The Scandal of the Scrolls, Part VI: The Codex Conundrum 3

The Gospel of Judas The name Judas has come to epitomise the most appalling treachery and betrayal. It may be surprising therefore to learn that many Gnostic Christians treasured a text called The Gospel of Judas, claiming that it was to Judas alone that Jesus revealed the truth about God, the creation of the world, and what the future held for the mass of humanity. In this part of our series we will explore this ancient document as well as other apocryphal writings that provide an insight into the range of alternative Christianities they reveal.

The Sad Tale The traditional New Testament story is familiar: Judas Iscariot was one of the Twelve Apostles, but he betrayed Jesus to the Sanhedrin in the Garden of Gethsemane by kissing him and addressing him as “Rabbi”, thus identifying him in the darkness to the officials who had come to arrest him. It seems that Judas did this for thirty pieces of silver, but that he tried to return the coins when he realised Jesus was to be crucified. He was rebuffed, Jesus went to his fate, and Judas died horribly, either by hanging himself or by “falling headlong, bursting asunder so that all his bowels gushed out” (Matthew 27; Acts 1:18).

Ambivalence On the surface, Judas seems to deserve his notorious reputation, although there is now some ambivalence. For example, in Dante’s Inferno Judas is condemned to the ultimate Ninth Circle of Hell where he is chewed up in the Jaws of Satan for all eternity, while by the 1960s he had become a tragic anti-hero whose anguish and torn loyalties overshadow a comparatively one-dimensional Jesus, as depicted in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar and other modern works.

The Gospel Such ambivalence reflects two fundamental facts. (1) Considered theologically, Judas’s betrayal set in motion the events that led to Jesus’s Crucifixion and Resurrection, thus bringing salvation to humanity. (2) At the Last Supper, Jesus made it clear that he knew he was to be betrayed, and yet went forward to his fate (Matthew 26:25; John 6:64, 13:27–28). Obviously there is a bigger (indeed cosmic!), context within which this episode and Judas’s role in it has to be understood.

Discovery Providing this context was very important for the Gnostic Christians and other dissidents in the Early Church, and this was the function of The Gospel of Judas, a Coptic-language version of which was discovered in the mid-twentieth century. It was withheld for decades as antiques dealers pushed up the price, and suffered terrible damage before it was eventually purchased by the Maecenas Foundation in Switzerland, a small team of scholars reconstructed it, and an English translation was published with great fanfare by the National Geographic Society in April 2006.

Irenaeus The Gospel of Judas has been known about since at least the second century, when Irenaeus denounced his Gnostic opponents for making the extraordinary claim that Judas alone among the Apostles comprehended the full truth of the cosmic drama in which they were all caught up, and that Judas “accomplished the mystery of the betrayal [so that] by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thrown into dissolution”. These outrageous heretics, Irenaeus complained, had “brought forth a fabricated work to this effect, which they entitle The Gospel of Judas”. It was then hunted down and suppressed until it re-emerged 1800 years later.

Anti-Gospel Judas is really an “anti-gospel”. That is, it presents a completely contrary version of the events surrounding the Last Supper, and it offers a sharp Gnostic critique of the orthodox Christianity of the time, depicting a very different, indeed irascible, Jesus. For example, he seems to have a dismissive attitude towards his disciples. At one point, he found them “sitting together and praying over the bread they were to share, and Jesus laughed”. The disciples said to him: “Master, why are you laughing at our prayer? What have we done?” He answered: “I’m not laughing at you. You’re not doing this because you want to, but because your God desires praise.” In other words, Jesus is laughing at the futility of prayers being offered to what the Gnostics saw as the Jewish God, the God of the Old Testament—Ialdabaoth, the Demiurge—the inept creator and warden of this fallen world in which the souls of the Children of Light are trapped. 

Anger The pronouncement that the God of the disciples is not the God of Jesus angers them, and they challenge Jesus. He responds: “Let whoever is strong among you bring forth the perfect human being and stand up to face me.” He wants to know whether any of the disciples belongs to the saved and can expound the special gnosis that opens the path to salvation. None dares to answer, except one: Judas Iscariot. Averting his eyes, he stands before Jesus and declares: “I know who you are and where you’ve come from. You’ve come from the immortal realm of Barbēlō, and I’m not worthy to utter the name of the one who’s sent you.” And then Jesus, knowing that Judas had some perception of exalted matters, said to him: “Come away from the others and I’ll tell you the Mysteries of the Kingdom. It is possible for you to reach that place, but you will suffer much grief.” “And after he told these things [to Judas] Jesus left.”

Futile Sacrifice Later, Judas offers a critique of a contemporary version of Christianity, which appears to have been proto-orthodoxy, denouncing what it claims were the needless sacrifices to “the Lower God”—the Demiurge, Ialdabaoth, the God of the Old Testament. Jesus is depicted as confronting the disciples as they explain: “Master, we’ve seen you in a great dream last night … We saw a great house, with a great altar, and twelve people who were priests. And a crowd of people was waiting at the altar. Some fast, others sacrifice their children, others their wives, praising and humbling themselves among each other. Other men sleep with men, others murder, yet others commit many sins and do criminal things. And in all their sacrificing they invoke your name” (cf. 2 Peter 2), as if this invocation of the name of Jesus would excuse such sinful behaviour.

Led Astray When they’d said this, the disciples fell silent because they were troubled. And this anxiety only intensified as Jesus explained their dream to them: “It is you who are the ones receiving the offerings on the altar you’ve seen. And it’s not the True God but the Ruler of Chaos that you serve, and you’re the twelve people you’ve seen. And those you saw brought in to be sacrificed are the faithful you led astray.” And Jesus predicts that these disciples won’t be saved even if they cease this shameful behaviour, and that “the Lord over the entire universe commands that they be put to shame at the End of Days”. Jesus makes it clear that the invocation of his name will not bring salvation, and that it is only the spiritual elect, the true Gnostics, that can look forward to such deliverance.

Return Judas is one of these, The Gospel of Judas declares, leaving the mass of humanity to its benighted fate. And it is because Judas is part of the spiritual elect that Jesus is able to teach him the full meaning of Jesus’s mission in the world, and the nature of salvation. Above all, such salvation doesn’t involve repellent practices that are fatally entangled with the physical world—namely, sacrifices and a ritual communion invoking “cannibalism”, the consumption of the “body and blood” of Jesus. Where the canonical Gospels insist that Jesus had to die in order to atone for the sins of humanity, The Gospel of Judas explains that this sort of substitutionary justice pleases only the Lower God, and that the One, the True God, is gracious, does not demand any sacrifice, and wishes only for the return of the divine sparks trapped in the material world.

Many Trials But Judas has many trials to face before he can enjoy the divine bliss of the “holy immortal race” to which Jesus reveals he belongs. In a dream, Judas sees himself being cast out and stoned by the rest of the Apostles, and he also comes to realise the misery that the unredeemed mass of humanity is doomed to suffer.

The Secret Gnosis And it is at this point that we come to the pedagogical core of The Gospel of Judas. Here, Jesus reveals to an increasingly astounded Judas the secret gnosis that comprehends the origin, nature and destiny of the universe: “Jesus said, ‘Come and I’ll teach you about the mysteries that no human will see, because there exists a great and boundless realm whose horizons no angelic generation has seen, in which is a great invisible Spirit [that is, the One, True God], which no angelic eye has ever seen, no heart has ever comprehended, and it’s never been called by any name.’”

The Myth Sadly, parts of this section of the manuscript are missing or damaged, but to a considerable extent it seems the cosmogony that Jesus describes corresponds to the Gnostic Myth discussed in earlier parts of this series. In addition, Jesus emphasises the tyrannical role played in ruling the world by the minions of the Demiurge—the “powers and principalities”—whose defeat his Crucifixion and Resurrection will ensure.

Night Falls By the end of his exposition night has begun to fall, and Jesus addresses Judas: “Tomorrow they’ll torture the one who bears my image [but] truly I say to you, no hand of a mortal human will fall upon me [because they’ll only] sacrifice the human who bears me.” This is Docetism; by this, Jesus means that he is eternal spirit in essence and that he has only entered a mortal physical body to accomplish his great purpose; therefore, it is only this bodily vehicle that will suffer and die, not Jesus.

The Ultimate Message Jesus then predicts the defeat of the “powers and principalities” and “the evil they sowed” in this world. And he thus discloses the ultimate message of The Gospel of Judas: the sacrifice on the Cross will set in motion a series of events that will lead to the defeat of the Demiurge and its minions, the dissolution of the current world order, and the liberation of humanity from their tyranny and the dictatorship of Fate.

Jesus’s Last Words Finally he offers his last words to Judas: “You’ve been told everything. Lift up your eyes and see the cloud with the light in it and the stars around it. And the star that leads the way is your star.” “Then Judas looked up and saw the luminous cloud, and he entered it … And Judas didn’t see Jesus any more.”

The Betrayal And soon the moment arrived, as The Gospel of Judas recounts: “There was a disturbance among [the] Jews [and] the high priests muttered because Jesus had gone to pray. But some scribes were there watching closely so they could arrest him during this prayer, because they were afraid of the people, since they all regarded him as a prophet.” “And so they approached Judas and said to him, ‘Are you not a disciple of Jesus?’ And Judas answered them and told them what they wanted to know. Then Judas received some money and handed Jesus over to them.”

Morning Dawns And so The Gospel of Judas ends, its author assuming his readers know only too well what happens next, as the morning dawns and the Crucifixion awaits.

The Gospel of Peter The Crucifixion looms as one of the great iconic moments in history, depicted in innumerable works of art and literature across the centuries, its meaning endlessly debated. This was especially the case in the early years of Christianity, as various parts of the movement struggled to cope with the paradox of horror and hope that it represented. The Gospel of Judas was an attempt to make sense of it from the viewpoint of the hated figure whose apparently traitorous actions set the vast cosmic drama into motion. Another apocryphal work, The Gospel of Peter, used the event as a vehicle to expound particular theological doctrines, while also offering an extraordinary denouement as Jesus exits the tomb, as we’ll now see.

Docetism Earlier we mentioned Docetism (“Illusionism”), the belief that Jesus, being a divine being, only appeared to be human. This was a type of doctrine that was prevalent amongst some branches of the Early Christian Church, but was eventually condemned as heretical. Basically, it was an attempt to resolve a number of important questions in Christian theology. Above all, it tried to explain how a divine being, the Son of God, could become manifest as a human being and do what human beings do, such as work, talk, interact with other people, get hungry and tired, suffer and, above all, die. As early Christians grew increasingly to believe that Jesus was divine, they also needed to understand how he could have suffered and died so horribly on the Cross.

Solutions Docetism tried to solve this problem by asserting that Jesus was not really human at all. There were two main versions. (1) One insisted that because Jesus was divine he could not have had a physical human body. Therefore, his body was a phantasm and he only appeared to be a flesh-and-blood person. This also meant that Jesus could not physically suffer, and what happened on the Cross was an illusion. (2) The alternative version claimed that “Jesus” was indeed a material, flesh-and-blood person, but “Christ” was a separate spiritual entity who entered the body of “Jesus” in the form of a dove at his baptism, empowered him to perform miracles, but abandoned him before his suffering and death on the cross (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46). What happened on the Cross was no illusion, but it affected only the human Jesus, not the divine Christ.

Identification It seems that Docetism was first identified by Bishop Serapion of Antioch (r. 191–211), who discovered the doctrine in a mysterious Gospel of Peter being used by a nearby Christian community. It had always seemed strange that Peter had left no gospel or epistle, as he was one of the most prominent of the Apostles, and Jesus had even declared him to be the rock on which he would build the church. And so the discovery of this book was welcomed—at first. But then Bishop Serapion discovered this heretical doctrine lying at its very heart. It seems to have arisen as an attempt to understand the theological meaning of a crucial sentence from The Gospel of John, 1:4: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” The doctrine was roundly condemned, The Gospel of Peter was declared apocryphal and heretical, and was comprehensively suppressed, with all copies being destroyed.

Exception Except for one, as we’ll see. The Gospel of Peter was mentioned occasionally in ancient Christian writings. For example, Origen of Alexandria (c. 184–253) suggested that it might explain that the “brothers” of Jesus mentioned in the New Testament were actually sons of Joseph from a previous marriage; while the Christian historian Eusebius of Caesarea made it clear in his history of the church that it had no place in the canonical New Testament. Consequently, until the late nineteenth century it appeared that nothing of the shadowy gospel had survived and that its contents would remain a mystery.

Discovery Then, in the winter of 1886–1887, French archaeologists discovered an excerpt of the gospel in Greek in a tomb near Akhmim, Egypt. Scholars of early Christianity were amazed; a portion of the lost Gospel of Peter, denounced by Bishop Serapion some 1700 years earlier, had finally come to light. It opens with Jesus on trial and goes on to describe the Crucifixion, Burial and Resurrection of Jesus, before breaking off.

Blame Shifting Notably, it attempts very hard to shift the blame for Jesus’s death away from the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, and onto the Jews, who are portrayed as clamouring for Jesus’s execution. And it’s now the Jew Herod, not the Roman Pilate, who orders that Jesus be taken away and crucified. Later the Jews refuse to break Jesus’s legs as he is being crucified, thus prolonging his suffering, and when Jesus dies, the Jews are described as jubilant. Later, they are shown realising their mistake and their guilt, and beating their breasts, lamenting: “Woe to us because of our sins. The judgment and the end of Jerusalem are near,” harkening forward to the future destruction of their city and its Temple. On the other hand, The Gospel of Peter virtually turns Pontius Pilate into a believer. After his soldiers report the Resurrection and declare that “He actually was the Son of God”, Pilate tells the Jews, “I am clean of the blood of the Son of God; it is you who decided to do this.”

Why? Why were Christian authors so eager to exonerate Pilate and blame the Jews? There were several reasons. (1) Tensions between the Jews and the Romans in Judaea had become increasingly inflamed as they entered their era of warfare, and the nascent Christian Church was anxious not to attract the anger of the victorious forces. (2) Christianity was quickly developing into a religion that was theologically, liturgically and institutionally distinct from Judaism, especially in the post-war period. (3) Christians were growing increasingly bitter about the failure of the Jews to believe in Jesus, and the gospel writers projected that rejection back into Jesus’s own lifetime. (4) One big problem was that Jesus had been executed by a Roman governor as a dangerous rebel, and they had to neutralise any implied threat to Rome. Consequently, as soon as the Christians started to write about Jesus’s death, their narratives minimised Pilate’s role and maximised that of the Jews: Jesus was innocent of the charges against him, and the Roman governor Pilate knew that; Pilate was not really responsible, the Jews were.

Docetism But Peter also significantly developed the Docetic tendency. Not only does it depict Pilate confirming Jesus’s divinity as the Son of God, but other characters also refer to Jesus in this way. But one detail is extremely important. In the New Testament Gospel of Mark (15:34) Jesus cries out as he dies: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The author of Peter amends this to: “My strength, O my strength, you have forsaken me!” This indicates that the human being on the Cross, Jesus, has suddenly become aware that the spiritual Christ that had empowered him through his ministry had left his body, leaving him as a frail, helpless, merely physical man nailed to a cross. This is the scenario described by Jesus in The Gospel of Judas, as we saw earlier.

The Resurrection We come now to a really astonishing moment. The Gospel of Peter’s emphasis on the divinity of Jesus climaxes in its description of the Resurrection. The New Testament does not contain any accounts of the moment of Resurrection but focuses on the empty tomb and the post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus. In contrast, Peter actually describes the very moment Jesus emerges from the tomb. It paints an extraordinary picture.

Strange Apparitions According to Peter, Jesus lay dead in the tomb, and two soldiers stood guard at its entrance as the third day dawned. Suddenly, a great voice came from the heavens and they saw the sky split asunder and two angels descend. The great stone blocking the tomb’s entrance rolled away and the celestial apparitions entered. Astonished, the soldiers alerted their commander and a group of Jewish elders who were also there. And this is what they witnessed: They saw three figures emerge from the tomb, two of them supporting the third, with a cross following behind them. And as they emerged, the trio assumed their full angelic and divine stature, with the heads of the first two reaching up to the sky, while the head of the third went up above the heavens. And then the soldiers heard a voice from the skies: “Have you preached to those who are asleep [that is, those faithful who have died]?” And a reply came, not from the angelic trio but from the cross! “Yes,” the cross replied to the voice in the sky.

Keep Quiet All of this was reported to Pilate, who unsurprisingly reiterated firmly, “I am clean of the blood of the Son of God”, but told the soldiers not to say anything about what they’d seen so as to “not inflame the Jews” who would surely stone them if they heard what had happened. Once again the anger and potential violence of the Jews are emphasised while the involvement of the Roman authorities is minimised.

Enter Mary After this amazing account, the narrative in this extract from The Gospel of Peter fizzles out. However, before it does so it briefly describes the role played by Mary Magdalene in this drama, and it is to a detailed account of her role that we now turn.

Dubious Disciples We saw earlier how The Gospel of Judas depicted Jesus’s original disciples in a very negative light, and it seems its author was conforming to a censorious view about this group that emerged in the Early Christian Church, as recorded in the canonical Gospels. As one prominent historian (Bart Ehrman, in Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene) summarises this New Testament evidence: “One betrays him, another denies him three times, and all abandon him and run for their lives”, when Jesus is arrested (Mark 14:50). Sadly, “these are the twelve men who have spent the entire time of Jesus’ ministry with him, who repeatedly show that they don’t realize that Jesus’ mission is to die on a cross [and] that if they want to be his disciples they must take up their crosses and follow him” (Mark 8:31–33; 9:31–32). Instead, apparently oblivious to the real meaning of Jesus’s mission, “they discuss, repeatedly, who among themselves is the greatest and who will have the superior roles in the future kingdom. In other words, despite Jesus’ repeated assertions, they think following Jesus will lead not to a cross but to a throne” (Mark 10:35–40).

Fade Away And so, instead of stepping forward to form a vanguard in this crucial moment, the disciples fade into the background and not a great deal is subsequently heard about them. Instead, it is an unnamed woman who anoints Jesus’s body for burial (Mark 14:3–9); it is an outsider, Simon of Cyrene, who takes up and carries the cross for Jesus (Mark 15:21); it is a pagan Roman soldier at the foot of the Cross who confesses that Jesus is the Son of God (Mark 15:39); and it is a previously unknown figure, Joseph of Arimathea, who cares for Jesus’s dead body (Mark 15:43–46). And who is it that is recorded as the witnesses to these events? None of the Apostles, but rather some of Jesus’s loyal female followers (Mark 15:40–41, 47). And the most prominent among them is Mary Magdalene.

Apostle of the Apostles Mary Magdalene came to play a notable role in the apocryphal New Testament writings, some of which were rediscovered amongst the Nag Hammadi Library and other recent archaeological discoveries. She went on to assume an important role in later Christian devotional history, and this gained momentum after 591 AD when Pope Gregory I delivered a series of Easter sermons that conflated Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany (Luke 10:39) and the unidentified “sinful woman” who anointed Jesus’s feet in Luke 7:36–50. The purpose was to magnify Mary Magdalene’s role and identify her as a repentant sinner. She became increasingly important over the centuries and is now considered a saint in the Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran and Eastern Orthodox churches. In 2016, Pope Francis decreed that she be regarded as the “Apostle of the Apostles” because it was she who met the risen Christ and carried the news of his Resurrection to the Apostles (John 20:18).

The Gospel of Mary Once again, a new perspective on these events is provided by these discoveries, in this case by The Gospel of Mary. Much of this has been lost but a significant portion was preserved in the Berlin Codex, a Coptic-language volume discovered in Cairo in 1896 but only published in 1955 due to various wars and other events. Even then, it attracted little attention until the Nag Hammadi discoveries hit the scholarly scene in the 1970s. As well as The Gospel of Mary, the Codex also contains the Apocryphon of John (the main source for the Gnostic Myth), The Wisdom of Jesus Christ (a treatise that records Jesus’s metaphysical teachings) and a summary of the Acts of Peter. Roughly half the text of The Gospel of Mary has been lost, including the first six pages and four from the middle, significantly a section where Jesus imparts some important teachings. Some other fragments appeared in 1938 and 1983.

The Peace Within The first section of Mary records Jesus answering questions from his disciples about the nature of the world and sin. Jesus explains that the material world has no ultimate reality and will eventually dissolve. He also explains that “there is no such thing as sin; rather you yourselves are what produces sin when you act in accordance with the [passions]”. He continues: “Acquire my peace within yourselves! Be on your guard so that no one deceives you by saying, ‘Look over here!’ or ‘Look over there!’ [for the Kingdom of God]. For the child of true Humanity exists within you. Follow it! Those who search for it will find it.” He then tells them: “Go then, preach the good news about the Realm.” He then departed from them, and according to this Gospel, these were Jesus’s final words.

Mary Appears It is in the second section of the text that Mary Magdalene appears. Once again the disciples are depicted in a negative light; petrified that they might share Jesus’s grim fate: “They were distressed and wept greatly. ‘How are we going to go out to the rest of the world to announce the good news? If they did not spare him, how will they spare us?’” They were a pathetic group, but then “Mary stood up, greeted them all, and addressed her brothers and sisters: ‘Do not weep and be distressed nor let your hearts be irresolute. For his grace will be with you all and will shelter you. Rather we should praise his greatness, for he has prepared us and made us truly human.’” Thus fortified by Mary’s courage, “they began to debate about the words of the Saviour”.

Mary’s Vision Presently, Peter said to Mary, “Sister, we know that the Saviour loved you more than all other women. Tell us the words of the Saviour that you remember, the things which you know that we don’t because we haven’t heard them.” Mary responded, “I will teach you about what is hidden from you.” And she began to describe a vision she had that evokes themes from the Gnostic Myth, emphasising the roles played by hostile spiritual powers in the heavens through which the soul must make its way to its divine destination. She also relates how Jesus explained it: “I said to him, ‘So now, Lord, does a person who sees a vision see it with the soul or with the spirit?’ And the Saviour answered: ‘A person does not see with the soul or with the spirit. Rather the mind, which exists between these two, sees the vision and that is what …’” And here—frustratingly and presumably not accidentally—the next four pages are missing.

The Soul’s Ascent When the text resumes, Mary is in the middle of explaining how the human soul ascends through the heavenly spheres controlled by the hostile spiritual powers: “When the soul had brought the third Power to naught, it went upward and saw the fourth Power. It had seven forms. The first form is darkness; the second is desire; the third is ignorance; the fourth is zeal for death; the fifth is the realm of the flesh; the sixth is the foolish wisdom of the flesh; the seventh is the wisdom of the wrathful person. These are the seven Powers of Wrath.” Mary explains how the hostile Powers continued the interrogation but the soul replies: “What binds me has been slain, and what surrounds me has been destroyed, and my desire has been brought to an end, and ignorance has died.” It appears the soul has shed all that attaches it to this lower world; that it will reach its ultimate divine destination; and can finally “rest in silence”.

The Apostles Object The Gospel of Mary makes it clear that only she amongst all the Apostles fully understands Jesus’s true teachings—that is, has grasped the secret saving gnosis. But the Apostles object to her speech, confirming their ignorance, with Andrew complaining: “Say what you think about what she said, but I do not believe the Saviour said this, for these teachings are strange ideas.” Peter has similar concerns: “Did he really speak with a woman in private, without our knowledge? Should we listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?”

Mary Weeps At this, Mary wept and said to Peter, “My brother Peter, what are you imagining? Do you think that I have thought up these things by myself in my heart or that I am telling lies about the Saviour?” Quickly, Matthew came to Mary’s defence, rebuking Peter: “Peter, you are always angry … If the saviour made her worthy, who are you to reject her? Surely the saviour knows her well. That is why he loved her more than us.” Placated, the Apostles went out “to teach and preach”, with what success we don’t know. And on that note, The Gospel of Mary ends.

Latecomer And we turn now to Paul. Paul wasn’t present at the Crucifixion, the Resurrection or the immediate aftermath. Indeed, he was initially a fierce opponent of the nascent Jesus Movement but was converted to its cause after a transformative mystical experience on the road to Damascus. Thereafter, he became a key figure in the Early Church, both in terms of formulating its theology and in carrying out a massive missionary effort. Many scholars consider him to be the “second founder” of Christianity as we know it.

Paul in Anatolia The Acts of Paul is one of the earliest and most important of the New Testament apocrypha. It was written around 160 AD by an author inspired by the legendary missionary work of Paul in Anatolia. Significantly, it doesn’t use the canonical Acts of the Apostles as a source but relies instead on oral traditions about Paul’s activities. Its overriding theme is that Roman society is corrupt and oppressive from top to bottom, but that God cares for and protects the faithful who are victimised by it. It seems the author was a local priest and the book emphasises how important for salvation are chastity, virginity, sexual continence and purity. While generally regarded as doctrinally orthodox, it did advocate female ministry, including preaching and baptisms, and this led the leading Church Father and major misogynist Tertullian to declare it heretical, a verdict confirmed when the Manicheans started using it.

Disruptive Influence Throughout The Acts of Paul he interacts with various families and households. Some of these support Paul and his mission, but others are dysfunctional and require Paul’s healing. Some are seriously disrupted by Paul’s involvement, usually when he persuades wives or children to become Christians and to break away from the rest of the family.

A Bad Case of Oedema For example, Paul cures a man named Hermocrates of a nasty case of oedema, and he and his wife Nympha then convert to Christianity and receive baptism. However, this outrages their son, Hermippus, who was hoping his father would soon die and he could collect his inheritance. He and his friends plot to kill Paul, but the scheme results in the death of another son, who Paul resurrects miraculously. Undeterred, Hermippus renews his attack on Paul, armed with a sword and accompanied by friends with clubs. Paul warns the young men that God will protect him: “I am a slave of God,” he declares, “alone and a stranger, small and meaningless among the polytheists. But you, O God, look down upon their plots and do not let them annihilate me.” God then strikes Hermippus with blindness. This causes him to repent: “The world is nothing,” he declares. “Money is nothing. All possessions are nothing.” Paul then restores his sight and he too becomes a Christian. The entire family reconciles, and they go on to collect and distribute food and money to widows.

Christian Romance The Acts of Paul is a novel or romance that addressed a literate and intelligent audience. In its common structure such a tale had two people meet and immediately realise they are meant to be together forever, only to be torn apart and condemned to a series of adventures that repeatedly test their commitment until they finally achieve their destiny. In their Christian versions, such works shared many of the genre’s concerns with conflict, danger, escape, love, magic and consummation.

Renunciation However, the Christian variety contrasted with the pagan versions in striking ways, preaching sexual renunciation instead of consummation. Whereas the pagan romances ultimately confirmed the sanctity of the pagan versions of marriage and marital devotion as the foundation of the empire’s social fabric, books like The Acts of Paul promoted strict sexual renunciation and devalued family life. They illustrate how the gospel of Christ undermined the conventional social fabric of family and community, all for the sake of the greater truth of heaven and the world above.

Paul Described Indeed, The Acts of Paul turned the pagan value system upside down. This is famously illustrated in the tale of Paul’s female protégé, Thecla, and her dramatic and socially disruptive conversion to Paul’s doctrine of sexual renunciation. This tale is set in Iconium, where Thecla lives as a young woman from a wealthy, aristocratic family, who is about to get married. Presently, Paul arrives in the city (cf. Acts 13:51) and the text provides the sole surviving physical description of Paul, quite possibly based on oral tradition: “he was a man of middling size, his hair was scanty, his legs were a little crooked, his knees were projecting, he had large eyes, his eyebrows met, his nose was somewhat long, and he was full of grace and mercy; at one time he seemed like a man, and at another time he seemed like an angel”.

Transfixed Paul begins to preach his sermons on sexual renunciation in the house next door to Thecla’s. Thecla can hear his teachings from her window and watches as “many women and virgins go in to meet Paul”. She remains transfixed for three days as Paul preaches his gospel that eternal life will come to those who abstain from sexual activity, even within marriage. Soon, “she desired to be considered worthy herself to stand in Paul’s presence” and left her home to join his entourage. Clearly, in this “anti-romance” it is Thecla and Paul who are meant to be together, albeit in a strictly spiritual not carnal sense.

Absolute Devotion Unsurprisingly, Thecla’s mother, Theoclia, and her fiancé, Thamyris, are appalled as they see their young girl lured away by this sinister figure that everyone agrees must be a sorcerer using “love spells” to bewitch women. Soon, other wives and brides-to-be are also converted to sexual renunciation by Paul, and Thamyris and the other men have the governor throw Paul into prison. However, Thecla is undeterred and displays her absolute devotion to Paul by bribing the guards to gain access to him, falling at his feet and kissing his manacles. Furious, Thamyris and Theoclia demand that the governor punish the pair. Paul is sentenced to be scourged and expelled, while Thecla is to be burnt at the stake, so that “all the women who have been taught by this man may be afraid”. However, just as she is about to ignite, God miraculously intervenes, dousing the fire with a thunderstorm, and Thecla is set free.

Naked Paul and Thecla (dressed as a man) then travel to Antioch, where she is accosted by Alexander, a local nobleman who wants to have his way with her. His high status is indicated by his great golden crown encrusted with jewels and images of the emperors. This she knocks off his head as he tries to embrace her. Humiliated, he contrives to have her condemned to be torn apart by the wild beasts in the arena. There, “the stranger” is paraded before the audience as a subversive “destroyer of holy things”. However, when she is stripped naked, the flames at the stake flare up to protect her modesty, and even “the governor wept and marvelled at the [holy] power that was in her”.

Baptism As she prepares to face the beasts, Thecla realises that she will soon die and that she has not been baptised. Seeing a tank of water filled with man-eating seals (!) she throws herself in and baptises herself. Then, just as the ravenous seals are about to consume her, lightning strikes the tank and electrocutes them, leaving Thecla unharmed. All the other beasts are killed or driven off by a lioness who becomes her protector. The governor realises Thecla has divine protection and sets her free.

Finale In the finale, Thecla once again seeks Paul, finds him, and receives his blessing to teach the word of God. Her mother is also reconciled to her, and Thecla moves to Seleucia, where she has a long and happy career as a firmly celibate healer and preacher of the Gospel, living in a cave for seventy years. In a final act of reconciliation according to the conventions of the romance genre, she journeyed to Rome and lay down beside the tomb of Paul, her mentor and teacher. A popular cult surrounding Thecla developed and continued through the Middle Ages, with women seeing her as a model to be followed in their daily lives. She is venerated as a saint in many Christian churches, and there are many pilgrimage sites dedicated to her.

Key Themes The major themes in Thecla’s story are clear: passion and desire are not properly directed in pagan society; their proper object should not be sexual partners but God and Christ, pursued under the guidance of the Gospel and its ministers like Paul. Only those who reject this world and its transient pleasures and distractions will find the Truth and achieve a right standing with God, both now and for eternity. Sadly, the rest of a society wallowing in its pagan delights rejects all of this; the Christians are condemned as socially disruptive, and are hated and persecuted. Fortunately, as the tale of Thecla demonstrates, God protects the faithful and miraculously vindicates the truthfulness of the message they seek to live by. It is unsurprising that Christianity was viewed as a dangerous superstition in the early centuries of the Roman empire, in what became for Christians the great age of persecution.

Paul in Rome Nowhere is this persecution pursued with more zealotry than in Rome, and The Acts of Paul concludes with an account of Paul’s fateful journey to the capital of the evil empire. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Paul was arrested in Jerusalem when he caused a riot and, as a Roman citizen, he was transported to Rome so that Nero could hear his case. Although it is not stated, it is implied that Paul died there as a martyr. The Acts of Paul seeks to fill in the story.

Warm Welcome In Rome, Paul is warmly welcomed by the Christians there, and he preaches his message to appreciative crowds. But once again he intrudes into the affairs of a prominent household—in this case, the household of the emperor! One of Nero’s favourite slaves, a cup-bearer named Patroclus, listens to Paul preach while sitting in a high window. Thanks to the wiles of Satan, Patroclus falls to his death. When Nero hears this news, he is devastated. Predictably, Paul raises Patroclus from the dead and when he arrives to serve wine at dinner, Nero is shocked: “Who brought you back to life?” he demands. “Christ Jesus, the king of the ages,” Patroclus replies, and explains to Nero that this Christ Jesus will destroy all kingdoms. He also identifies himself and four more of Nero’s favourites as new soldiers of this divine king.

Confronting Nero Although Nero loves these men, he is alarmed and has them imprisoned and tortured. He then has Paul brought before him. Confronting Nero, Paul tells him that Christ recruits his soldiers from every kingdom and that no wealth or power will spare Nero from divine judgment. Nero then has numerous Christians burned alive, but he orders that Paul be beheaded because of his legal status as a citizen. Paul tells Nero that he will appear to him after his execution and goes on recruiting new Christians right up until his death. These include his guards after Paul warns them that they will perish in the coming destruction of the world unless they become believers in Christ.

The End of Nero After his death, Paul appears to Nero as he promised: “Caesar, behold Paul, the soldier of God,” he declares. “I have not died but live. Many dreadful things will happen to you because of the righteous Christians you have killed.” Terrified, Nero releases the remaining Christian prisoners, including Patroclus the cup-bearer. Nevertheless, soon after this ghostly confrontation, Nero’s murderous reign comes to an ignominious end, and so the Christians of Rome were avenged.

Fantasy Of course, none of this happened. Nero was overthrown and then forced to flee dressed as a peasant. Cornered, he tried to commit suicide but lacked the willpower and needed a servant to help him. Otherwise, The Acts of Paul is a fantastic re-visioning of history, a heroic tale designed to fortify the nascent Christian movement as it entered the most horrendous period of persecution in its history.

The Foreigner From beginning to end, The Acts of Paul depicts a militant Christianity that sought to disrupt and overthrow the pagan social order. Paul is “the Foreigner” discussed previously—the spiritually enlightened person who is an alien presence in this benighted world. His mission is a simple one: he preaches a single God who will bring the current world order to an end, bringing destruction to pagan idols, those who worship them, and those enslaved to money and sex. Salvation will come only to those who believe in Christ. It was this stark message that Early Christianity brought to an unwelcoming pagan population in the first three centuries of the Roman empire.

Next Up All of this material enjoys a provenance that goes back to the earliest years of the Christian religion, and yet it reveals a starkly different picture from that that has been traditionally handed down. In the next and last instalment in this series we will review the “Scandal of the Scrolls” and the “Codex Conundrum” and their unprecedented implications for contemporary Christianity.

This is the sixth instalment of a seven-part series. The first five parts appeared in the March, April, May, June and September issues, and the seventh will appear shortly. Mervyn Bendle is the author of Anzac and its Enemies: The History War on Australia’s National Identity.