Paul recognized the danger of Gnosticism as it tried to worm its way among the believers in Colosse, in Phrygia, and wrote them to say, "Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind."

National Geographic would cluck disappointedly at Paul, who was only deeply involved in a mission to take Christianity beyond the Middle East and, as it turned out, had his hands full to keep new churches headed on the right path.

And it classifies the bishop of Lyon, St. Irenaeus, who denounced a Gospel of Judas - it is not known if it is the same as this text - in his treatise, "Against Heresies," written in A.D. 180, as merely outraged and reactionary and so infers he thus could not be capable of an objective opinion. After all, it was Irenaeus' 27 recommended books that eventually came to be approved as the New Testament, so the fix must have been in.

Gnosticism was rejected early on among organized Christians because it did not agree with the principles Jesus taught in public before many who remembered and passed the accounts along. It relied upon specialized knowledge, privately conceived and held, and once its followers tried to promote it, it fell under the weight of scrutiny.

But that is not at all good enough for National Geographic. Its underlying assumption, which agrees with that of the scholars it depends upon, is that the early church fathers were, to put it frankly, ignorant.

Up to 2,000 years removed from today - which, we must point out, puts them much closer to the events and source materials of early Christianity - they receive almost no credit for critical or objective assessment of writings or histories of their day.

The sense you get from scholars who comment on the Gospel of Judas is that we have the four so-called canonical Gospels because - well, they just seemed right and the others didn't.

Irenaeus had more to say than that, and maybe he was a bit over the top, but in my book, that doesn't mean he couldn't be right.

The question is asked: Was this a suppressed book? The answer is obvious - it wasn't so much suppressed. It, along with early Gnosticism and other, lesser known variants of Christianity, died off for lack of support, mainly because they could not connect with the origin of the faith as it had been attested and established, by many sources.