In 1940, as the Germans invaded Norway, Vidkun Quisling, head of the Norwegian Fascist Party, announced a coup d’etat against his own Norwegian government. He subsequently collaborated with the Nazis and served as Minister President of Norway under the Nazi occupation from 1942 until the end of World War II in 1945. His name has become a synonym for “traitor” in English and several other European languages.

Now, imagine, that a short story written this year of 2013 surfaces claiming that Quisling is really a good guy, that he was actually working for the Allies, and that he’s been horribly misunderstood and slandered all these years. Would anyone pay any attention? Would anyone accept the rehabilitation of Quisling on the basis of a document written years after Quisling’s death, by someone who never knew Quisling and has no documentation or any other evidence to support a position that is at odds with all the other records of history?

Probably not.

And yet, each year around Easter the news media will trot out texts that have no connection to Jesus other than the fact that his name appears in them. For instance, not long ago the Gnostic Gospel of Judas received a lot of attention from magazines, websites, and newspapers. (And before that, it was The Gospel of Thomas, another Gnostic text.) But in reality, the Gospel of Judas has as much connection to the historical person of Judas as my proposed short story of 2013 has to Quisling–and yet people all over started wondering “maybe there’s something to it.”

Odd. Very odd. Maybe I could actually make a buck with a short story about Quisling, huh? Or maybe about Benedict Arnold?

Of course, the current nutjob President of Iran (along with the majority of the Moslem world) imagines that the Holocaust never happened. There are the willfully stupid who don’t think Al-Qaeda had anything to do with 911. There are people who believe the President of the United States was born in Kenya. There are the morons who don’t think anyone has been to the moon. And some fools believe that vaccines are bad, or that psychiatry is of the devil, or that eating certain fruits and vegitables will cure cancer. Sigh. So perhaps it’s not so surprising that there are pundits and others who think there might be something to the Gnostic literature. Ignorance and folly are widespread. And as Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”

So what is the Gospel of Judas? It is a Gnostic text written more than a hundred years after Judas’ death; and it is, to put it bluntly, simply made-up, the same way I recently wrote a novel about a nineteenth century patent medicine conman who comes into possession of a time machine. The Gospel of Judas was part of a genre of pseudo-gospels written from the second century onward, in which the authors simply invented the stories in order to perpetuate their aberrant beliefs.

And for those who might suffer romantic delusions about the Gnostics, imagining that they were unjustly labeled heretics by a domineering, patriarchal church bent on eliminating creative alternative interpretations to the narrow orthodoxy, let’s take a look at what the Gnostics actually believed.

They believed that the physical world was created by an angry god whom they identified with the God of the Old Testament. They argued that Jesus had been sent by a different god, who had nothing to do with the created world. Gnostics were polytheists.

Because they believed that the material universe had been created by an evil god, Gnostics strove to avoid all contact with the created world. They believed that matter was intrinsically evil. They abhorred the flesh and wished more than anything to be freed from the bondage of the body. They were generally celibate, and ascetic. They did not even allow the use of wine at communion, insisting only on bread. They also denied the authority of the Old Testament, and most of the Gospels. Their only scriptures were portions of Luke, and only ten out of thirteen letters attributed to Paul that are found in the New Testament. They rejected the rest of the New Testament.

Why did they reject the Old Testament and most of the New Testament? Because the Bible, both Old and New Testament, is filled with stories about the wonders of creation. God keeps saying that creation is good. Genesis 1:31 for instance, states “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” The Song of Songs describes and rejoices in the sensuous love between a man and a woman. In Acts 14, we find Paul preaching to the Greeks in Athens and telling them that the God he worships and has come to tell them about is “the God who made the world and everything in it.” The New Testament argues that the God who was the father of Jesus was the same God who had made the material world. In the Gospel of John, which the Gnostics rejected, Jesus’ first miracle (John 2) happened while he was at a party. They ran out of booze, so Jesus made more.

All the Gnostic sects seem to have condemned marriage. They believed sex was a bad thing. While they acknowledged that Jesus had been born of a woman, they claimed that Jesus had never touched Mary’s body or gotten any nourishment from her womb. Dan Brown’s popular novel, The DaVinci Code, reverses the beliefs of early Christians and the Gnostics. Early Christians would have seen nothing odd or wrong in Jesus being married and having children. After all, a basic Christian doctrine is that Jesus was fully human. What could prove that better than for him to have fathered children? What could have been more ordinary? But for the Gnostics, such a notion would have been shocking and completely vile, an idea to be opposed with every fiber of their beings.

The earliest Christians seem to have foreseen that something like Gnosticism would attempt to substitute itself for Christianity. In Paul’s first letter to Timothy he specifically warned about the false teachings that would arise that would forbid marriage, order people not to eat meat and to abstain from other foods. In opposition to such false notions, Paul asserted that God had created these things to be received with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:1-5). Paul believed that “everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected.” The Gnostic author of the Gospel of Judas would have been horrified by what Paul taught.

Gnosticism’s hatred of the created world, of sex, of eating, of essentially anything that is fun, sets it in direct opposition to Jewish and Christian doctrine from the first chapter of Genesis all the way through to the end of the New Testament. Gnosticism also tended to be misogynistic. For instance, the Gospel of Thomas, another Gnostic text dating from about the same time as the Gospel of Judas, concludes with this peculiar exchange, made up by its author, with no connection to anything in the New Testament:

“Simon Peter said to him, ‘Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.’
“Jesus said, ‘I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’”

This odd Gnostic notion regarding the status and value of women contrasts sharply with Paul’s statement (recorded in a letter he wrote to a church in Galatia) that men and women are equal (Galatians 3:28), or with the fact that wealthy women were the source of the finanacial support for Jesus and his disciples as they wandered about ancient Israel (as recorded in the Gospel of Luke 8:1-3).

The Gnostics were not the downtrodden, misunderstood members of a happier, freer, more vibrant version of Christianity, unjustly oppressed and suppressed by “the man.” Instead, they have more in common with our modern perception of Puritanism. H.L. Mencken, in Sententiae: The Citizen and the State, wrote of Puritanism that it is “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

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