Gospel of Judas opens old wounds
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 …