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Who Are These Guys?

A sermon

by Yvette Marie Eber, Mdiv, MCE

Many years ago in the land of the Western Suburbs of Chicago a young novice began her career as a Christian Educator.  She had been hired by a church before she even began her degree and was nervous about following a professional CE director.  The retiring director met with the young woman to show her where all the supplies were kept.  While going through the poster file the young woman came upon twelve beautifully framed portraits.  Each gilt framed picture was of a man with a beard.  “Who are these guys?” the novice asked. 

The veteran answered, “Why those are the portraits of the twelve disciples of course.  You recognize them right?  Here is Peter and this one is Matthew,” and she continued so on and so forth.”  The novice was more than a little puzzled.  She asked the veteran, “How do you tell Peter from Matthew?  They aren’t marked.”  The veteran looked at her aghast and said, “You are registered for seminary right?” 

            As you may have guessed I was the novice.  I have now been to seminary and earned two degrees and you know what?  I still couldn’t tell the difference between Peter and Matthew. What I have learned was that I was right all along.  No one knows what these guys looked like.  Each image is recorded according to the tradition of the artist.  Although I think that in most pictures Peter appears to look like Peter Ustinov, and while a painting I saw recently of Matthew reminded me of John Rhys-Davis—you know the actor who played Gimli in the Lord of the Rings, to this day I would still need the portraits labeled. 

            The same confusion can occur over the theology and personalities of the disciples mentioned in the gospels.  Each gospel writer seems to have a slightly different Peter or a different motive for the betrayal of Judas Iscariot.  We compare the disciples portrayed in Mark and Matthew to the disciples in Luke and John and we ask, “Who are these guys?”  They seem different in each book according to the goals and the intended audience of the author. 

And the canonical gospels are not the only portrayals of the original twelve. There are the gospels that didn’t make it into the Bible such as The Gospel of Thomas, the fragmented Gospel According to Mary Magdalene and the recently released Gospel of Judas.  In April 2006 the Gospel of Judas was finally made public after years of rumors and speculation on what it contained.  Already my bookshelf is filled with books by theologians summarizing the theology of the Gospel and guess what…Judas and the gospel bearing his name are interpreted a different way by each book I have read. 

The facts not in dispute are as follows:  We know it was written in the second-century which means Judas could not have written it himself.  It was originally in Greek and then it was translated into an Egyptian form of Coptic based on Greek.  The copy of the Gospel that is currently all over the Christian and Archeological news has had an interesting journey of being found by peasants in a cave in Egypt in1970’s, making its way from antique dealer to dealer, stolen from one antique dealer, and finally being improperly stored in a bank vault in Hicksville, New York.  When the crumbling manuscript was finally put in the hands of professionals, a five-year process of restoring it piece by piece began. 

However, these people of the twentieth and twenty-first century who restored this gospel were not the first to read it.  Second-century church leader and prolific writer of early church doctrine, Irenaeus denounced it in writing, ordered the copies of it destroyed and anyone believing the theology of the Gospel of Judas was declared a heretic.  What was so threatening to the early church about this gospel that it disappeared from religious life from the second-century until the 20th? 

One key answer is how the Gospel of Judas portrays the original twelve disciples.  Professors and theologians Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King are co-authors of Reading Judas:  The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity.  In the introduction to their book Pagels and King say that their first impression of the Gospel was “aversion to the Gospel’s sometimes strident, mocking tone and slanderous accusations.”  But being theologians they worked to get past their first impression and found that the gospel was filled with wonderful images of Jesus’ teachings and spiritual life.  That left Pagels and King with a question? Why all the rage by the Gospel's author, and why such a negative portrayal of the other eleven disciples?

The answer is in the violence of the second-century church which was the context of its author.  The author of the Gospel of Judas was angry and was agonizing over the martyr deaths of Christians in the early church at the hands of the Romans and most importantly the church leaders who seemed to be glorifying martyr deaths.  According to Pagels and King the author of Judas was saying that the Christian leaders who called on their fellow Christians to glorify themselves that way were murderers.  They misunderstood Jesus’ teaching and were worshipping a false God. The Gospel of Judas was written so that the other eleven disciples represent the early church fathers that the author was denouncing-church fathers such as Irenaeus.  Irenaeus while holding the office of Bishop of Gaul, taught that to die a martyr’s death was to perfect oneself, ensuring that God will reward martyrs by raising them physically from the dead.  The Gospel of Judas disputes that teaching with a strident and mocking tone.  The author of the Gospel of Judas thought there should be no shame in fleeing a martyr’s death if possible and that believers were perfected spiritually by believing and acting in the world and that there was no resurrection of the body, but resurrection of the spirit.  The author of the Gospel of Judas has all the disciples, except Judas, as misinterpreting teachings of Jesus and worshipping a false God who required suffering.  Here is the kicker for Irenaeus, since Bishops in the second century claimed their power by tracing their teachers back to the original disciples, to disparage the characters of the disciples inside the Gospel of Judas was to directly attack the second-century church fathers and their teachings.  The early church relied on a direct connection to the disciples of Jesus for leaders to rest their authority upon. 

The Gospel of Judas challenged the leadership of the early church.  It claimed that the church leaders were misinterpreting Jesus in teaching that God willed the suffering of God’s people for their own good.  The author of Judas is claiming this teaching makes the teacher “complicit in murder” in human sacrifice.  The author of Judas is putting forth the radical theology (by second-century terms) that Jesus asked Judas to help him demonstrate to humanity that when they have to step beyond the limits of physical existence they will “step into the infinite-into God.”  It boldly taught that people are not saved by dying as martyrs “but only by accepting God’s forgiveness and standing fast against those who teach error and violence.” The writer of The Gospel of Judas goes even a step further in by portraying Judas Iscariot as the first martyr of the church. For the gospel has Judas Iscariot not commiting suicide but being stoned to death by the other disciples. 

 No wonder Irenaeus, Bishop of Gaul, denounced The Gospel of Judas.  It is a direct attack on the doctrine of the church he is leading.  Irenaeus’ anger on reading a gospel where Judas Iscariot is the only disciple who truly understands Jesus must have been a reaction worth seeing . . . or better yet a reaction worth burying your writings for another time and fleeing.  As a former high school history teacher I can truly testify that history as we know it is usually written from the view point of the winners, and therefore the viewpoints of the so called losers must be ferreted out.    The Gospel of Judas was not the only writing denounced by early church leaders.  Pagels and King’s book really excited the history, archeology buff in me with the following sentence “Like the Gospel of Judas, many books were buried in jars or hidden in graves, preserved for a distant future in which their silenced voice might speak.”  Truly that is a sentence worthy of an Indiana Jones movie.  The finding of The Gospel of Judas gives us a glimpse into the life and death struggles of the early church from the viewpoint of the theology that was silenced. 

Pagels and King write, “Over the last 150 years or so, we have gained access to over forty gospels, letters and other early Christian works.  We can now see more clearly that the early history of Christianity was a tumultuous time of intense reflection, experimentation, and struggle involving every fundamental issue.”  They go on to say that the church leaders were distressed over the diversity of theology between Christians and the differences of opinions separating Christians.  Wow, thank God we no longer have that problem, huh? 

The Gospel of Judas is not unique in the  elevation of one disciple over another. 

            All these different disputes and power trips can leave your head spinning and you asking, “Who are these guys?”  Which Gospel got the personalities right?  What is it that the disciples have to teach us in the name of Jesus Christ?

            The first thing we learn from every depiction of the twelve disciples is that The Good News of Jesus Christ, unconditional love, grace and salvation, and a kingdom of God as no further off then inside of us, is real.  They put their lives on the line, they faced persecution, imprisonment, the destruction of their daily lives as they knew them before Jesus, and eleven out of the original twelve were supposed to have died a violent death.  Why would they risk so much unless somehow, something happened to change these people from scared fishermen, tax collectors, and overlooked women to leaders of the church after the resurrection?  “Something happened” is one of my favorite quotes from our Tuesday morning Bible study.  Something happened to change these people to make them devote their lives to the teachings of Jesus and risk their lives.  That something was the work of God through Jesus Christ which was then entrusted to disciples.  Jesus himself sent all twelve disciples out to preach and heal. Judas went out to preach and heal. History and tradition traces these leaders after the resurrection over much of the known world founding churches.  Something happened to them and it is worth attention and study.

            The second thing we can learn from the varied descriptions of the disciples is that the church was fighting for its very survival in a hostile environment.  The authors of the gospels knew a world that consisted of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans, of the persecution of Christians that was rampant from the death of Jesus until the Emperor Constantine legalized all religions sometime around the year 313.  The people fighting for the survival of the church were human beings.  They made mistakes, misinterpreted God and provoked infighting.  Again, a good thing we in the twenty-first century don’t make those mistakes today. 

I have made Irenaeus and the early church fathers sound pretty much like the bad guys of the second-century church but in reality Irenaeus and the others were leaders who were charged with the survival of the church.  He was one of the leaders who thought that the marks of the true church were creed, clergy and canon.  These second-century church leaders weren’t villains.  They were fearful for the survival of the church and felt that only by unity amongst all believers would the church survive.  Irenaeus was a disciple of his time just as we are disciples of our time.

            The third thing we can learn from any portrayal of the disciples is that the church can survive diversity.  Believers have disagreed from the beginning of time and believers still disagree today.  However, people of hope know that the teachings of Jesus Christ survive the actions of humanity.  The church universal has survived the fighting for power of Peter and Paul, and each of them with Mary Magdalene.  The church has outlived the Holy Roman Empire.  The church has survived even though the second-century church leaders suppressed any theology they did not agree with.  The church has survived the divergent portraits of the twelve disciples in all gospel writings. The church has survived the crowned heads of Europe and the Protestant reformation.  The reason for the survival is because the church is made up of disciples, flawed, imperfect, disciples created by God in God’s image, placed in God’s world and struggling with free will to do as God wants.  As the living disciples of today we are called to go forward discussing divergent thinking, embracing diversity or maybe admitting where we are failing to embrace it.  As living disciples we are called to study our history from the viewpoint of the so-called winners and and also from those that have been silenced.  As disciples we should not fear that new archeological, sociological or historical discoveries may undermine our faith.  We should study them fully, completely and ask what they teach us.  We are people of hope, people of the Good News of Jesus Christ with the Kingdom of God at hand and we are disciples.  Our faith may waver and we may struggle but no arguing over diversity or newly discovered artifacts can destroy it--only enlighten us.  In the case of the Gospel of Judas we see our history revealed and are given the honor of asking how does this inform our faith today and in the future?  We get to delve into the varied portraits of who these people are, how they lived and how the teachings of Jesus informed their actions and their faith. 

            Being a disciple is a responsibility--a responsibility for living our lives according to the teachings of Jesus.  At times we are daunted by the task just like the original twelve disciples. But Paul in a moment of clarity tells us to fear not “For Christ himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. You are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.  And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling, in which God lives by his spirit.”  With God as the cornerstone the portrait of any disciple can inform and teach. 

 

© 2007:Yvette Marie Eber, Illinois