‘Gospel of Judas’ —

“THE Gospel of Judas” which was made public last week by National Geographic Society and has sparked heated debates worldwide will not cause the Catholic Church to “get grey hairs,” according to Roman Catholic Archbishop of Port-of-Spain, Edward Gilbert.

The script is believed to have been written in AD300 and was found in a desert cave in Egypt in the 1970s. It was passed from one antiquities dealer to another.

The Gospel of Judas suggests that far from being the betrayer of Jesus as depicted in existing gospels, it was Jesus who asked Judas, one of his apostles, to betray him, to help him shed his earthly body.

Commenting on the issue yesterday, Gilbert said: “Don’t worry about it. It is just a part of history discovered, they will probably find more,” he said.

He described the Gospel of Judas as just one of hundreds of “Gnostic” texts found over the years and the Catholic Church was not going to get any grey hairs over it. Gilbert admitted that he has been getting calls from concerned people. He said the Gnostics were all about self-knowledge as the basis of knowledge of God, in what was quasi-scientific beliefs.

He said people with a New Age view picked up on the Gnostic texts since they were into self-improvement. Gilbert said the text should serve as an indication to the Christian believer of “the role of the Church in the certainty of their faith and source of their faith.”

He referred to the furore caused by the best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown which suggested a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Gilbert said there were many texts in Gnostic literature — the Gospel of Paul, Gospel of Truth, for example.

He said the Gnostic texts were not credible for the Church. “Not because they were not authentic documents but because what they represent — spirituality that was not Christian but Gnosticism was about self, and foreign to the Church tradition.”

The National Geographic Society made the script public at a media briefing last week and dated it to about AD300. It was written in Icoptic script and is a copy of an earlier Greek manuscript. The Gospel was found in a desert cave in Egypt in the 1970s and passed from one antiquities dealer to another.

Gnosticism, according to Catholics, places the salvation of the soul merely in the possession of a quasi-intuitive knowledge of the mysteries of the universe and magic formulae indicative of that knowledge.

Gnostics were “people who knew” and the knowledge that once constituted them as a superior class of beings, whose present and future status was essentially different from that of those who, for whatever reason, did not know.

Its publication close to Holy Week and Good Friday has sparked intense interest, debate and consternation among believers and non-believers.