Comments | xephyr: Gospel of Judas, revisited

xephyr

Gospel of Judas, revisited

May 07, 2008 09:07

The latest issue of BAR revisits the much hyped Gospel of Judas, and has some unkind words for National Geographic and their media-heavy release of the original material. The biggest complaint was that they picked the wrong scholars who didn't understand Gnostic cultures and misinterpreted key passages of the text. Most significantly, NatlGeo ( Read more... )

christianity, history, media, biblical archaeology

Comments 5

beowulf1723 May 7 2008, 15:59:27 UTC

I was happy at all with the NatGeo's edition of the GosJud, and never did understand why this was published by NatGeo and not by E. J. Brill, who published standard scholarly editions of the Nag Hammadi text. Brill would have done it right the first time, including having a facsimile that you could read. I have a few volumes of the Nag Hammadi facsimiles, and they are easily readable where the papyrus isn't damaged.

The magazine article in BAR, likely highly simplified, suggested that Gnosticism was a coherent, unified system, from which they could draw reasonable inferences regarding the meaning of Judas by presuming that the author was an average Gnostic.

If the folks at BAR really say this, they are behind on this subject and should read Karen King's What is Gnosticism. It looks like "Gnosticism" was a coinage by Iraenius to cover a multitude of non-standard Christianities and simular faiths he didn't like.

Oops beowulf1723 May 7 2008, 16:11:52 UTC

The first sentence should read:

I was not at all happy with NatGeo's edition of the GOsJUd, ... .

xephyr May 7 2008, 16:21:47 UTC

never did understand why this was published by NatGeo and not by E. J. Brill

That's easy. The codex was nonprovenanced, in the antiquities market, so Brill wouldn't touch it. NatGeo paid the tomb raider's price and so got exclusive publication rights.

re: simplified Gnosticism

I don't think for a minute that this is the last word at BAR on the topic. I'm hoping the Deconick book isn't as naive, but I don't have high hopes. (The BAR article was not written by Deconick.)

beowulf1723 May 7 2008, 17:53:15 UTC

The other three texts in the GosJud codex are copies of Nag Hammadi works. Its going to be real hard to get an updated edition of these if the GosJud is ignored for lack of a legitimate provenance. The Nag Hammadi mss weren't completely pure in this regards, especially the one that ended up in Switzerland for a while ( ... )

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