By Gerard Baker (THE TIMES, 14/04/06):
ONE FAMOUSLY erudite example of graffiti was spotted on the wall of an Oxford lavatory a while back. “Archduke Ferdinand found alive,” it said. “Wars of twentieth century all a big mistake”.
I was reminded of that example of piercing undergraduate humour by the news last week, feverishly reported for some reason by a press that doesn’t usually take developments scriptural all that seriously, of the authentication of the Gospel of Judas.
This 2nd-century document tells the story of the ministry of Jesus Christ from the perspective of the most reviled man in history, and it’s quite a page-turner. The treacherous Judas, it seems, was not only a central part of God’s plan for the world, Jesus actually tells him that his famous betrayal guaranteed him greatness. “You shall be cursed for generations,” Jesus says, presciently, but goes on: “You will come to rule over them . . . You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.”
The revelations were treated as though freighted with genuinely cosmic significance for the world’s largest religious faith. If Judas was really that great, maybe . . . maybe Jesus was not all he was cracked up to be. “Judas Iscariot acquitted,” you could read between the news headlines: “Christianity all a big mistake.”
But before you cancel the rest of your Holy Week plans, a quiet word is in order. It was widely reported last week that the Gospel of Judas was the work of the Gnostics, a sect that produced a number of early scriptures of historical significance. Less widely reported is that the Gnostics were religiously speaking a sort of composite bunch, not even Christian in any currently recognisable form of the term (and that’s a pretty broad church, it’s fair to say). Rather, they were an eclectic group who picked the tenets of their faith from a smorgasbord of Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Babylonian, Jewish and Christian traditions.
One of their distinguishing beliefs was in the notion of a dual divinity. To deal with the familiar conundrum of evil in a divinely created world, they developed the idea of a flawed Old Testament God-creator, who begat a corrupt world. They championed the cause of Cain, the world’s first murderer, as an instrument of this God and of course they elevated Judas, who surpassed Cain in Biblical infamy.
So Christians, or those of us not inclined towards the Gnostic interpretation, can breathe easier. At least until the discovery of some new gospel — or the publication of the next Dan Brown novel that proves that Jesus was, in fact, a very large, highly intelligent and coldly calculating rabbit.
And yet there is something about the “Judas is innocent” story that makes a certain amount of sense, even for conventional Christians. The redemptive ambivalence of the name by which we commemorate this day — Good Friday — tells us that Judas was, in a universal, historical sense, not all bad. A villain in a story is usually the pivot. Without the villain, there would be no crime. And yet in the story of Judas’s treachery this won’t work. Without the kiss there would have been no arrest; without the arrest there would have been no trial; without the trial, no Cross, and without the cross, no empty tomb. And then where would we be?
But in the end isn’t Judas simply the New Testament incarnation of the happy fault, the necessary sin that saved us? In fact, Judas is like most of the characters in the Good Friday tragedy that seem to be playing parts ordained for them by the unavoidable necessity of the awful sacrifice.
Jesus Himself, of course, is the unfathomable God and man, His sinless mother uncomplaining even in her grief. The chief priests and the baying crowd are animations of populism; Pontius Pilate is earthly authority. Even the Apostle John and Mary Magdalene are loyal, stolid, almost too serene for human reality.
In a sense Jesus appears to be assigning them all the roles of supporting actors when he says to Pilate: “You would have no power over me if it were not given you from above. That is why the one who handed me over to you bears the greater sin.”
That is why, as I contemplate the meaning of today’s events 2,000 years ago, I find Peter has the most to teach us. It is Peter who most truly compels our attention as the flawed human in the narrative: not the good or evil figure sleepwalking his way towards fate, but the man with choices who can’t get them right; who oscillates between the inner angel and the demands of the flesh.
It was Peter who, on that Thursday and Friday, most captured the weakness, the sheer hopeless irresoluteness of humanity — fiercely promising one minute to fight and die with Jesus, impetuously slashing off the ear of the High Priest’s servant in the garden, bravely ready to take on all comers. And then, within hours, the same, shivering, cowering, feeble Peter frantically denying to everyone his very association with the criminal. You get the impression he’d hammer in the nails if they asked him.
It’s the same human Peter visible throughout the Gospels. He’s often depicted as bumbling, weak, scared, perennially hopeless, always putting his foot in it. Even after the Resurrection he can’t quite shake this basic frailty. When Jesus calls to him to walk across the water, his faith isn’t strong enough and he fails, again.
And yet we know, too, that Peter was the chosen one, pulled from his fishing boat by Jesus, picked again by Jesus to feed his flock. And that’s the real message in Peter’s bit part in the Easter story. We know we can’t really be like Jesus. We know too we can’t really be like Judas. But in our simple, human hopelessness, and in our mysterious capacity for greatness, we can all aspire to be Peter.