c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) By sponsoring research on a document called the “Gospel of Judas,” National Geographic has transcended its musty image of piling up in waiting rooms and attics as the magazine nobody can throw away. This ancient text portrays Judas not as the traitorous apostle who hanged himself after betraying Jesus but, as The New York Times summarized it, as the figure “who helps fulfill salvation history by betraying his beloved Jesus at the Messiah’s own bidding.”

Before some novelist eager to churn out the next “Da Vinci Code” makes this into a biblical “Brokeback Mountain,” we might pause in Holy Week to understand that this look at Judas from another angle is not really news to the biblical scholars who have commented about it in recent days.

This discovery also highlights a significant insight into how we read all the books of the Bible. They are not written in the classic who-what-where-when and get-it-right style of morning newspapers and the nightly news. We read about real events, such as the crucifixion of Christ, in the Bible, but accounts of even such historic incidents are wrapped in the swaddling clothes of symbols and myth.

The Scriptures are not the sheet music of salvation whose individual notes are plucked on a one-string harp whose twang matches the dry and fruitless biblical plain. When we open the Bible, we enter a concert hall that is filled with transforming symphonic sound and melody. The conductor blends the strings, brass and tympani into a profound orchestral revelation that does not telegraph information bulletins to our minds but infiltrates our depths with mystery and transforms us spiritually.

We put ourselves on a spiritual hunger strike when we read Scripture as if it were a collection of news stories. We thereby deny ourselves the nourishment of its symbolic and mythical richness. To miss these meanings is, as mythologist Joseph Campbell once said, to eat the menu and skip the lunch.

What are the symbolic meanings in the story of Judas?

Campbell notes that Judas is “the counterplayer to Christ … who delivers him to his death, and himself dies in shadow. He is the Christ’s shadow. In the Christ figure, we have this motif all the time, the counterplayer against the light of the world. You cannot have light without the shadow; the shadow is the reflex of the light.”

In his master work “The Gospel According to John,” the late Raymond Brown notes that before his arrest “Jesus knows what is going to happen and goes out to meet his opponents. … Jesus had given Judas permission to leave the Last Supper to betray him; now he will permit Judas and his forces to arrest him.”

After this occurs, Jesus emphasizes that his destiny is not in the hands of Judas or anybody else, saying clearly that “No one takes (my life) from me, rather I lay it down of my own accord.”

John, Brown explains, is “interested in the symbolic value of Judas’ presence” in the garden, that is, in his expressing the contrast between light and shadow that constitute the signature notes of Christ’s suffering and death. A few verses before we learn that the betraying Judas “had gone off into the night.”

Brown, a Catholic priest, explains this is “the evil night of which Jesus had warned … the night in which men stumble because they have no light.” Judas’ rejection of Jesus the light of the world is underlined as he and his companions arrive with lanterns and torches.

“They have not accepted the light of the world,” Brown observes, “so they must have artificial light.” Jesus identifies his captors’ seeming triumph and its source, saying, “This is your hour and the power of darkness.”

Riveted by the drama of Jesus’ betrayal and arrest, we stand not only in the flickering light of the torches that eat away the shadows of the night but also in the deeper mystery of shadow and light that fall across this moment and all of time and history.

Judas is therefore a prominent figure in the history of salvation, a man trusted enough by the other disciples to carry their funds and to sit at their last meal with Jesus. It is no surprise that Jesus knew Judas well and understood what, in a sense, he commissioned him to do by allowing him to leave that feast to bring on his own arrest.

Judas cannot be understood, however, unless we see his symbolic significance as the one who could not accept the light and so turned Jesus over in the darkness. The spiritual meaning of Judas’ choice is not altered by this new discovery. Every day we choose to live in either the shadow or the light.

MO/PH END RNS

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

Editors: To obtain a photo of Eugene Cullen Kennedy, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.