If you notice the media’s coverage of this so-called “Gospel of Judas,” they keep showing several old classic paintings of the infamous kiss of betrayal Judas planted on Jesus Christ shortly before His crucifixion.

Another time in the Bible where there’s a similar lying, insincere kiss given is in II Sam. 15:5 when Absalom steals away the kingdom from David with a kiss. Absalom was feigning loyalty and love to Israel in order to steal the hearts of the people away from King David.

Just after Judas Iscariot delivers his unholy kiss, Christ identifies him as “Friend” in what’s an intentional reference to Psalm 41:9: “Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me.”

From the account of Judas’ betrayal in John 13, we know Christ had given him sop, or bread, “and after the sop Satan entered into (Judas).”

When the Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians to “greet one another with a holy kiss,” he means to be genuinely caring and not a phony like Judas and Absalom.

“He’s saying, ‘Salute one another with a sincere honest greeting,’ ” explains my pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.), in a sermon I have on tape. “He's talking about having a genuine honest heart toward people. He’s saying, ‘Don't be like Absalom. Don't just try to win ’em with a friendly name tag and, ‘Welcome!’ ”

By example, Jordan told of a young married couple in his congregation who, upon first coming to believe in the gospel, had decided to attend a big evangelical church in their area. Upon attending their first service they were immediately befriended by an older married couple who happened to be long-time members of the church.

“This young couple told me how wonderfully impressed they were at first, and how important they felt because this older couple—the man was on the deacon board—recognized them and brought them into their home and did all this stuff, but then after about six months, the (older) couple hardly even spoke to them,” explained Jordan. “It turned out they had been ‘assigned’ to the older couple to kind of ‘get to know them.’ They were the church’s ‘welcoming couple,’ and after they had assimilated them in, they went on to doing the same thing with other new people at the church.”

Jordan said he’s attended seminars in the past for preachers “where they teach you how to welcome visitors, and how to keep them coming back, and, ‘If you can get ’em coming three times, they'll just keep coming,’ and all this marketing stuff.

“But what happened to this (young) couple is when they got on down the road, their eyes were opened up and they knew, ‘You know, those people didn't really love us. They didn't really care about us. They were just working the system.’ ”

In another example, Jordan told of a church member named Stan who had gotten saved when a Hammond, Ind.-based church’s bus ministry pulled into his rough neighborhood in Chicago one Saturday morning and the driver got out and knocked on his door as part of a canvassing of the residential streets.

“He introduced Stan to the gospel and Stan got saved,” says Jordan. “Stan began taking the bus an hour’s drive into Hammond and was real excited, praising the Lord. Then, after about two months, he found out the reason that bus captain was out winning people to Christ, filling his bus and taking them to his church, was because he was trying to win a cruise to the Caribbean.”

In a cover story I saved from the New York Times Sunday magazine a year ago, there was a profile of a growing mega-church in Surprise, Ariz., called Radiant, which unabashedly employed marketing techniques from the Rev. Rick Warren’s wildly influential manual for churches, “The Purpose-Driven Church.”

In the story, it said the pastor, Lee McFarland, a former high-paid Microsoft employee whose professed hero was TV mega-church pastor Joel Osteen, actually moved to Surprise with church-building aspirations after attending a Warren seminar.

“. . . Nearly all of the techniques (McFarland) has used to build his church—the informal marketing study; the communication cards; the self-deprecating, Everyman persona; even the untucked Hawaiian shirt—are taken straight from Warren’s playbook,” the Times article reported. “This is not plagiarism. Warren doesn’t copyright anything, and he describes his purpose-driven formula as an Intel chip that can be inserted into the metaphorical motherboard of any church. Some 30,000 churches across the denominational spectrum now define themselves as ‘purpose-driven.’ ”

Further in the article, it revealed, “Everything about Radiant has been designed to lure people away from other potential weekend destinations. The foyer includes five 50-inch plasma-screen televisions, a bookstore and a café with a Starbucks-trained staff making espresso drinks. (For those who are in a rush, there’s a drive-through latte stand outside the main building.) Krispy Kreme doughnuts are served at every service. (Radiant’s annual Krispy Kreme budget is $16,000). For kids there are Xboxes (10 for fifth and sixth graders alone). ‘That’s what they’re into,’ McFarland says. ‘You can either fight it or say they’re a tool for God.’ The dress code is lax: most worshippers wear jeans, sweats or shorts, depending on the season. (‘At my old church, we thought we were casual because we wore mock turtlenecks under our blazers,’ Radiant’s youth pastor told me.) Even the baptism pool is seductive. Radiant keeps the water at 101 degrees. ‘We’ve had people say, ‘No, leave me under,’ McFarland says. ‘It’s like taking a dip in a spa.’ ”