Much is being made today of the “Judas Gospel,” a set of papyrus texts recently acquired by the National Geographic Society and authenticated as ancient, dating from about 140 years after Jesus. The texts were discovered in Egypt in the 1970s.

Judas was one of the Twelve, who were the core group of disciples of Jesus during his ministry. Canonical gospels agree that Judas betrayed Jesus for money paid by the Temple priests. Obviously, the “Judas gospel” wasn’t written by Judas, who committed suicide after Jesus was arrested in Jerusalem.

The Mercury News reports,

Judas Iscariot, long reviled as history’s quintessential betrayer, was actually the best friend of Jesus and turned him over to authorities only because Jesus asked him to, according to the Gospel of Judas, a long-lost document presented Thursday by the National Geographic Society.

The document, considered by some to be the most important archaeological find of the past 60 years, purports to record conversations between Jesus and Judas in the last week of their lives — conversations in which Jesus shared religious secrets not known by the other disciples.

It was ruled heretical by early church leaders because of its disagreement with the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Not quite. What happened is that by the middle of the second century Christians increasingly made a distinction was made between the apostolic time and their own. Also, there were so many writings claiming Christian authenticity that documents of genuine apostolic origin were being squeezed out. Through a complex series of episcopal meetings, by the fourth century the Church decided that only Gospels of actual apostolic origin should be considered canonical. That meant that writings well known to the Church, such as the Didache (Teaching of the Twelve Apostles), Gospel of Peter, First Letter of Clement, Letter of Barnabas, Apocalypse of Peter and Shepherd of Hermas, and now the so-called Judas gospel were excluded. They simply dated far too late to have apostolic authority. In the case of the Judas document (but not only it), they were works of imaginative fiction, novels basically, which could not form the basis of preserving the teachings of the apostles who had known Christ personally.

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Osama Saeed, a spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, asks in The Guardian just what all the calls for Muslim self-examination are about:

The position of Muslim organisations and mosques has been consistent for years. Killing civilians is murder, and a crime in Islam. We have consistently said that Muslims must help the police to track down those responsible.

This is why I’ve found it strange that many Muslim leaders have offered to look deep within our community now.

Maybe it’s because they better than he understand that there is a deep rot within much of modern Muslim rhetoric and practice that is both destructive and self-destructive. Many western Muslims have awakened to that fact, exemplified by among other things, the Iqra Learning Center bookstore in Leeds

Some of the 7/7 bombers hung out at the bookstore. …

Iqra not only sold hatemongering Islamist literature, but, according to The Wall Street Journal, was “the sole distributor of Islamgames, a U.S.-based company that makes video games. The video games feature apocalyptic battles between defenders of Islam and opponents. One game, Ummah Defense I, has the world ‘finally united under the Banner of Islam’ in 2114, until a revolt by disbelievers. The player’s goal is to seek out and destroy the disbelievers.”

Or consider the words of Ahmed Rashid, writing of London’s July 7 bombers,

Britain has allowed militant Muslim preachers freedom to preach their message of hate in the mosques, the meeting halls and the sitting rooms of British Muslims. Literature and videos promoting extremism have been allowed to spread deep into the Muslim community. While some outsiders saw this as typical British eccentricity or liberalism, foreign intelligence agencies have been furious with British laxity for some years.

The four July 7 bombers did not have to enrol in a Pakistani religious school or madrassa to learn about Islamic extremism, because it was available in Yorkshire. Experts now think it unlikely that the three London bombers who came to Pakistan last year enrolled in a madrassa to become ideologised. Instead, they arrived fully brainwashed and probably used their time making contact with al-Qa’eda and Pakistani militant groups to train in explosives.

Then there is Khalid Kelly, British resident and follower of radical cleric Abu Osama, who said,

“Some of the people tell you Islam is a religion of peace because they think that then you’ll want to convert. But you cannot possibly say Islam is a religion of peace; jihad is not an internal struggle.

“We can fight wherever, in Iraq, London, Paris, or Berlin. There is no such thing as innocents. The idea of the Islamic state is terror against anyone who doesn’t support Islamic ideology.”

There are many other Muslims who have been vocally critical of the growing tilt of mainstream Islam toward violence. Thomas Friedman quoted Husain Haqqani, author of the new book Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military,

Every week some courageous Arab or Muslim intellectual, cleric or columnist publishes an essay in his or her media calling on fellow Muslims to deal with the cancer in their midst. The truth tellers’ words also need to be disseminated globally. “The rulers in these countries have no interest in amplifying the voices of moderates because the moderates often disagree with the rulers as much as they disagree with the extremists,” said Husain Haqqani, author of the new book “Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military.” “You have to deal us moderates into the game by helping to amplify our voices and exposing the extremists and their amen corner.”

Other Muslims speaking against this trend include:

— Muslim activist Irshad Manji:

Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general for the Muslim Council of Britain, is an example [of Muslim denial about Ismalmist terrorism]. In the midst of a debate with me, he listed potential incentives to bomb, including “alienation” and “segregation.” But Islam? God forbid that the possibility even be entertained.

That is the dangerous denial from which mainstream Muslims need to emerge. While our spokesmen assure us that Islam is an innocent bystander in today’s terrorism, those who commit terrorist acts often tell us otherwise [italics added- DS].

- Pakistani Muslim Nasra Hassan’s delineation of the Islam-based (if not actually true Islam) motivations of more than 200 suicide-bombers in training or some who were apprehended or even survived:

[An imam] explained that the first drop of blood shed by a martyr during jihad washes away his sins instantaneously. On the Day of Judgment, he will face no reckoning. On the Day of Resurrection, he can intercede for 70 of his nearest and dearest to enter Heaven; and he will have at his disposal 72 houris, the beautiful virgins of Paradise. The imam took pains to explain that the promised bliss is not sensual.

- A Muslim who in October 2001 wrote that Islam had become its own worst enemy:

The struggle against violence in the Muslim world is much more than a struggle against murdering fanatics like the Taliban. Or despotic leaders like Saddam Hussein and Mahathir Muhammad. It is also a struggle against the Islamic movements whose simplistic and virulent rhetoric often ends up sanctifying the fanatics and demonises everything else in the absolutist, unquestioning terms of all totalitarian perspectives.

- Or a self-described “unhappy American Muslim” who says that

. . . one of the biggest problems in the Muslim world [is] the total inability to deal with any kind of criticism of Islam or its practices, no matter how kindly or sincerely it was intended. The legitimacy of any criticism is denied; either the criticizer, Muslim or non-Muslim, is part of the plot to destroy Islam, and/or working for Satan, the “Jewish/Zionist conspiracy,” or whatever nefarious organization dedicated to destroying Islam, and/or condemned as heretical/apostate. Whatever is said is “lies” and “slander” and “hate” regardless of its veracity.

Mr. Saeed is not even familiar with the voices of his own fellow Muslims, including British Muslims. Nonetheless, he plunges ahead:

Mr Blair has attacked the idea of the caliphate - the equivalent of criticising the Pope. He has also remained silent in the face of a rightwing smear campaign against such eminent scholars as Sheikh al-Qaradawi - a man who has worked hard to reconcile Islam with modern democracy.

Seriatim:

(1) The caliph of Islam’s classical age was a political ruler of an empire, the caliphate, that was gained almost exclusively by the sword. Within 81 years after the death of Mohammed, Islam came to dominate land masses from the Arabian Peninsula to the Atlantic Ocean. Muslim armies stormed into Europe from the east and the southwest. Spain fell under Arab domination in 713 and was not fully freed until 1492. In 732, an Arab army under Abd er Rahman marched toward Paris; it was defeated near Tours by Charles Martel.

The Muslim Ottoman Turks penetrated into eastern Europe as far north as Poland, and into Russia all the way to St. Petersburg, where there is still today a large, active mosque. Arab naval raiders reached England, the western coast of Europe and even Iceland. The West was almost constantly on the defensive; the cultural and religious survival of Europe was a close-run thing.

One of al Qaeda’s stated goals is to restore all the lands of the old caliphate to Islamic rule. For Mr. Saeed, living in Britain, to fail to understand why this idea is abhorrent to Europeans betrays severe historical un-awareness. Does he not realize how offensive the whole idea of the caliphate is to everything Britain holds dear? Saeed’s claim that opposing the restoration by force of a ancient military empire is equivalent to criticizing the pope is simply absurd and would be laughable if the subject weren’t so serious. We’re back to the unhappy American Muslim’s observation that for so many Muslims, Islam itself is sacrosanct and completely off limits to criticism. Finally, let’s face it, criticizing the pope itself is no offensive idea to millions of Westerners, it’s done all the time. Why, Mr. Saeed, should the caliphate be off limits?

(2) Sheik al-Qaradawi does indeed have a reputation - among Muslims - as a moderate, mostly because he insists on being described that way. He was once a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian, original Islamist movement of the 20th century and the prototype for almost every Arab terrorist organization since; it is Hamas’ direct sire, for example. And even the BBC reported al-Qaradawi defends suicide bombings against Israel.

Defending suicide bombings that target Israeli civilians Sheikh A-Qaradawi told the BBC programme Newsnight that “an Israeli woman is not like women in our societies, because she is a soldier.

“I consider this type of martyrdom operation as an evidence of God’s justice.

“Allah Almighty is just; through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have and and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do”.

Mr. Saeed, we do not accept the claim that al-Qaradawi is “moderate.” No longer will we parse one kind of Muslim terrorism from another. By his own words, Sheik al-Qaradawi is seen for what he is: an advocate of terrorism committed by Muslims against non-Muslims. This is your idea of “moderation?” And you fail to understand why he has been criticized? Mr. Saeed, you are showing yourself to be an unserious man.

But Mr. Saeed’s piece de la resistance is his closer about the bombings in London:

You can regard these acts as part of Islam, or as an irrational reaction to injustice taking place in the world. If it’s the former you have to explain why this started only 12 years ago and not 1,400.

Again, historical ignorance on Mr. Saeed’s part. “This” didn’t start 12 years ago, it did indeed start 1,400 years ago. The Islamic caliphate and the West have been in intermittent combat or open warfare since not long after Mohammed’s death. Only beginning in 1688, with the defeat of an invading Muslim army near Vienna, has there been anything approximating political peace. It lasted only a little more than 100 years, after which French and British armies invaded the Middle East in open imperialism (as well as power struggles between them).

Neither did “this” start only 12 years ago even in the sense Saeed means. Jihadism, an outgrowth of Islamism, has its roots in the 1980s, when Saudi clerics declared a general jihad against Soviet forces that had invaded Afghanistan.

Prof. Olivier Roy, author of Globalized Islam, wrote,

[T]he first generation of Al Qaeda left the Middle East to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. Except for the smallish Egyptian faction led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, now Mr. bin Laden’s chief deputy, these militants were not involved in Middle Eastern politics. Abdullah Azzam, Mr. bin Laden’s mentor, gave up supporting the Palestinian Liberation Organization long before his death in 1989 because he felt that to fight for a localized political cause was to forsake the real jihad, which he felt should be international and religious in character.

From the beginning, Al Qaeda’s fighters were global jihadists, and their favored battlegrounds have been outside the Middle East: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. For them, every conflict is simply a part of the Western encroachment on the Muslim ummah, the worldwide community of believers.

Second, if the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam.

If Mr. Saeed continues to insist that Islamist terrorism is an “irrational reaction to injustice taking place in the world,” then he’d best also admit that the injustice is taking place in Arab lands and acknowledge that terrorism, according to a Harvard University study, “is more more accurately viewed as a response” to the terrorists’ own “political conditions and longstanding feelings of indignity and frustration that have little to do with economic circumstances. We suspect that is why international terrorist acts are more likely to be committed by people who grew up under repressive political regimes.”

Perhaps now, Mr. Saeed, you understand why your own leaders have offered to look deep within your community as a seedbed of Islamist killers. Perhaps you should, too.

For the really ambitious readers among you, I have posted a 52-page opus in PDF form tracing the modern roots of Muslim jihadism and a history of the three stages of Arab terrorism in the last century. I have unoriginally named it, “Islamism’s war against the West.” It’s a work in progress for me.

See also a shorter companion piece, also a work in progress, “The Forever Jihad.”

Not long before the turn of the millennium, I wondered whether America was on the verge of a third Great Awakening. In the only sermon I preached about the then-impending new millennium, I used the movie, “The Truman Show” as a metaphor for America nearing the end of 1999:

Its premise was that a baby boy named Truman Burbank was adopted by a television corporation. A huge domed set was constructed over Truman’s hometown of Sea Haven and the surrounding coast lands. Truman’s friends and family – everyone he meets, in fact – are actors, all conspiring to keep Truman from knowing the truth.. He lives under the unblinking gaze of five thousand hidden TV cameras. Truman’s every moment is broadcast live to the whole world. The Truman Show is the most popular TV show ever.

But occasionally disorder creeps into Truman’s scripted world. One day as he is getting into his car, an object falls from the dome’s high ceiling and smashes into the pavement nearby. Truman picks it up. It is a spotlight marked, “Sirius.” A couple of times former cast members break into the set and cry out to Truman that his world is a fake before the on-set police hustle them away. Once, Truman breaks from his usual daily routine and discovers stage hands pushing set designs around.

Finally, Truman realizes that there is a beyond, away from Sea Haven. He steals a boat and sails toward the horizon, which he literally runs into. That’s it, on the cover of your bulletins. And that’s Truman, about to see for himself that there is another “there” out there, through that open door.

I think that most clergy like me had some high hopes that America would be religiously revived and for awhile after Jan. 1, 2000, we were encouraged because worship attendance did rise. Alas, it was temporary, just as the rise after 9/11 turned out to be.

Which leads me to Glenn Reynold’s observation about a potential Great Awakening on TCS:

Are we in the midst of a religious revival that will change the face of America, and the world? Some people on the Right hope so, while many people on the Left fear so. I suspect, however, that the trend will be less dramatic than either the hopeful or the fearful believe.

If recent history is any indication, he’s right. Glenn, though, is less concerned in his essay with the state of people’s souls than their politics. Despite the grinding away at gaining political power by the Christian Right (or so they are accused, anyway, by the Christian Left) and the breathless fears of columnists like Jack Kelly, Glenn is skeptical that folks like Christian dominionists I wrote about yesterday will ever become politically significant, observing,

In fact, the traditional American attitude toward religion — and especially religion in politics — might be summed up this way: “Religious, but not too much.” …

The decline of the Left as a political force in America coincided precisely with its shift from a politics of individual freedom to that of tut-tutting politically-correct nanny-statism. I suspect that if the religious Right decides to emulate the Left in this regard, its influence will evaporate in similar fashion.

Religious, yes. But not too much.

I think that’s about right. In 2002 I wrote an essay I called, “Bourgeoisophobia, Mather, Franklin and Lincoln,” sprung from David Brooks’ Weekly Standard piece, ” “Among the Bourgeoisophobes: Why the Europeans and Arabs, each in their own way, hate America and Israel.” I postulated that the philosophies of Puritan leader Cotton Mather and early-American success guru Benjamin Franklin form a dialectic tension within American culture that is not yet resolved today, but that some lessening of the tension may be gained by studying the political philosophy of Abraham Lincoln - which seems especially relevant in the time of the GWOT since it too was born of war.

The Puritan ethic and intense religion were the source of their industriousness, but contained the seeds of their own dissolution. “Religion brought forth prosperity,” Mather wrote, “and the daughter destroyed the mother.” Mather complained of conformist preachers who goaded their complacent congregations to amass wealth as an outward symbol of inward grace. With the experiment in the New World not even two hundred years old, Mather wrote that the whole enterprise was already undermined. He observed of Americans, “There is danger lest the enchantments of this world make them forget their errand into the wilderness.”

The Franklin Succession

The ideal of America as the Land of Opportunity was a true ideal. In Europe, labor was plentiful but status depended on land ownership. In America, land was plentiful and cheap, but skilled labor was scarce. From the earliest days, skilled workers commanded high wages and soon became major landowners. From the beginning, the American dream always had a substantial material base. Equality, freedom, and individual rights were important, but America’s main promise was improvement in one’s economic condition. The working political philosophy, which survives to this day, was that democracy really meant something only when it was accompanied by widespread opportunity to participate in economic abundance.

(This emphasis on material achievement, writes James Nuechterlein, has always been the serpent in the garden of American civilization. “Always there has been the fear that the material drive would overwhelm the idealistic vision, that prosperity was becoming not one goal but the ultimate end of American life. Americans have, in their self–critical moments, regularly invoked the biblical judgment on those who gain the whole world but lose their own souls.”

Benjamin Franklin has been called the patron saint of material success. Franklin secularized the American dream. The Puritans saw themselves as citizens of a City on a Hill, showing the world, like Jerusalem of old, the pure and correct worship of God in both church and society. Led by Franklin, American thinkers in the 1700s threw out this vision of heavenly inheritance for one of a secular city.

So Glenn’s thought that Americans want religion, but not too much, seems about right. The prospect of theocracy of any kind (or any other extremism) will find more than a very temporary foothold in American politics is dim, indeed. But fearmongering about it - like she did - always pays off, at least in the short run, and makes for great fundraising fodder.

Update: The fact that Americans are among both the most prosperous and the most religious in the world seems tangentially relevant.