JOHN LEO'S BLOG

It's a dud because it offers no convincing new information about Judas or Jesus. The story it tells has been known for many centuries. It was denounced by Irenaeus, an important Christian bishop, in A.D. 180 and rejected as an attempt by Gnostics to write their beliefs into a canonical text. Gnostics believed the physical world was evil and that Jesus, sent to Earth by a second god, asked Judas to inform on him so he could be freed from this world.

The notion that the Judas text "could challenge our different beliefs" is ludicrous. Richard Ostling of the Associated Press gave a loud ho-hum to the story because he is a sophisticated reporter on religion, probably the best in the country. (We were colleagues at Time magazine for many years. Ostling turned out superb stories, week after week.) In contrast, most reporting on the release of the Judas text was unbelievably bad, possibly because the media have eliminated so many religion reporters. This story was either kicked over to the science desk or dumped on an unlucky general-assignment reporter who failed to look busy when the top editor was scanning the newsroom.

The result was that major news outlets presented this small-bore story as an exciting and important breakthrough, possibly a refutation of much of the Jesus story. A few outlets sounded the note that the winners write history, meaning that a suppressed but true story written by an oppressed wing of early Christianity had finally surfaced. Elaine Pagels of Princeton, the all-purpose newsroom Rolodex source on religion, was once again trotted out to yammer on irrelevantly about diversity among early Christians and how the losers in early theological battles were labeled heretics. A different way of putting it is that the church exhaustively analyzed this Judas material and found this late and self-serving version of the Gospel unconvincing.

Last Friday, PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, which also featured the diversity-prone Pagels, was almost entirely pointless blather. Oddly, the Rev. Donald Senior, a blatherer on Lehrer, was sharp and informative in the Washington Times. Senior, president of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, said in the Times: "There is no independent historical tradition behind this text. [The writers] made its characters to be mouthpieces of their own theology." Earlier he told Ostling: "There are a lot of second-, third- and fourth-century gospels attributed to various apostles. We don't really assume they give us any first-century information."