Quote from Forum Archives on April 25, 2006, 7:56 am

Posted by: bhfbc <bhfbc@...>

 

GRAPE NUTS

April 23, 2006

 

TEXT: Galatians 1:6-10

 

Has anyone here not heard of Grape Nuts? Anyone like them… besides me? Well, whether you like them or not, probably everyone thinks that this cereal has a strange name, because they contain neither grapes nor nuts. Yet, the name of the cereal is Grape Nuts. I wonder if anyone has ever bought it expecting it to contain the ingredients in its name. That would be disappointing. There is a reason for the cereal’s name. Its inventor, Charles William Post, said that grape sugar was formed during the baking process and described the cereal as having a nutty flavor. (www.kraft.com/100/innovations/ grapenuts.html)

Prior to Easter this year, there was a media frenzy over the new release of an ancient manuscript known as the Gospel of Judas. Like Grape Nuts, the name of this manuscript does not accurately describe the ingredients. It is not a “gospel,” meaning bearing the good news of Jesus. Neither was it written by Judas, since the date of the manuscript places it well after the death of Judas. And, since it contains discussions between Jesus and Judas that were to have been secret, it is not realistic to say that someone else wrote it on Judas’s behalf. Who else would have known the secret?

When I learned in seminary about the process that took place by the Church leaders and councils throughout the 2^nd through 4^th centuries A.D. that determined the manuscripts to accept as Scripture, I could not imagine that Christianity would have to face those debates again! Yet, here they are. It’s the same old arguments dressed up in newer clothing. In fact, it is not only the same old arguments that the early Christian Church faced; it is the same old argument that the disciples confronted.

In his letter to the Galatians, Paul gets to the matter quickly: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel - which is really no gospel at all.” Paul is right to be astonished. If the churches in Galatia - Galatia was a large province - had their start during Paul’s first missionary journey, they would have been formed about A.D. 47 or 48. Paul’s letter to the Galatians is dated late 48 or early 49. In two years at the most, these believers went from hearing and believing the truth about Jesus to being deceived into a “different gospel.” Paul continues, “Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ.”

The false teachers Paul confronted in this letter are often referred to as Judaizers. We won’t actually find that name in Scripture; the false teachers are not mentioned by any specific name by Paul. They have been named Judaizers because the false teachings that Paul addresses in Galatians is apparently an influence from certain Jewish legalisms, particularly circumcision. The message that Jesus suffered and died and rose victorious to forgive our sins was now being added to by these Judaizers. They were not exactly teaching that the gospel was false; they believed all of this about Jesus. But they added that in order for this faith to be made complete, believers needed to be circumcised. Paul, of course, confronted these teachings. He vigorously defended the original gospel message that the Galatians had heard. Writes Paul, “As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!” His final stamp on the truth in this letter is found in 6:15, “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is a new creation.” He refers, of course, to our becoming a new creation - born again - through Jesus Christ.

Galatians was the first of Paul’s letters included in Scripture, but it was far from the last. Most of Paul’s letters confronted and corrected false teaching. The teachers and the philosophies varied from place to place, but they all had the common trait of adding something to the gospel. The Judaizers added specific Jewish rites. Another group Paul, and other disciples, confronted are know as Gnostics. Now that sounds like “agnostic,” which is a person who thinks it is impossible to know there is a God or anything beyond material phenomenon, but the two are not the same.

Gnosticism is part of a group of beliefs called “mystery religions.” They are called that because they rely upon some hidden knowledge as the completion of salvation, if you will. Bible scholar F. F. Bruce describes the general pattern of the gnostic myth this way: “…a heavenly essence which falls from the upper spiritual world of light into the lower material world of darkness… is imprisoned in a number of earthly bodies. To liberate this pure essence from its imprisonment a saviour descends from the world of light to impart the true knowledge (gnosis); he is at once redeemer and revealer. By acceptance of the revealed knowledge, the pure essence attains release from the thraldom of matter and re-ascends to its true abode.” (F. F. Bruce, New Testament History, Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1969, p. 420) Catch all that? In plainer language, I hope, these disembodied spirits come from heaven and get stuck in our bodies. So they’re miserable, and we’re miserable because they want release and we want them to be released. Problem is, without the true, hidden knowledge, they cannot be released. We don’t know what this hidden knowledge is; it must come from a heavenly savior. Obviously, Jesus is a heavenly savior, and Gnostics accepted him as such. But in addition to the plain gospel - Jesus suffered, died, and was resurrected to conquer our sins - Gnostics believed that a hidden knowledge had to be added in order for salvation, or this releasing of the spiritual essence, to be complete.

Not only were elements of Gnosticism confronted by Paul and Peter and James, and clearly labeled false teachings, they were also confronted and rejected by the early Christian Church. Gnosticism in various forms continued to be a threat to the true Word of God, and early Church leaders sought to remove these false teachings from the Church. This was one of the major reasons why certain manuscripts circulating in the churches during the first four hundred years were selected as Scripture. Through a very rigorous process, letters and writings about Jesus and the Christian faith were studied and either accepted or rejected as authentic Scripture. There are those who want to label this process, which took place over 150 to 200 years, a “conspiracy.” I guess one can call it a “conspiracy,” but it was a very open process. Dissenting thoughts and beliefs were not summarily dismissed. They were heard and debated at length. The reason for choosing one text and rejecting another was laid open for anyone to know.

Many texts and manuscripts they considered were derived from Gnostic influences. Just as the disciples rejected these influences as false teaching, so the leadership of the early Christian Church rejected them. They gave them due consideration and study, but they still rejected them on very solid grounds.

Why bring all this up? Why try to teach about something as confusing and wrong as Gnosticism? Because that is exactly what this Gospel of Judas is all about. Contemporary Christians are being forced to once again confront this ancient false teaching. In the text of this manuscript, Judas asks Jesus to interpret a vision. Jesus answered, "Judas, your star has led you astray. No person of mortal birth is worthy to enter the house you have seen, for that place is reserved for the holy. Neither the sun nor the moon will rule there, nor the day, but the holy will abide there always, in the eternal realm with the holy angels. Look, I have explained to you the mysteries of the kingdom and I have taught you about the error of the stars; and . . . sent it . . . on the twelve aeons." And in the most revealing statement in the entire text of The Gospel of Judas, Jesus says to Judas, "But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." In other words, Judas would perform a service to Jesus by betraying him to those who would then crucify him, liberating Jesus from the physical body and freeing him as spirit. As the editors of The Gospel of Judas indicate in a footnote, "The death of Jesus, with the assistance of Judas, is taken to be the liberation of the spiritual person within." (Albert Mohler, “From Traitor to Hero? Responding to the Gospel of Judas,” April 7, 2006, www.crosswalk.com/news/weblogs/mohler /1387259.html?view=print)

I know that this can sound like a lot of “mumbo-jumbo,” but do you catch the Gnostic mystery religion prevalent in this? This is clearly in direct conflict with the Christian gospel and the New Testament, yet there are those who are attempting to rouse support for this document in order to reformulate Christianity. Writes Dr. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, “The resurgence of interest in Gnostic texts such as The Gospel of Thomas and The Gospel of Judas is driven by an effort, at least on the part of some figures, to argue that early Christianity had no essential theological core. Instead, scholars such as Elaine Pagels of Princeton University want to argue that, ‘These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion, and demonstrating how diverse--and fascinating--the early Christian movement really was.’ What Pagels and many other figures argue is that early Christianity was a cauldron of competing theologies, and that ideological and political factors explain why an ‘orthodox’ tradition eventually won, suppressing all competing theologies. Accordingly, these same figures argue that today's Christians should be open to these variant teachings that had long been suppressed and hidden from view.” (Albert Mohler, “From Traitor to Hero? Responding to the Gospel of Judas,” April 7, 2006, www.crosswalk.com/news/weblogs/mohler/1387259.html? view=print) This movement to challenge historical, orthodox Christian theology by “proving” that the Bible is filled with distortions and lies leads me to the same question I asked last week concerning denial of the resurrection among Christians: what is there to celebrate?

Fortunately, not all Bible scholars are intent on destroying the truth in Scripture. Dr. Mohler explains, “Metropolitan Bishoy, leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church, dismissed The Gospel of Judas as ‘non-Christian babbling resulting from a group of people trying to create a false 'amalgam' between the Greek mythology and Far East religions with Christianity . . . They were written by a group of people who were aliens to the main Christian stream of the early Christianity. These texts are neither reliable nor accurate Christian texts, as they are historically and logically alien to the main Christian thinking and philosophy of the early and present Christians…’ Simon Gathercole, a New Testament professor at Aberdeen University, defended the text as authentic, but relatively unimportant. ‘It is certainly an ancient text, but not ancient enough to tell us anything new,’ Gathercole explains. ‘It contains themes which are alien to the first-century world of Jesus and Judas, but which became popular later.’” In fact, it is of significant interest to note that this manuscript, which is made to sound like a new discovery by some, was known by the early Church leaders. Writing in the year A.D. 180, Irenaeus identified this text as a false teaching. (Albert Mohler, “From Traitor to Hero? Responding to the Gospel of Judas,” April 7, 2006, www.crosswalk.com/news/weblogs/mohler/1387259.html?view=print) What I conclude from this is that there are those who are purposely being deceptive in order to “throw [us] into confusion and [try] to pervert the gospel of Christ.” The bad news is that some will be deceived because truth has been allowed to be set aside for many years now. The good news is that there remain scholars and others faithful to God’s Word who are dedicated to honest scholarship that exposes the deceptions being inflicted upon us. For the sake of our future generations, we need to continue to seek out and learn about the hard work that has gone into identifying and preserving the truth that God has entrusted to us. Just as the early Christian churches needed Paul and the other witnesses to help them steer a straight course through the confusion of seductive false teachings, so the Church today needs those who are gifted with the knowledge and ability to refute the wiles of satan and his followers in their attempts to discredit the saving truth of the gospel of Christ.

I will continue eating Grape Nuts cereal in spite of the absence of grapes and nuts inside the box. But I will not be deceived into believing that the Gospel of Judas has anything to do with the gospel of Christ. “If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!”

 

Rev. Charles A. Layne
First Baptist Church
Bunker Hill, Indiana

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