Back in April, the National Geographic provided the world with the annual Eastertime attack on Christianity in the form of promoting and hyping the “Gospel of Judas.” I posted “White Teeth” (reposted below) with video of a Judas apologist and some links worth clicking.
Ben Witherington follows up with information on the thorough debunking of this book, the fact that National Geographic had scholars sign nondisclosures in order to protect their exclusive and were uninterested in subjecting their theory to peer review, and that it turned out to say the exact opposite of what it’s supporters claimed.
As many of us have been saying for some time, the author or authors of this document were not Christians at all. They were anti-Christians, and they had a very serious ax to grind against orthodox Christians and their faith, including having a major problem with the idea that Jesus’ death atoned for the sins of the world. More to the point, and more importantly, this document is far too late to add any new historical information at all about the historical Jesus or the historical Judas, and the obvious bias of the document would have ruled it out from doing so even it was a century older than in fact it is.
It is time to stop talking about ‘lost Christianities’. For one things, scholars have known about the Gnostics, the Ebionites, the Marcionites and others for centuries. Neither Gnosticism nor Marcion’s movement has any serious historical claims to have begun during the time that the original eyewitnesses and apostles of Jesus lived. Indeed, there is no good historical evidence either existed before the second century A.D. And it is especially unhelpful to call something a form of early Christianity which is in fact antithetical to the claims made about Jesus and his movement by our earliest and best sources for the study of early Christianity– the documents that ended up in the New Testament. If one is ‘Christian’ the other is not, or else the law of non-contradiction must be deemed to have ceased to function in the discussion of earliest Christianity.
An excellent resource about the early church and the doctrine of Christ is For Us and for Our Salvation: The Doctrine of Christ in the Early Church 
White Teeth – Posted on Apr 07, 2006 There was an interview with Professor Marvin Meyer on CNN this morning about the Gospel of Judas, which will be the subject of a TV special on the National Geographic channel Sunday, April 8, and the cover story on the magazine this week. Marvin Meyer is known for Gnosticism and for his participation in the Jesus Seminar. His latest effort to dilute Christianity and lead people down a false path is the Gospel of Judas. He seems a great deal more interested in the “spiritual” than in the biblical.Professor Meyer describes the gospel of Judas as “rich and lovely.” Dogs find the taste of antifreeze pleasing, but it’s not a good idea to feed it to them, as it will kill them. The Gospel of Judas might seem equally inviting, but it’s something that people will do well to avoid.
In another interview, the professor was asked if he had a favorite saying in The Unknown Sayings of Jesus. He replied,
Yes—Saying 194, “The Dead Dog’s Teeth Are White”:
“Malik, son of Dinar, said this: one day Jesus was walking with his followers, and they passed by the carcass of a dog.
“The followers said, ‘How this dog stinks!’
“But Jesus said, ‘How white are its teeth!’”
I can’t think of a better analogy for the false doctrine Professor Meyer promotes. The dog’s teeth may have been white, but the dog will never use them again. These feel-good false gospels put a pretty smile on death.
UPDATED: Ben Witherington III, professor of New Testament interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary was interviewed in the NYT about the gospel of Judas and discussed it in his blog. One point in his excellent post was:
Much of what Jesus is depicted as saying in the Gospel of Judas the historical, thoroughly Jewish, resurrection believing Jesus could never have said. In other words it is revisionist history being done by a splinter group of Gnostics.
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