Even after watching the two-hour program about "The Gospel of Judas" on the National Geographic television channel on Sunday, one knows very little about the actual contents of the book, for which we will apparently have to wait for its publication. All we know at the moment is that "The Gospel of Judas" emanates from second century C.E. Christian-Gnostic circles and that all the tests it has been put to - paleographic analysis, radio-carbon testing, and so forth - show it to be definitely authentic. Still, the little we do know tells us that, for Jews, this is likely to be a curiously paradoxical document to relate to.

On the one hand, it represents an early Christian attempt to exonerate the figure of Judas Iscariot - a figure that, more than any other in the whole vile history of anti-Semitism, has come to stand in Christian tradition for the deicidal Jew and his evil ways. The very idea that there were some second-century Christians, however sectarian, who considered Judas not Jesus's betrayer, but rather, his most loyal and understanding disciple, the only one to whom could be entrusted the excruciating but necessary task of turning the Savior over to the authorities so that his crucifixion and death could take place, is enough to fill many Jews with a sense of gratitude. In rehabilitating Judas, it might seem as if "The Gospel of Judas" is a Christian rehabilitation of the Jewish people, too.

And yet once the text of "The Gospel of Judas" is released, this is highly unlikely to prove to be the case. Too much is known about Gnosticism, and about Christian varieties of it, to encourage us to think that we are dealing with a "pro-Jewish" book. On the contrary: Of all the many varieties of Christianity that were in competition with one another in the centuries before Catholicism won out, Gnosticism was the most philosophically hostile to Judaism and the most radically at odds with it.

This was because Christian Gnosticism, in all its forms, was a dualistic system of thought that believed in the existence not of one God, but of two - an "inferior" God, the God of the Old Testament, who created the fallen world we live in and rules over it, and a "superior" God, the God of the New Testament, who has nothing to do with the created universe known to man and exists transcendentally apart from it - from where He sent Jesus to bring salvation to humanity. The first God is the God of matter, of Old Testament law and retaliatory justice; the second, the God of the spirit that is imprisoned in matter, of New Testament love and mercy. The two have nothing in common and one must choose between them; One can worship one or the other, the God of the material world or the God of the spiritual world, but one cannot worship both.

Needless to say, this school of Christian thought, which lingered on in an underground existence even after being suppressed by the Catholic Church and re-surfaced in the Cathar heresy in medieval France, represented a far more radical break with Jewish monotheism than did normative Christian thought. In the latter, the God of the Old and New Testaments are one and the same; the stiff-necked Jews simply do not understand that the God of their tradition, who is indeed the true God, has sent his son to the world as the Messiah. According to the Christian Gnostics, on the other hand, the Jews have been worshiping the false God all along and foisting him off on a gullible mankind, which has now been saved by the intervention of the real God.

Is this the theology of "The Gospel of Judas?" Despite the paucity of information released about the text so far, it apparently is. One episode from it mentioned in the National Geographic's TV special makes this fairly clear. In this episode, the program's viewers were told, Jesus comes across his disciples blessing God for the bread they break and bursts into laughter because they are praying to the wrong Deity - that is, to the Jewish one who cruelly made the physical universe in which their souls are trapped. After everything that he, Jesus, has taught them, they still don't get it!

Indeed, if Judas is portrayed by the "Gospel of Judas" as a heroic figure, this is because he alone of all the disciples realizes as much. Only he knows that Jesus' death is of no consequence - or rather, that death is life's true goal, because only then is the spirit finally free to return home to its transcendent abode. No religion could be, philosophically, more profoundly anti-Jewish or more opposed to the biblical creed of "Thou shalt choose life."

The irony of "The Gospel of Judas," which will no doubt become clearer as we can read more of it, is that it defends Judas Iscariot by attacking Judaism. Far from being the arch-Jew of Christian stereotype, its Judas is the Jew who has freed himself of all Jewish delusions - a freedom that, according to Gnostic beliefs, conventional Christianity never managed to achieve.

"The Gospel of Judas" will almost certainly not turn out to be, then, a very pleasing book for Jews. Still, there is something refreshing about a Judas, even a Gnostic one, who represents the best rather than the worst of the human race. And if Christian Gnostics could think of him this way, perhaps ordinary Christians also can.

After all, it is possible to read the New Testament story non-Gnostically, too, with the understanding that Jesus knows all along that he must die a terrible death, and that he needs the help of a disciple - his dearest and best one! - to facilitate this. Greater even than the sacrifice on the Cross would be, then, the sacrifice of he who let himself be vilified by the ages in order to make this sacrifice possible. It's an intriguing thought.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.

© 2006 The New York Sun