"I don't believe you. You're a liar!"
Jesse Walker | December 4, 2007, 4:09pm
Remember all the hubbub when the
Gospel of Judas Iscariot was published last year? April DeConick of Rice University has examined the original text, and she says she's found some gross errors in the translation. Here's the quick version of the story, as laid out in Saturday's
New York Times:
Amid much publicity last year, the National Geographic Society announced that a lost 3rd-century religious text had been found, the Gospel of Judas Iscariot. The shocker: Judas didn't betray Jesus. Instead, Jesus asked Judas, his most trusted and beloved disciple, to hand him over to be killed. Judas's reward? Ascent to heaven and exaltation above the other disciples.
It was a great story. Unfortunately, after re-translating the society's transcription of the Coptic text, I have found that the actual meaning is vastly different. While National Geographic's translation supported the provocative interpretation of Judas as a hero, a more careful reading makes clear that Judas is not only no hero, he is a demon.
The details are
here. Political angle: According to DeConick, the distortions could have been prevented with more transparency.
I think the big problem is that National Geographic wanted an exclusive. So it required its scholars to sign nondisclosure statements, to not discuss the text with other experts before publication. The best scholarship is done when life-sized photos of each page of a new manuscript are published before a translation, allowing experts worldwide to share information as they independently work through the text.
Another difficulty is that when National Geographic published its transcription, the facsimiles of the original manuscript it made public were reduced by 56 percent, making them fairly useless for academic work. Without life-size copies, we are the blind leading the blind. The situation reminds me of the deadlock that held scholarship back on the Dead Sea Scrolls decades ago. When manuscripts are hoarded by a few, it results in errors and monopoly interpretations that are very hard to overturn even after they are proved wrong.
Given enough eyeballs...Mad Max | December 4, 2007, 7:52pm | #
From the article:
“Judas is not set apart ‘for’ the holy generation, as the National Geographic translation says, he is separated ‘from’ it. He does not receive the mysteries of the kingdom because ‘it is possible for him to go there.’ He receives them because Jesus tells him that he can’t go there, and Jesus doesn’t want Judas to betray him out of ignorance. Jesus wants him informed, so that the demonic Judas can suffer all that he deserves.
“Perhaps the most egregious mistake I found was a single alteration made to the original Coptic. According to the National Geographic translation, Judas’s ascent to the holy generation would be cursed. But it’s clear from the transcription that the scholars altered the Coptic original, which eliminated a negative from the original sentence. In fact, the original states that Judas will ‘not ascend to the holy generation.’”
Oh, picky, picky, picky!
“How could these serious mistakes have been made? Were they genuine errors or was something more deliberate going on? This is the question of the hour, and I do not have a satisfactory answer.”
Yeah, that’s a real head-scratcher. We better get Sherlock Holmes on the case, to investigate this perplexing mystery.
DeConick says that the problem is that National Geographic didn’t make the manuscript more widely available to other researchers before publishing their translation. I’m sure that didn’t help, but I don’t think that gets to the heart of the matter. It’s like saying that the problem with Mike Nifong was that he didn’t hire a panel of outside experts to examine Crystal Mangum’s credibility. The question is, why did National Geographic and Mike Nifong believe these false stories in the first place?
I would suggest that National Geographic chose to believe that interpretation of the evidence which would tend to produce the result they wanted, just as Mike Nifong chose to believe that interpretation of the evidence which tended to produce the result *he* wanted. In Mike Nifong’s case, he wanted the rape charges to be true so that he could ride to election as the champion of oppressed black people everywhere. In National Geographic’s case, they wanted a translation which would sell the most copies. There was deception involved, although it could have been inadverdent *self*-deception, the tendency (often imputed to mainstream Christians – have you noticed? to believe that the truth is what *ought* to be true.
If you’re publishing a translation of an old Gnostic manuscript, which headline would be more likely to inspire lots of readers to buy copies?
HEADLINE #1: “Newly-translated Gnostic text says Judas betrayed Jesus.” B-o-o-o-o-o-o-ring! You can’t sell many books can you sell with a headline like that, except to a few libraries.
HEADLINE #2: “Newly-translated Gnostic text say Jesus ‘was asking for it,’ told Judas to betray him; Judas now partying in Heaven with Benedict Arnold, Ted Bundy.”
Now *there’s* a headline!
