When the story broke on this so-called “Gospel of Judas,” the newspapers and television news outlets immediately latched onto this one author, Elaine Pagels, for her critical opinions on the subject.

Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University who is frequently trotted out by the media as a supposed expert on the Bible, was thrilled with the contents of the bogus Judas gospel written by heretical Gnostics. She gave it all kinds of credence.

In return, the New York Times saw fit to give her a highly coveted op-ed column to propagandize this satanic manuscript that obviously completely betrays the Bible’s record and the character of Jesus Christ.

Under the headline, “The Gospel Truth,” Pagels wrote in the April 8 Times piece, “What is clear is that the Gospel of Judas has joined the other spectacular discoveries that are exploding the myth of a monolithic Christianity and showing how diverse and fascinating the early Christian movement really was. “Startling as the Gospel of Judas sounds, it amplifies hints we have long read in the Gospels of Mark and John that Jesus knew and even instigated the events of his passion, seeing them as part of a divine plan. Those of us who go to church may find our Easter reflections more mysterious than ever.”

First of all, these Gnostic writers weren’t part of the “early Christian movement” because they weren’t Christians. They were the enemies of Christ the Apostle Paul warns about all through his epistles written to the early Christians. Early church father Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons, actually mentioned a Gospel of Judas in his anti-Gnostic work Adversus Haereses, dated around 180 A.D., writing that there were some who “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. . .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 fictional history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.

As a Wikipedia.org article on all this explains, “This is in reference to the Cainites, a sect of Gnosticism that especially worshipped Cain as a hero. The Cainites, like a large number of Gnostic groups, were semi-maltheists believing that the god of the Old Testament — Yahweh — was evil, and a quite different and much lesser being to the deity that had created the universe, and was responsible for sending Jesus. Such Gnostic groups worshipped as heroes all the Biblical figures which had sought to discover knowledge or challenge Yahweh's authority, while demonizing those who would have been seen as heroes in a more orthodox interpretation.”

Of course, this damning information is “mysteriously” left out of much of the coverage by the media, which now pushes all sorts of irresponsible journalism in obvious attempts to debunk biblical accuracy.

As an article on the website ProfessorBainbridge.com aptly observes, “If you don't read the news accounts relating to the much ballyhooed Gospel of Judas carefully, you might come away with the impression that it is a legitimate alternative to orthodox Christian theology. Indeed, National Geographic is essentially billing it as such. . . So why is the National Geographic peddling heresy at this precise moment in time? I'll give you a hint: May 19, 2006. It looks like a cheap attempt to cash in on the Da Vinci Code phenomenon just as the movie is about to be released.”

In a book I have from 1996, “Genesis; A Living Conversation,” in which PBS journalist Bill Moyers shares a series of round-table discussions he leads on stories from the Book of Genesis, Pagels proves she has no real grasp at all of what the Bible says.

Discussing the account of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Pagels reasons, “What strikes me is that God warns that on the very day you eat of this fruit, ‘you shall surely die.’ But the serpent speaks more accurately, saying, ‘You will not die’—and, of course, they do not. . . It’s not just that He’s not omniscient, it’s that He and the serpent give different pictures of what will happen, and both are incomplete.”

Any student of the Bible knows that what Satan, as the serpent, feeds Eve is The Lie, which is that she can act independently of God’s Word and be as God, living free from any consequences. They also know that God’s warning of, “You shall surely die,” is a reference to mortality and the fact that Adam and Eve’s lives would no longer be eternal because of the entrance of sin.

The point is when God breathed into Adam the “breath of life,” he was created to live forever. That’s what the Tree of Life was all about!

Further showing her total lack of comprehension of this primary Bible lesson, Pagels, who actually acknowledges that what bothers her about God is the “limitations of His knowledge and the competitiveness with His creatures, and His punitiveness,” pontificates, “The creation stories show humankind as if we were quite distinct from nature. Then it blames all of our participation in nature—the suffering, pain and death—on human fault. That’s an amazing claim—that suffering, pain, and death exist because humans have failed morally, not because these conditions are built into the nature of the universe.”

Genesis clearly tells us sin entered the world through Adam and, consequently, everything God created was cursed. Also, it is only man who was created in the image of God, meaning he is distinct from nature.

As Bible scholar Dr. Noah Hutchings explains in his 1998 book, “God Divided the Nations, “Man was created body, soul, and spirit. Adam could have eaten from the Tree of Life and lived as he was created—forever. Such a promise was not committed to any other form of life on the earth.

“. . . when sin entered, God had to change creation for man’s own good. The Tree of Life was taken away to keep man from eating of it and living forever in a sinful state separated from His Creator. Likewise, the rest of the plant and animal life was affected. . . after Adam and Eve sinned, the Edenic creation was cursed for man’s sake. Mutations occurred in the plant life and the environment to produce conditions which made it necessary for man to struggle to earn his bread, and at the same time other mutations brought forth disease germs that caused illness and death. The thistles, burrs, deserts, droughts, famines, and disease came because of sin.”

Just think how opposite this is from Pagels’ Gnostic sensibilities. She reasons in Moyers’ Garden of Eden conversation, “My own sense of this comes out of a Gnostic gospel that wasn’t included in the New Testament, the Gospel of Philip, which says that life and death, good and evil, and light and darkness are brothers to each other. They’re all inseparable. There’s a remarkable passage in this gospel that says that the paradise you anticipate is the one in which God says, ‘Eat this’ or ‘Do not eat that—just as you wish.’ ”

Is this really the kind of loopy thinking people want to take their cues from about biblical accuracy?! Certainly Pagels’ just what the media wants us to buy into as gospel.