The Judas Code

Father Raymond J. de Souza is chaplain to Newman House, the Roman Catholic mission at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. Father de Souza is also on the advisory board of the Catholic Educator's Resource Center. This is what he has to say about the Gospel of Judas, in an article published in the National Post:

In the year 4006, an enterprising team from Global Geographic announces that experts in late second-millennium languages and data retrieval have pieced together an authentic copy of the longrumoured-to-exist Da Vinci Code.

Religious experts say that the discovery challenges traditional Christian doctrine, as the widely circulated document shows that early-21stcentury Christians believed that Jesus was not divine, had married Mary Magdalene, founded a royal dynasty, etc … It is believed that early fourth-millennium Vatican officials suppressed the sacred text.

That is more or less the story of the much-ballyhooed Gospel of Judas. It is, no doubt, a remarkable historical find - an apparently authentic fourth-century copy of a second-century document. But it tells us no more about Christian doctrine than does Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.

About 180 A.D., St. Irenaeus of Lyons referred to the document in his arguments with the heretics of his day. So likely there was a group in the mid-second-century that was peddling false gospels. It wouldn't be the last time.

During the Holy Week, at every Catholic Mass in the world, St. Mark's account of the passion of Jesus was read. About Judas, Jesus says, "For the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born" (Mark 14:21). That addresses rather forthrightly the claim that Judas was not a traitor but a clandestine saint.

For those of a more conspiratorial mindset - then and now - even the most direct statements can be turned inside out against their plain meaning. So leave aside the claims that the Gospel of Judas is supposed to advance. What remains interesting is why there should be such interest in it.

The first reason is that Christianity is a historical religion. It depends on actual events in history. Like our elder brothers the Jews, our faith is not about abstract principles or mythical stories. It is about the gritty stuff of history. From the promise made to Abraham to the empty tomb, the Christian faith depends on what happened to the God who became man and walked among us. That is why the historical record matters; it is why Christians are interested in archaeology and ancient documents.

The second reason for Christian interest is that Christianity is a scriptural faith - the sacred texts matter.

Christians are not, strictly speaking, "people of the book," for our faith is in a person, Jesus Christ, who left no writings whatsoever. Yet the sacred Scriptures are indispensable and venerated precisely as the word of God.

The Christian faith is not an antiquities obsession, however, pursuing this or that fragment to shed light on the faith. Christians read their scriptures in an ecclesial context; i.e., it is the Church that gives rise to the Scriptures, determines their canonical status, and meditates upon them. It could not be otherwise: The Church comes before the Scriptures, for the Church is necessary to recognize the existence of the Scriptures in the first place. It is the faith of the Church that distinguishes between the canonical gospels and the ersatz. Without that ecclesial context, the author of the Gospel of Judas, or Dan Brown, for that matter, could present himself as a instrument of divine revelation.

A third reason - and I suspect the most powerful - to explain Christian interest in the Gospel of Judas is that it addresses a great question: What happened to Judas? The Catholic Church, for her part, does not definitively declare anyone to be in Hell, as she does with the saints in Heaven. Yet the clear weight of the tradition is that Judas is in fact condemned. Such is the horror of condemnation that the believer instinctively recoils from that conclusion.

That conclusion is not obligatory for Christian believers, but the apparent condemnation of Judas underscores another important Christian reality, namely the personal nature of salvation. Judas is not some cog in a providential machine, required to do X so that Jesus could do Y. No one is arbitrarily sacrificed in the plan of salvation, and Judas remains free until the end. The Bible is full of repentant sinners, from King David to Saint Peter. The sin of Judas lies not in his betrayal, which could be repented of, but in his refusal to repent unto the Lord. He insisted on remaining alone with his sin, and his sin destroyed him.

Even at a distance of 20 centuries, the devout Christian wishes that it had been otherwise - not for Jesus' sake, but for Judas.

So what's all the fuss about?

Ruby Martin of Chicago writes:

I read The Da Vinci Code several months after the book was released and to be quite honest, I thought it was a pretty good read, even though I didn't think Brown was anywhere in the league of guys like Grisham or Ludlum.

For the life of me, though, I couldn't understand how anybody could take the book seriously! Mary Magdalene sitting by the side of Jesus at the Last Supper!? Admittedly, the person next to Jesus did look extremely effeminate, but if that was Magdalene in the painting, there would need to be 14 people in it - Jesus, the 12 apostles and Mary. Count how many there actually are!

There were, of course, several other equally glaring mistakes in the book, but then the copyright page of the novel did say this: "In this work of fiction, the characters, places and events are either the product of the author's imagination or they are used entirely fictitiously."

So what's all the fuss about?

People who ask this question usually have not read the page of The Da Vinci Code titled Fact, where the author, Dan Brown, asserts that "all descriptions of [..]documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate" and are based specifically on the fact that "in 1975 Paris' Bibliotheque Nationale discovered parchments, known as Les Dossiers Secrets" which reveal the story of the Priory of Sion. For more about the Priory of Sion and other claims that Dan Brown makes in his book, please read the The Da Vinci Code FAQ, or Will the Real Priory of Sion Please Stand Up? by Massimo Introvigne on Holy Spirit Interactive.

The Dundee Code: Long Awaited Sequel to The Da Vinci Code

For those of you who devoured The Da Vinci Code and couldn't have enough of all that juicy scandal, here is The Dundee Code. Follow the continuing adventures of Langdon and Sophie in Dan Brown's new sequel to The Da Vinci Code!

Oh, okay, it's a joke - but a good one. Do check it out!

The Gospel of Judas

It just keeps coming... one after another. First, there was The Da Vinci Code, which sent historians and art experts into fits over its countless errors and distortions. Then there was a lawsuit in Italy and a feature-length documentary... both of which argue that Jesus never actually existed. And now, we have the Gospel of Judas... which is being promoted by National Geographic as a bombshell that could destroy the very foundations of Christianity.

Does the Gospel of Judas undermine Christianity? Find out in the article by Brian Saint-Paul in this week's update of Holy Spirit Interactive.

Jesus Decoded

There is a great site developed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops that provides us with much information about the Da Vinci Code that is of use. It is called Jesus Decoded. The following excerpt is from the introduction to the site by Msgr. Francis J. Maniscalco:

Causing people to see something they never saw before in a five-hundred-year-old work of art which is among the most famous and reproduced of all time is an accomplishment of genius, if that "something" is a valid new insight. If it is not, then this kind of achievement usually goes by other names.

The Da Vinci Code novel contains a claim that in Leonardo's mural The Last Supper, which portrays Jesus and his twelve apostles at the meal he took with them on the night before he died, one of the twelve is not the apostle John but actually a woman who is Mary Magdalene.

Forget the Gospel narratives through which Leonardo, like every other Christian, would have known about the Last Supper and which contain no mention of Mary Magdalene; forget the fact that this mural seems to have caused no sensation among the monks whose refectory it decorated and who would have been as likely to recognize a female form then as we are today; forget the many paintings of the Last Supper which show a handsome youth often leaning on Christ's shoulder or on his chest following the tradition that identified John with the unnamed "beloved disciple" of the fourth Gospel. If such a claim is put between the covers of a book, apparently it merits respectful consideration no matter how absurd.

What this novel does to Leonardo's Last Supper, it does to Christianity as such. It asks people to consider equivalent to the mainstream Christian tradition quite a few odd claims. Some are merely distortions of hypotheses advanced by serious scholars who do serious research. Others, however, are inaccurate or false.

One false claim is that the Emperor Constantine, for political reasons of his own, decided to make a god out of Jesus Christ who was solely a Jewish rabbi for whom neither he nor his first followers ever asserted a divine origin. This claim cannot be sustained on the basis of the existing evidence which demonstrates that Constantine did no such thing.

It also highlights the schizophrenia in the The Da Vinci Code about Jesus Christ. Only if Jesus is divine would we have any interest in the possibility that his descendant might walk the earth today. If he is not, such a descendant ceases to be a mythic figure and becomes only a kind of celebrity child, so many of whom have turned out to be disappointments to their parents.

Reporters have asked whether even a bestselling novel can seriously damage a Church of one billion believers. No, in the long run, it cannot. But that is not the point. The pastoral concern of the Church is for each and every person. If only one person were to come away with a distorted impression of Jesus Christ or His Church, our concern is for that person as if he or she were the whole world.

Counteracting the Da Vinci Code

Karen Rumore forwarded me the following email from Nick which has a great plan of action to counteract the DaVinci Code without giving them any more free press.

I appreciate the efforts to counter-attack the heresies evident in "The DaVinci Code". However, this is a scenario where we should be "wise as serpents, innocent as doves." Stopping this movie from being shown will give this film even more publicity than it deserves. Witness how a small Utah theater owner unwittingly drew national attention to pro-homosexual "Brokeback Mountain" when he refused to show that film.

If you boycott a movie, even as one as blasphemous as "The DaVinci Code", you are, in fact, aiding in the promotion of the film. It would give the producers no greater pleasure than to see a marginalized, to-them-uncool, fringe group to draw free publicity to the film. If a film becomes labeled "controversial", a lot of curiosity seekers will search it out to see what the fuss is all about. Besides, it's not like one cannot read the story for themselves--bookstores are not being boycotted, and the book is supposedly a page-turner.

So, what to do? If you ignore the film, the film will be left unchallenged for unsuspecting people to be led to its heresy. If you protest the film, you will draw unneeded attention and free publicity to the film. If you try to engage the film, by seeing it, you are giving more money into the pockets of those who make this film, signalling that Hollywood should make more films like this.

There is another approach, which devout Catholic Barbara Niccolosi (www.churchofthemasses.com) has suggested. It is, in my opinion, utterly brilliant. On the weekend of DaVinci Code's opening, every Christian should go to the movies. Just not The DaVinci Code. Every Hollywood bigwig and insider checks opening weekend statistics to decide whether or not such films should ever be made in the future. A movie ticket purchase is like a "vote." If you don't vote, then you signal to Hollywood that you're not a movie paying patron whose voice should be listened to.

But what if "The DaVinci Code", a film which has "blockbuster" written all over it--what if it were to not win the weekend, and lose to another film opening that weekend? (In that particular weekend, a clean computer-graphics cartoon, with considerably good cast, and written by a Christian screenwriter is opening: "Over The Hedge"). If "Over the Hedge" wins that weekend, with Narnia or Passion numbers, you will do more to signal your discontent with Hollywood trash than anything else out there. You will signal that you are a movie-paying patron, who has no interest in Christian-bashing films and are instead into family-friendly fare. Your voice will matter. You will also not give free publicity to "The DaVinci Code", and you may even have a good time at the movies.

If enough Christians come out and support the little cartoon-that-could, and make that a surprise success, it will leave an indelible mark in Hollywood. In short, please consider going to the movies on the weekend of May 19, to counter the influence of "DaVinci Code." Just not "The Da Vinci Code."

Papal Preacher Lambasts Dan Brown

The pope's personal preacher railed on Friday against Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and the recently published Gospel of Judas, saying they amounted to a fresh betrayal of Christ.

In a Good Friday homily in St Peter's Basilica, Capuchin father Raniero Cantalamessa told Benedict XVI and several top Vatican officials that the media was exploiting the Christian tradition to make millions of dollars.

"No one can stop this wave of speculation, which is in fact going to get stronger with the imminent release of a certain film," he said, in a clear allusion to the movie of the Da Vinci Code, which is due out next month.

Cantalamessa said there was a growing trend in the media to weave fanciful stories which played shamelessly with Christian beliefs and ancient legends. As well as making money for the publishers, these stories misled millions of people, he continued.

The Da Vinci Code portrays the Catholic Church as a corrupt organisation determined to hide certain explosive truths and contains the notion that Jesus Christ married and had descendants.

The Capuchin then directed his attention at the so-called Gospel of Judas which was published earlier this week amid intense media attention. The document, which dates back to the second or third century, offers a positive view of Judas, the betrayer of Christ.

The content of the document was branded heretical by the early fathers of the Christian Church and Pope Benedict himself strongly reaffirmed the traditional view of Judas on Thursday.

"There's a lot of talk about Judas's betrayal and nobody realises that it's happening all over again," said Father Cantalamessa. "Christ is still being sold, not to religious authorities for 30 pieces of silver, but to publishers and bookshops for billions". The preacher said the underlying problem was that the media was more interested in novelty than in truth.

He also said that such questions didn't deserve to be talked about on one of the most important days in the Christian calendar. "But we can't allow the silence of believers to pass for embarrassment and the good faith of millions of people to be manipulated by the media."

Source: ANSA

Pope: Judas a greedy liar

Judas was a greedy liar who put his desire for money ahead of his relationship with Jesus and his love for God, Pope Benedict XVI said.

Exactly a week after the National Geographic Society put the sympathetic Gospel of Judas on display, Pope Benedict reasserted the traditional Christian view that Judas betrayed his friend and Lord after the Last Supper.

The document that went on display in Washington April 6 is a third-century Coptic translation of what had originally been written in Greek before 180. The text portrays Judas as Jesus' closest disciple and says Jesus asked Judas to hand him over to the Roman authorities so that he could fulfill his mission.

But during his April 13 homily at the Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord's Supper, Pope Benedict said Judas is the clearest example Christians have of someone who refuses God's saving love.

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 said.

Purposefully ignoring the truth, he said, Judas "hardens, becoming incapable of conversion ... and throws away his destroyed life."