austraLasia #1803

Just one more - and possibly the most intelligent comment so far on 'that gospel'.

MELBOURNE: Good Friday 2007 -- Thanks to Fr Tony Bailey sdb UK who picked up on this quickly, the written text of an interview with Frank Moloney sdb by Australia's ABC Radio National on the recent publication of the Gospel According to Judas is available. It seems appropriate to make this available to austraLasia readers on this day of all days. The interview is certainly the most thorough-going and intelligent comment so far on the novel. Stephen Crittendon is presenter of the ABC Religion Report. Crittendon is well known and appreciated in his role as a radio presenter. He describes himself as a 'lapsed Catholic' but one for whom religion is important. The interview that follows is fair and objective.

"It looks like a gospel, it's the length of a gospel, it even feels like a gospel. British novelist Jeffrey Archer and leading Australian Bible scholar
Professor Frank Moloney, a former member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, have come together to write the Gospel According to Judas.
Another one of those dubious publishing ventures that signal Easter just around the corner, I hear you sigh. Well, yes and no. The Gospel of Judas
has a serious intellectual purpose. Frank Moloney is now the Australian Provincial of the Salesian Fathers of Don Bosco, and he joins us from the ABC studios in Melbourne.

Frank, welcome to the program. What made you want to team up with a novelist like Jeffrey Archer, and indeed what made him want to team up with you?

Frank Moloney: Yes, that's a good question, Stephen. This idea of writing something about Judas apparently was something that had been in Jeffrey
Archer's mind for a number of years, and he had proposed it to his earlier publisher, Harper Collins, many years ago. And at that time they told him
that they were not prepared to do anything on that topic unless he engaged somebody who would help him with the historical background. And he sort of
dropped the issue. Then he seemed to come back at it with a passion, and he went to Rome, thinking that he would be able to engage the services of no
less a person than Cardinal Martini. That's typical of Jeffrey Archer, of course.

Stephen Crittenden: He certainly aims high.

Frank Moloney: He does, yes, he starts at the top. Martini had been a teacher of mine; he was the Rector at the Biblical Institute when I was
there, and he told Jeffrey to come to me. Now I had read some Jeffrey Archer, so I thought this was just going to be a novel, and he wanted me to
act in a consulting role. So I said Yes, I'd be prepared to help at that level. But I was in Rome for a meeting, at one of my own congregational
meetings, so he came across to Rome to talk to me, and then it became clear that he wanted to actually write a text in the literary form of a Gospel,
about the length of the Gospel, and he wanted it to be the Gospel as through the eyes of Judas, and I wasn't just to be a consultor, but I was to be
profoundly involved in the constructing actually of the form of the text, and of giving him a shape of the way in which the story would unfold.
Now I was a little bit amazed at all that, and I wasn't too sure if No.1 I had the time to be involved in that sort of thing; but it's something that
had interested me in my own scholarly work, particularly on Mark and John which I've written major commentaries to. I'd always sensed that there was
an underside to the Judas story. There are a number of contradictions in the texts, and so I said, 'Sure, let's see what we can do on that'. And off we
went.

Stephen Crittenden: This is less Jeffrey Archer the novelist than Jeffrey Archer and Frank Moloney as redactors of the canonical gospels. It's even
something that in a way you highlight in the whole format of the thing. Red highlighting of quotes from the actual Gospels, margin notes, there's even
the traditional red ribbon placemarker. It's all made to look like a very traditional Catholic Missal if you like.

Frank Moloney: Yes, or the old red letter Bible that they used to produce in England. And you're exactly right, and I think the word that you used of an
Archer-Moloney redaction of the gospel tradition, is pretty close to what happened, except as you would have noticed, there are several places where I
gave Jeffrey his head, and then you see the fertile imagination of Archer take over. For example particularly towards the end. I, on good scholarly
grounds, believe we know nothing about the death of Judas, and once I'd given Jeffrey the green light that he may have lived longer than immediately
after the death of Jesus, well then his imagination took over of course. My responsibility then was to control what he wrote. As I said to him, the
principles were always that what he wrote had to be possible even if it wasn't probable.

Stephen Crittenden: At one level, this is a very interesting literary exercise I suppose about the gospel as a literary form. And how and why
various gospels were generated in the past. It seems to me that there's something going on here about the way one evangelist will write a different
account of the same situation that maybe shifts the emphasis slightly or blackens someone's reputation or restores someone's reputation. Mark is very
critical of Peter; Matthew was clearly writing to restore Peter's reputation. Thomas comes in in one of the gospels for some heavy flak

Frank Moloney: ..John, yes..

Stephen Crittenden: ..as a bit of an idiot. Is that in fact what you're up to at an intellectual level, sort of showing us how the process of
rearranging existing fragments occurs in the writing of new gospels each time?

Frank Moloney: Stephen, this is exactly what I'm trying to do and what Jeffrey in the end was very happy to collaborate with, and I'm delighted to
hear you say this. What I'm trying to do and what Jeffrey has collaborated so well in doing here, is the expression I use is to try to show to a wider
audience how a gospel works. In other words, there are received traditions that are articulated in different ways; in the canonical tradition in four
different ways. We have also received that tradition and articulated it in a different way in the Gospel of Judas, so it is another form of the
traditional gospel form and because it is, one of the reasons that - to go back to your first question - that led me to continue on this work with
Jeffrey, is the hope that this modern rewriting of the tradition will make people say 'Hey this sounds familiar to me. This is interesting.'

Stephen Crittenden: And that's the whole point.

Frank Moloney: Exactly, go back to the other four Gospels.

Stephen Crittenden: One of the points being of course that any of the Gospel authors, even Mark at the very beginning, is presumably sitting there at his
desk with another text open in front of him. He's cutting up and rearranging in some way.

Frank Moloney: That's right. And that's exactly what we were doing.

Stephen Crittenden: On the other hand, we've had a decade of nonsense, some would say, about Gnostic Gospels, we've had the da Vinci Code, and all of
that. Isn't it the case that we're living in a time when everyone wants to believe that the truth has been suppressed, the real truth isn't the truth
that's been revealed. And aren't you, in a sense, playing to that?

Frank Moloney: I certainly am, but I'm playing to it in a negative role. One of the things that really I'd have to say upsets me as a believing and
committed Christian and a practising Roman Catholic priest, is the fact that people like Dan Murphy can trivialise the Christian tradition and people
like the author of 'The God Delusion' can insult the Christian tradition and everybody wants to hear this. Millions of copies are sold, and those of us
who want to tell the tradition as it has been received down across 2,000 years, we have to sit there with our hands tied behind our backs and watch
it all go by. Now, I've written many books discussing all these things, just last year I wrote a book called 'The Living Voice of the Gospel' which looks
at all of these technical questions about how Gospels were formed etc. It'll be a best seller - which means it'll probably sell about 5,000 or 6,000
copies. But once we get into this form, then I'm presenting a strong picture, even a critical picture of the way Jesus may well have lived and
related to others, through the eyes of Judas which gives me another chance to show how a Gospel works, in the hope that we won't get caught up in all
of this Gnostic business and this 'the church has chosen these four Gospels and suppressed all the other Gospels'. I'm going mainstream Christianity
because I do not want to stand there with my hands tied and write scholarly books which nobody reads, and the whole mass audience is going to read the
Dan Browns, and I think well let's raise a voice, and once Jeffrey asked me to be a part of this, I thought, well here's an opportunity that I could use
to get out into that market and let's see what happens.

Stephen Crittenden: Let's turn to Judas. Do you think Judas was a real flesh and blood person? The great English literary critic, Frank Kermode once
suggested that Judas probably originated as an agent of the plot. In other words, Jesus had to be betrayed, that was part of the story, so therefore
there needed to be a betrayer, and that was Judas, and that with each retelling of the story, we got more detail as the character took on more
life.

Frank Moloney: Yes. I would agree with the second part but not with the first part. I think that we can know two things about Judas, and it is the
association of these two things that make him a historical person. The first thing is that he is a disciple of Jesus and not only a disciple of Jesus,
but one of the 12. And I think it's been definitively proven by serious scholarship that this group of the 12, is a historically existing group.

Stephen Crittenden: And we know their names and that one of their names was Judas?

Frank Moloney: Was Judas. And the second thing we know about it, and this is what makes it absolutely sure, is one of them, and his name was Judas,
betrayed Jesus. So they are in fact Stephen, the only two things that we can say are historically rock solid. One of the 12 and he betrayed him. It's
just too consistent across the fourfold Gospel tradition and beyond that, into the apocryphal tradition to say this is purely a figment of the
imagination. But the second part of Kermode's suggestion is absolutely spot on.

Stephen Crittenden: OK, how does it change the story to have Jesus effectively betrayed not by Judas but by an outsider, rather than an insider. You know, in Agatha Christie terms, this is a story where the butler did do it. Not one of the family.

Frank Moloney: That's right. We still wanted to maintain in the story that the actual agent of the betrayal is the person Judas. It is through Judas
that Jesus is eventually handed over into the hands of the Jewish and eventually the Roman leadership. But not directly. So as you're aware from
our story, the betrayer is in fact betrayed. Now I don't think that changes the story greatly, except of course, it lightens up the load of guilt that
Judas has to bear, and that's what we wanted to do, and that of course is a figment of our imagination.

Stephen Crittenden: Now let's just turn to the launch of the book. You used the Pontifical Biblical Institute, of which you were a member, as the venue
for the book launch in Rome, and I gather that a few noses were out of joint, and I've even seen accounts that I would describe really as a bit of
a scholarly kick in the teeth. You were criticised, for example, for your 'promiscuous use of the words Vatican and Pontifical in your publicity'.

Frank Moloney: Yes, well that's unfortunate. As you would know from the publication world, and from the media world there was an article in The
Times which had nothing to do with Vatican approval etc., that was a headline put on the top of an article in The Times in London, which was most
unfortunate. The minute I saw it, I got in touch with the MacMillan people in London and I said, 'This is awful, you know, the Vatican does not approve
anything except its own documents. So any claim on the part of their publicity campaign to say that this is Vatican-approved, is very misguided,
and I would strongly disapprove of that.' However, what went on at the Biblical Institute is another story, and that is that the Biblical Institute
was quite happy to host this largely because of my involvement in it; I had been both a student there and a professor there. But once we got to Rome it
became apparent that some of the people at the Biblical Institute were not happy that it was going on, and one in particular, a young American Jesuit
who I knew when he was a student, is a vitriolic person, an extremely right-wing person, and he has been using quite a poisonous pen to write for
the extreme right-wing American Catholic media and unfortunately that moves around and gets into blogs. I can say to you that we had an excellent
gathering at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. We had a terrific discussion that would only have been possible in that sort of context - but that this
particular young man objected to the whole process, and unfortunately has begun to use the media to spread the opinion that this was all a big stage
by the Archer camp etc, and that's most unfortunate. And I feel sorry that the Catholic Right is following this down and beginning to make all sorts of
very hurtful charges against what we are trying to do and our own integrity.

Stephen Crittenden: Look I reckon there's a very interesting sort of broader question in the background, particularly in relation to that kind of very
negative response. And it's this: There was a period, in fact it was exactly a century ago when Bible scholarship amongst other things, was a very
red-hot topic in Rome. It was called the Modernist Crisis, and it never went away, and in fact I'm planning a centenary series on this program later in
the year about the Modernist Crisis. It strikes me that a century ago, if you didn't believe in the literal truth of say the creation story in
Genesis, you couldn't possibly get a seat on the Pontifical Biblical Institute, that a century later believing in the literal truth of Genesis
might well be a disqualification, Frank.

Frank Moloney: Well I only wish that were true. I would say in terms of the professorial staff at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, that is generally
true. I would say that there are one or two elements coming in from highly intelligent younger generations who generally work in the area of languages,
Hebrew and Akkadian, or geography and history, who would pretty well go back to that modernist debate and still stay there. But my bigger problem,
Stephen, is not just what's going on at the Biblicum, and there I think most of the professors would be quite critical, as you're saying, and would
follow contemporary critical scholarly methods. But my real problem is that that debate over modernism and all that we came to decide about historicity
and all those questions, in those days, that never ever touched the believing public.

Stephen Crittenden: What do you mean by that?

Frank Moloney: I mean receiving hate letters from ordinary Catholic people who say 'How can you dare to say that there were no 30 pieces of silver?'
That is a part of my faith, to which I like to - I don't respond, I would like to say, 'Do you stand up in church on Sunday, I believe in one God and
the 30 pieces of silver?' And if there's no discrimination between that which is the essential core message of the Christian faith and the narrative
details that have developed over the centuries to communicate that core message. And that I believe, in an age of very, very sharp critical mindsets
in every other discipline, yet we've got mainstream Catholic people who are not able to apply the same critical sense to the reading of their sources.
And that impoverishes the whole church.

Stephen Crittenden: Isn't it the case though Frank, that if you look back to an event like the Second Vatican Council, that a lot of the new ideas that
were floating around amongst the intellectuals in the church at the very top, never penetrated down in any systematic way. The broad things about the
spirit of the Vatican Council penetrated well and truly, but there was maybe even a decision not to have it systematically worked through, down, down,
down; would you agree that that's a problem?

Frank Moloney: Yes I do think there's a problem in that, and I think as I was just saying to somebody yesterday, we've got to a stage now where we
have in the Catholic church, which is the one I know, a small group of people on the right end of the church very vocal, obviously have finances
available, have excellent publications and published books and journals. Another small group on the other end of the church who are more or less the
sort of the hangovers of the Second Vatican Council who are tired and discouraged and they don't raise their voice much. And in the middle we have
83% of Catholics who really don't care much any more, because there are only 17% of Catholics who are churchgoers. So 83% have basically thrown their
hands in the air and said, 'I just can't follow all this any more.'

Stephen Crittenden: You're really saying that something like a billion people have fallen through a very large crack.

Frank Moloney: That's right, yes. And that's sad you know. And our inability, as you've just suggested, to take on the intellectual challenge
of Second Vatican Council, leaves us wide open to the attacks of the Dan Murphys [Brown, perhaps? Dan M is known for other things!]. I mean we've got nothing to say because we're still going along with the basically fundamentalist reading our texts, and he comes along and says, Well you know, the canon was imposed by Constantine and Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and we've got no answer. Except to say, Well you're wrong. Well let's show how you're wrong, let's go to the texts and show what evidence we've got to the contrary, but we don't have the equipment to do that. Well some of us do, but nobody's listening to us.

Stephen Crittenden: It's been great to have you on the program. Thank you very much.

Frank Moloney: Thank you, Stephen.

Stephen Crittenden: Professor Frank Moloney and The Gospel According to Judas is published by MacMillan.

Guests
Professor Frank Moloney SDB, AM, STD, DPHIL (Oxon)
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