Is the Gospel of Judas a Forgery?

January 27, 2012 by Tony

I have been reading Robert M. Price’s Secret Scrolls: Revelations from the Lost Gospel Novels (Eugene, Or.: Wipf & Stock, 2011). Occasionally Price contextualizes some of the books he examines with discussions of theories and results of biblical scholarship. Sometimes, however, this contextualizing is drawn from what most of us would consider “fringe” scholarship—for example, dating the composition of the canonical gospels to the mid-second-century, Barabara Theiring’s ideosyncratic views on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the New Testament as “put together and heavily rewritten by Polycarp” (p. 169, appealing to David Trobish, The First Edition of the New Testament [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000]).

Another of Price’s contextual nuggets is the claim that the Gospel of Judas is a forgery (p. 76-77, 181). Price appeals here to an article by Richard J. Arthur, Associate Professor of New Testament at the Unification Theological Seminary (“The Gospel of Judas: Is It a Hoax?” Journal of Unification Studies 9 [2008] 35-47, available online HERE). Price summarizes the article in three points: the text betrays an awareness of modern moral issues (“it seems to be editorializing on the priestly scandals of our time, as it depicts priests sleeping with women and ‘sacrificing’ children, this last perhaps pointing to abortion or molestation”), part of the gospel copies from The Secret Book of John (“the impression one gets from reading it is a patch transferred out of context, no longer making the sense it did in the original”), and it contains a …

New Fragments of Gospel of Judas Published

November 2, 2010 by Tony

April DeConick mentions on her blog The Forbidden Gospels the publication of an article in the journal Early Christianity giving the contents of the Ohio fragments of the Gospel of Judas. Read her post HERE.

Reflections on Teaching Gnosticism II: The Gospel of Judas

February 19, 2008 by Tony

The first assignment due in my current Gnosticism course is a translation comparison. The goal of the assignment is for students to see how much work is involved in putting together an edition of a text and how the editor’s decisions can greatly affect how one reads or understand the text. This is particularly so with fragmentary texts. In previous years I have used the translations of the Apocalypse of Adam in Layton’s Gnostic Scriptures and Robinson’s Nag Hammadi Library.

This year I opted for the Gospel of Judas by Marvin Meyer (The Nag Hammadi Scriptures) and April DeConick (The Thirteenth Apostle). I chose this text for three reasons: it is well-known to (though not well-read by) the wider public, the assignment would force the students to read the gospel very carefully and thus lead (hopefully) to a rewarding discussion of the text, and the interpretation of the text is highly contentious.

Meyer and DeConick have been in conflict over their particular interpretations of the text; their positions are available for all to read in an article on Meyer’s site (see HERE) and a series of responses on DeConick’s blog (see HERE). But I hoped the students would not see this exchange before writing the paper; it is preferred that they find the major contentious passages themselves and thereby avoid trying to understand why each scholar arrived at his/her position but focus purely on the general issue of the choices involved in the …

A Judas Compendium

October 8, 2007 by Tony

April DeConick at The Forbidden Gospels mentions a forthcoming book by Marvin Meyer on the full range of Judas traditions from early Christian writers. The book is due in November and is titled Judas: The Definitive Collection of Gospels and Legends About the Infamous Apostle of Jesus. This is a welcome resource as these traditions, though not all contained in gospels, are nevertheless apocryphal traditions and deserve greater exposure and discussion.

Tchacos Codex Conference

May 31, 2007 by Tony

April DeConick of Rice University (and administrator of the Forbidden Gospels blog) has announced a conference on the Tchacos Codex (the codex that features the Gospel of Judas) for March 2008. Read her post HERE.

Gospel of Judas Roundup

April 21, 2007 by Tony

Elaine Pagels promoted her latest book Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity (with Karen L. King) on the Colbert Report this past week. You can also read about a recent talk by the author from the Columbia Missourian.

April DeConick of the Forbidden Gospels blog has posted several articles lately on her work on the Gospel of Judas including this one about the forthcoming critical edition.

Gospel of Judas Roundup

April 3, 2007 by Tony

John Dominic Crossan offers this review of Karen King’s and Elaine Pagels’ The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity.

April DeConick’s The Forbidden Gospels blog features a preview of her new book The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says.

Mark Goodacre’s NT Gateway blog has a post on Jeffrey Archer’s Gospel According to Judas novel.

Ehrman vs. Bock on the Gospel of Judas

February 15, 2007 by Tony

Bart Ehrman and Darrell L. Bock (author of The Missing Gospels) are interviewed on The Things That Matter Most (based in Dallas) about the Gospel of Judas. For a recent on-line review of Bock’s book see Mike Aquilina’s The Way of the Fathers Blog.

Popular New Thriller Features Gnostics

February 15, 2007 by Tony

Jim Davila at Palaeojudaica has a few posts (HERE and HERE) on the new thriller The Book of Names by Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori (read a review HERE). The book features a battle between a group of chosen ones, the lamed vovniks, mentioned in the Talmud and a rival group called the Gnoseos. Comparisons to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code are inevitable but there have been plenty of decent biblical or medieval thrillers that are worthy of mention. Ian Caldwell and Diustin Thomason’s The Rule of Four and Lev Grossman’s Codex are both highly readable literary thrillers dealing with efforts to thwart evil efforts to hide important medieval manuscripts. There are numerous Jesus novels that feature apocryphal traditions—far too many to mention.

Another early biblical thriller is the now-infamous The Mystery of Mar Saba written by in James H. Hunter 1940 which some claim inspired Morton Smith to “forge” Secret Mark. For a discussion of the book in connection with the gospel see HERE. Novelist Jeffrey Archer will add to the CA-related fiction next month with his The Gospel According to Judas by Benjamin Iscariot. You can read about it HERE, but here’s a quick publisher’s summary:

The Gospel According to Judas, by Benjamin Iscariot sheds new light on the the mystery of Judas—including his motives for the betrayal and what happened to him after the crucifixion—by retelling the story of Jesus through the eyes of Judas, using the canonical

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New Christian Apocrypha Blog

February 2, 2007 by Tony

Prof. April DeConick of Rice University in Houston (and author of Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas) recently launched her blog The Forbidden Gospels. Already she has discussed her views on the Gospel of Judas (adding to the growing number of voices that declare that Judas has been mischaracterized by previous scholars of this text) and the origins of the Gospel of Thomas.

Post-Holiday Roundup: The Gospel of Judas

January 11, 2007 by Tony

The Green Bay Press Gazette has an article reviewing recent books on the Gospel of Judas.

Novelist Jeffrey Archer is writing a book inspired by the Gospel of Judas. Read an article on it from the Times On-line. Read an AP article here.

Jim Davila at Paleojudaica excerpts a Los Angeles Times article on the gospel (you must register at the LA Times to read the entire text).

Vision reports on a lecture on The Gospel of Judas delivered by Marvin Meyer.

Gospel of Judas opens old wounds

December 12, 2006 by Tony

Special guest Pierluigi Piovanelli of the University of Ottawa offers the following discussion on the publishing of the Gospel of Judas:

TCHACOS LIBRE!

These days I am completing a collective review of the first publications on the Gospel of Judas, i.e., (1) Herbert Krosney’s The Lost Gospel, (2) The Gospel of Judas from Codex Tchacos translated and explained by Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer and Gregor Wurst, and (3) James Robinson’s The Secret of Judas. This is probably the case of many other colleagues around the world with one small but significant difference. In my case, working in a bilingual institution (the University of Ottawa) and writing the review for a bilingual journal (Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses), I was lucky enough to have at my disposal both the original American editions (published on April 6 and 7, 2006) and their translations in French (released two months later, in June). What was my surprise when I realized that there are some substantial differences between the two editions!

This is especially true for the French versions of Kasser’s chapter on “The Story of Codex Tchacos and the Gospel of Judas” and the final chapter of Robinsons’s book. The polemic between the Swiss scholar and his American colleague, already present in the English texts, reaches peaks of unsuspected intensity in the French publications. Apparently, old misunderstandings that go back to the controversy about the edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices, in …

Secret Lives of Jesus on National Geographic Channel

December 12, 2006 by Tony

The National Geographic Channel will air a special on December 17 at 9 PM (Eastern) titled “The Secret Lives of Jesus”. A press release describes it as follows:

More than 1,500 years ago, ancient writings were buried that offered alternative narratives about Jesus of Nazareth. There were many of these alternative gospels that rendered very different versions of the story and were considered scandalous and deemed heretical. Rediscovered within the last century, these texts offer more questions than answers. Secret Lives of Jesus examines these mysterious lost stories of Christ, exploring the fundamental questions surrounding the texts. Who wrote them and why? How do they compare to the accepted New Testament gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? And why were the stories forgotten for so long? Secret Lives of Jesus deconstructs the forces at play during this time of radical religious ideals — and offers a tantalizing glimpse inside the logic behind some of the most bizarre stories ever told about Jesus Christ.

I heard about the special last month when a producer contacted me looking for images related to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. I sent her some manuscript images, including an illumination from a fifteenth-century Ambrosian manuscript (L58) of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (several images from the manuscript are featured in Elliott and Cartlidge’s Art and the Christian Apocrypha book). The channel will also air an encore presentation of their special on the Gospel of Judas December 18.

Judas: Friend or Foe

December 8, 2006 by Tony

Craig Evans of Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia is quoted in a recent article on the Gospel of Judas on the CBC web site. Evans here claims that the text was misinterprted by National Geographic’s editing and translation team. John Turner is quoted in support of Evans’ position:

Judas did an evil deed by betraying Jesus to his enemies, Turner said.

"The decision was made that this is a truly shocking, revolutionary document that throws into question all of the traditional Christian claims about the figure of Judas, and the document simply doesn't support that," he said.

Terry Garcia, leader of the society's Judas project, dismisses the criticism, saying those who say the translation is incorrect are a minority

Evans may have been influenced by a paper presented at September’s Christian Apocrypha Workshop by Louis Painchaud. Painchaud’s team is working on a new translation of the text which, in their opinion, corrects erroneous views advanced by recent scholars that the text portrays Judas as Jesus’ most loyal follower. Here is the abstract of the paper:

À PROPOS DE LA (RE)DÉCOUVERTE DE L’ÉVANGILE DE JUDAS

Since its publication by the National Geographic Society last April, the Gospel of Judas has been interpreted and presented by the scholars in charge of its edition and translation as rehabilitating the figure of the apostle, who would be the true disciple of Jesus, the only one who understood his mission, to whom the spiritual Saviour would have asked to deliver him

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New Gospel of Judas book

November 4, 2006 by

The Charlotte Observer interviews Bart Ehrman on his new book (released just this last week), The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed at http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/living/religion/15701139.htm.