The reverberations over Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, still rumble on in some quarters. With the movie of the book, starring Tom Hanks, about to be released, Da Vinci fever is in the air, expertly manipulated by scores of eager publicists.

Confronted with scathing criticism from the Roman Catholic Church, Tom Hanks has played down the work’s significance: “If you’re going to take any sort of movie at face value, particularly a huge-budget motion picture like this, you’d be making a very big mistake. It’s a damn good story and a lot of fun.”

The book sensationalizes the implications of a different, more spiritual strand of Christianity, linked to the Cathars, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the “apocryphal” books of the Bible associated with groups collectively called the Gnostics. In fact, these books have as much right to be regarded as important as the books chosen to go into the New Testament by 4th-century French Bishop Iraneus.

A modern churchman with a different point of view is the Reverend Robin Griffith-Jones, a 49-year-old Anglican cleric, who is the present Master of the Temple, a 12th-century church near Fleet Street in London named after its founders, the Order of the Knights Templar. Readers of Dan Brown’s novel will know that the Master of the Temple plays a role in the book.

Asked by The Times if he is glad Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code, he replied, “Yes, in the larger setting of the responses that it’s made possible from churches. In itself, it just sort of hangs there and can mislead people, but it does give an astonishing opportunity for churches to respond and clarify things in an open and upbeat way, and for that I’m very glad.”

Giotto’s fresco “Judas’s Kiss” from the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (AP).

A fragile ancient manuscript written in Egypt in the 4th century AD, known as The Gospel of Judas, claiming that Judas Iscariot was not the betrayer of Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, was published yesterday by National Geographic.

A detailed account of the document and its history, including how it was discovered near Beni Masar in Egypt in the 1970s, features in a two hour documentary due to be screened on the National Geographic cable and satellite television channel on Sunday at 9pm.

The Times (London) reports: “It will argue that the original Gospel of Judas was probably written by the Gnostics — members of a 2nd Century AD breakaway Christian sect, who became rivals to the early Church. They thought that Judas was in fact the most enlightened of the apostles, acting in order that mankind might be redeemed by the death of Christ. The apocryphal account of the last days of Jesus’s life portrays Judas as a loyal disciple, who followed Jesus’s orders in handing him over to the authorities and thus allowed him to fulfil the biblical prophecies of saving mankind.”

The manuscript is thought to be a copy of a still earlier Gospel of Judas, which may have been written about 150 years after Jesus’s death by Greek scholars, then translated into Coptic, the language of Egyptian Christians.

Craig Evans, the Payzant Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, said: “The Gospel of Judas turns Judas’s act of betrayal into an act of obedience. The sacrifice of Jesus’s body of flesh in fact becomes saving. And so for that reason, Judas emerges as the champion and he ends up being envied and even cursed and resented by the other disciples.”

Elaine Pagels, the Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University, commented: “Whether or not one agrees with it, or finds it interesting or reprehensible, it’s an enormously interesting perspective on it that some follower of Jesus in the early Christian movement obviously thought was significant.”

Some of the 31 pages are being exhibited at the National Geographic Museum at Explorers Hall in Washington. Once the conservation process is complete, the document will be sent back to Egypt to be housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

Dr Simon Gathercole, a New Testament expert from The University of Aberdeen, said: “The so-called ‘Gospel of Judas’ is certainly an ancient text, but not ancient enough to tell us anything new about the real Judas or Jesus. It contains a number of religious themes which are completely alien to the first-century world of Jesus and Judas, but which did become popular later, in the second century AD. An analogy would be finding a speech claiming to be written by Queen Victoria, in which she talked about The Lord of the Rings and her CD collection.”

James Catford, Chief Executive of the Bible Society, stated: “It really would be a miracle if Judas was the author of this document, because he died at least 100 years before it was written. It may yield some interesting insights, but there’s nothing here to undermine what Christians have believed throughout the centuries.”

Judas, if such a man existed, may not have written this document, but it certainly reflects a strong mystical theme among the early Christians, one that Jesus seems to have shared with his closest disciples. The Gospel of Thomas, another Gnostic document, reveals this side of him. Roman politicians were quick to snuff out this light, though, surmising that it was too specialist for popular consumption.

Now we have the chance to reassess this view of Christianity in an age when spirituality is supplanting religion in the popular mind.

May this signal a way forward for Christianity in the 21st century?

The translation of The Gospel of Judas, due to be published on Thursday, contains no reference to the resurrection, according to the UK Mail on Sunday newspaper.

The controversial publication just a week before Easter, when the resurrection is celebrated by Christians, is sure to fuel a new round of hot-tempered debate around these age-old questions.

The manuscript is said to have been discovered in a limstone tomb in Eqypt in the 1970s, and is not part of the Gnostic haul recovered from Nag Hammadi in 1945. It represents a new perspective on the position Judas played in the Jesus story. In the Coptic Gospel, Judas appears as a hero, not a villain and is Christ’s favored disciple. In betraying Christ, Judas was fulfilling a divine mission, it claims.

American theologian, Bart Ehrman, says that in the Judas document there is no account of Jesus’s death because “his death isn’t what really matters”. What does matter to Judas is not that the body is going to come back to life but that “the body is going to die and the spirit is going to live on”.

This mystical view was eliminated from the Romanized version of Christianity in the 4th century, and subsequently reinforced by the French Bishop, Irenaeus, whose choice of four edited Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, has defined Western Christian thinking ever since.

However, there is strong evidence that the early Christians, including Jesus himself, were far more mystically-inclined than the materialist, political Roman church has allowed us to believe for 20 centuries. A large part of the spirituality of the Jesus story has been written out of history as if it never existed. The Gospel of Judas reveals much of this strand of early Christian thought.

National Geographic, the publisher of the translation, insists that it’s an authentic and plausible Christian text. Tests show it to be a 4th-century copy of a manuscript written in Greek in AD 187. National Geographic’s Herbert Krosney describes how in the text Judas is the only disciple who had the courage to stand before Jesus. He is told “to step away from the others”, for he will exceed them by “sacrific[ing] the man that clothes me”.

This last statement bears much comparison with the descriptions of nirvanic experiences described here on Spiritual Nirvana.

This is sure to be a controversial week for all of us interested in genuine spiritual matters so, for the other side of the argument, let’s turn to Charles Hedrick, an American historian: “I believe [this] is a copy of a document known as The Gospel of Judas that was originally written in the 2nd century by the Gnostics, a sect denounced by the early Fathers of the Church like St Irenaeus as heretics for trying to vindicate Judas. Timing the publication of this for Easter is dramatic stuff but my prediction is that after the initial uproar it will have no impact whatever on the future of Christianity”

The Mail on Sunday quotes a “Vatican scholar” as decrying the project as “dangerous”, and a “high-ranking Church of England figure” commenting: “Saying that Judas was a hero is not a generally accepted chain of thought”.

These ideas have been around a long time. They are not going to go away now. Books like The Da Vinci Code will see to that.

A fragment of the Gospel of Judas.

An ancient Gnostic manuscript written in Coptic is to be unveiled to the world by National Geographic on April 6. It is the Gospel of Judas, one of a series of Gospels which were not included in the Biblical canon because they were deemed too mystical. They also diverged from the story decided on by the Church in the 4th century.

Only 26 pages of the disintegrating manuscript are available, but the contents are said to be explosive. From this perspective Judas Iscariot is seen as a friend of Jesus who helps him fulfil his divine mission and the Biblical prophesies of the Old Testament.

In the text, Christ asks Judas to betray him with the words: “You will become the apostle cursed by all the others. Judas, you will sacrifice this body of man which clothes me.”

That Jesus speaks of the body as a garment which clothes him, presupposes “his” existence apart from the body. Since the Roman church does not believe in the pre-existence of the soul and assumes that the body is resurrected, this is clearly a mystical step too far for Catholicism.

The Coptic text (the ancient language of Egyptian Christians) is thought to be a 4th-century translation of an earlier Greek book. Tests have confirmed its authenticity.

Already the world of Biblical scholarship has been turned upside-down, while Vatican sensitivities are stretched to breaking point. It hasn’t helped that the text is being published just weeks before release of the film version of “The Da Vinci Code”.

Spiritual Nirvana will be covering this event with great interest as the story unfolds.