for 30 pieces of silver, but by editors and by libraries, for millions".

The document that went on display in Washington on April 6 is a third-century Coptic translation of what had originally been written in Greek before 180. The document puts Judas in a more sympathetic light than his well-known role as Jesus's betrayer in the canonical Gospels.

In it, Jesus said Judas would "exceed all" of the other disciples, "for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me" - a reference to Judas' impending betrayal of Jesus. It is also an allusion to Gnostic belief that held the spirit in higher esteem than the body, and that, through the liberation of Jesus' body, his spirit would be freed.

As the Pope quite rightly said during his Maundy Thursday homily, Judas was a greedy liar who put his desire for money ahead of his relationship with Jesus and his love for God. For Judas, the Pope said, "only power and success are real; love does not count".

"And he is greedy: money is more important than communion with Jesus, more important than God and his love. He also becomes a liar, a double-crosser who breaks with the truth," Pope Benedict XVI said.

The Gospel of Judas was unimportant to most Christians when it was written hundreds of years ago and it is unimportant today, said a Jesuit professor who has convoked a series of ecumenical studies of the historical Jesus. Jesuit Fr Gerald O'Collins, a longtime professor of Christology at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University, said the text, like the gospels of Mary Magdalene and Philip, "does not merit the name 'Gospel'."

"A 'Gospel' is a literary genre - established by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - focusing on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus," Fr O'Collins said. While including events supposedly related to the life of Jesus, the Gospel of Judas and the others really are texts "attempting to bolster the importance" of the personalities they are named after, not of Jesus, the priest said.

Early Christians used the term to describe various sects that arose in the second century which exalted arcane knowledge, mixing Christian belief with pagan speculation and theories. Gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge. Repudiated as heretics, Gnostics claimed that salvation could be obtained only through the knowledge and acceptance of certain divinely revealed mysteries which they alone possessed.

Until the 20th century most of what was known about Gnosticism came from the anti-Gnostic writings of Christian theologians of the second and third centuries.

That has changed since 1945, when an ancient library of about 50 Gnostic works in Coptic, including the so-called Gospel of Thomas, was discovered in a cemetery near the modern Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi.

In the year 180, St Irenaeus condemned the Gnostics, mentioning particularly a Gospel of Judas. Fr O'Collins said the most important thing about the text released in early April is that "it shows just how right Irenaeus was in saying the Gnostics were against mainstream Christianity and Judaism, they were against our God.

"It was junk then and it is junk now," he said.