National Geographic is getting a lot of publicity for its research on the Gospel of Judas, a heresy just in time for Holy Week. It’s actually quite interesting. But, in this age of the Da Vinci Code, I’m sure someone will soon be writing a bestselling novel about how modern-day descendants of Judas extract some rare, truth revealing, document from the Vatican library, or perhaps they will just sue the Vatican for defamation of character. Dan Brown or John Grisham, take your pick.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote two stories revolving around the tale of Judas, long before this new gospel was discovered. Both stories take the typical route in which Borges writes fiction about supposedly (and sometimes) real scholarly works. (If Borges were alive today, he probably would be up to all sorts of mischief inserting believable falsehoods into Wikipedia).
The first published in 1944 is Tres versiones de Judas, Three Versions of Judas about a gnostic scholar Nils Runeberg who published a study titled “Kristus och Judas”, which follows the premise that the “betrayal” by Judas was actually a sacrifice of Judas, one equivalent to the sacrifice of Jesus. Borges wrote “Judas refleja de algún modo a Jesús”, “Judas is somehow a reflection of Jesus”.
Thirty years later, in 1975, Borges published another story on the Judas theme, La Secta de los Treinta, The Sect of Thirty about a fourth century AD Latin manuscript in the library of the University of Leyden. Borges adds that Gibbon mentions the manuscript in a footnote to the 15th chapter of The Decline and Fall. (I don’t have a copy of Gibbon handy but I assume that it’s a false reference). The first paragraph of the story sets the context and the rest purports to be a translation of the ancient text, except for the final sentence which is one of Borges’ usual twists.
The manuscript is about a cult that worships both Jesus and Judas equally. The betrayal by Judas, thereby condemning himself to hell, was a premeditated act by Judas so that the divinity of Jesus could be demonstrated by the resurrection.
Find and read both stories this Holy Week, then ponder the actions of Judas.
April 12th, 2006 at 7:10 pm
A terrific post – it reminds us that sometimes it seems that Borges imagined most of our reality before it ocurred to us…
He often plays with this idea of betrayal: Caín y Abel, “La forma de la espada,” “Tema del traidor y del héroe”…
April 17th, 2006 at 5:27 am
I read Fictions some 20 or so years ago.
Then the other day I read an article, The comfort of a lie (IHT), about the Da Vinci trial, and how the novel’s fictional discovery in the Bibliotheque Nationale harks back to Dumas, and Three Musketeers, also said to be based on a discovery in the Royal Library, and which resulted in a similar legal case for plagiarism, and then Gide’s hoax novel, the Vatican Cellars, where he wrote: “Fiction there is – and history. We are indeed, forced to acknowledge that the novelist’s art often compels belief, just as reality sometimes defies it.”
Then came the news of the Gospel of Judas. It was a story I immediately found fascinating, the reversal of all we think we know, and all of a sudden the two articles made me think of Borges, and I bought another copy of Fictions.
Talking to people about the Judas discovery, even yesterday when both the Catholic and Anglican churches attacked it (and the Da Vinci Code) in terms that were remarkable for their vehemence in restating the Christian canon, – seemingly denying the gospel’s authenticity when in fact the 3rd century bishop who helped establish the canon explicitly describes what can only be the same text – I kept saying to people that the whole incident reminded me of a parallel universe in an (imaginary) Borges story where instead of being the bad guy, Judas is the good guy.
Imagine then my suprise when I downloaded some material to read about the Judas gospel, and, sleepless early this morning, started to read through it only to find a casual reference to an actual Borges story — in Fictions.
And now I’m reading the story for real.
National Geographic reports that the papyrus codex of the gospel has so deteriorated since 1945 when it was discovered that some parts are lost.
Thus: That Judas is entrusted with this task is a sign of his special status. “Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it,” Jesus tells him encouragingly. “The star that leads the way is your star.” Ultimately, Judas has a revelation in which he enters a “luminous cloud.” People on the ground hear a voice from the cloud, though what it says may be forever unknown due to a tear in the papyrus.
We are left with a hiatus.
Except that a National Geographic commentator speculates that since the Catholic church proscribed the Gospel of Judas, it must still have a copy of the text somewhere in the Vatican Library, or even (perhaps) in the Vatican Cellars.
June 16th, 2006 at 7:59 am
Fiction often precedes reality. In the case of Judas as the most trusted of the apostels, who makes the ultimate sacrifice, this idea circulated in esoteric circles already for some time.
But Borges would certainly have appreciated this confirmation of his story, and in fact he could have wrote the story of the manuscript of the Judas Gospel. Although Borges would never go through the trouble of actually writing the gospel itself; in his world a footnote to a fictional manuscript would suffice:
“The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary… More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.”
December 18th, 2006 at 10:26 am
[…] I novellen La Secta de los Treinta (De trettios sekt) skriver Borges om en heretisk sekt som ser Judas som frälsare: hans förräderi var nödvändigt för att Jesus skulle korsfästas och därigenom bli martyr. […]