The forthcoming release of The Gospel of Judas by National Geographic will open up another round of the ongoing “controversy” about the origins of Christianity - and what really happened when the bloke from Nazareth got nailed up by the Romans.

According to the advanced publicity (as reported in the mainstream press) the book will “shed new light on the historical figure of Judas” - according to yesterday’s Australian, for example, Judas may “be on the verge of a moral makeover.”

The translation is due for release around Easter, and the advance publicity is sure to maximise sales - as the Da Vinci Code proves, anything which reflects on mainstream Christianity is likely to prove a best seller, particularly if a controversy can be attached to it.

But what will the book actually contain?

It’s difficult to say without an actual copy of the book - but what it will almost certainly not contain is accurate historical depictions of the Apostles and of Jesus.

If the provenance of the book is as advertised, it’s a copy of one of the many religious texts which existed in the early churches.

While the Gospel of Judas would be described as “non-canonical” now, it’s important to understand that, at the time of its appearance, here really wasn’t any such thing as a unified Christian Canon (there still isn’t, in actual fact).

The advance material is saying that the Gospel of Judas is a text which was used by the Cainites, one of the early Gnostic sects. What the book is likely to contain can be inferred from what we know about the Cainites.

And what do we know about the Cainites?

Bugger all.

Like most of the early Gnostic sects, we have most of our information about them from their enemies. In this case, they get a chapter from Irenaeus in Against Heresies, a brief mention by Tertullian in On Baptism and sod all else.

Irenaeus says,

Others again declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to themselves. On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator, yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.

And very little else, except for summing up their beliefs by saying,

Wherefore I have laboured to bring forward, and make clearly manifest, the utterly ill-conditioned carcase of this miserable little fox

Which is poetic, but hardly informative.

Because they ultimately failed, groups like the Cainites didn’t leave any organisational records. There are no internal records of their size, their structure, their preaching methods - and, unforunately, there are no remaining polemic works like those of Irenaeus, where they defend their positions and attack their critics.

The little we are able to infer from the works of their opponents is very simple, theologically.

They were Gnostics. They believed, basically, that the creator god was the villian of the piece. The creator (or Demiurge) created the material world to trap a portion of the Divine Essence within it. They believed that the goal of humankind should be to escape the material world and reunite with the Divine.

We also know that Irenaeus accused them of holding similar beliefs to the Carpocratians - namely that, in order for the Divine Essence (trapped with the human body) to escape the material world, it must go through every possible human experience, good and bad.

They also hold, like Carpocrates, that men cannot be saved until they have gone through all kinds of experience. An angel, they maintain, attends them in every one of their sinful and abominable actions, and urges them to venture on audacity and incur pollution.

It’s difficult to say what that actually meant for their behaviour, but Irenaeus seems to think that this meant they had sex a lot. That’s what he usually meant by “pollution.”

In addition, like the Carpocratians and the Marcionites, they rejected the Old Testament as being the work of the Demiurge.

They took their name from Cain, on the basis that if the Demiurge of the Old Testament didn’t like someone, they must be OK. And as Cain was the first human to fall badly afoul of the Demiurge after the Garden of Eden debacle, he must have been pretty damn cool indeed.

The move away from the Hebrew Bible (and the Demiurge), therefore, was an important part of the message of Jesus for the Cainites, and they believed that the larger Christian sects were making a mistake by retaining it in their teachings.

The physical death of Jesus was a good thing. Only through his death could Jesus transcend the material world and become a part of the Divine once again - his execution by the Romans, then, is a positive thing.

And, therefore, Judas wasn’t such a bad bloke. He knew things that the other Apostles didn’t, and carried out the divine will by ensuring that Jesus got nailed up.

The Gospel of Judas presumably makes this theological point at some length…

To be continued in a in a day or so…