Archbishop calls Judas text 'not a real Gospel'

Published: 2006-04-18

SANTA FE, N.M. (CNS) -- Santa Fe Archbishop Michael J. Sheehan has warned his people that the widely publicized gnostic Gospel of Judas is a heretical document that contradicts the teachings of the Bible. Writing in the May issue of the monthly archdiocesan newspaper, People of God, Archbishop Sheehan said the National Geographic Society, which sponsored an English translation of the ancient text and put the manuscript on exhibit in early April "did a disservice to Christian people and has exploited this old manuscript for its own purposes." In the early centuries of Christianity several breakaway sects, mixing Christian beliefs with pagan speculation, claimed that salvation could be obtained only through the knowledge and acceptance of certain arcane, divinely revealed mysteries that they alone possessed. The sects were called gnostic, after the Greek word for knowledge, and were rejected as heretical by the early church. The Judas manuscript is a third-century Coptic text, uncovered in Egypt in the 1970s. It may be the sole surviving version of a long-lost Greek text of the same name that St. Irenaeus condemned as heretical in A.D. 180.

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