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.” To its credit, National Geographic has acknowledged this mistake, albeit far too late to change the public misconception.
So what does the Gospel of Judas really say? It says that Judas is a specific demon called the “Thirteenth.” In certain Gnostic traditions, this is the given name of the king of demons ”” an entity known as Ialdabaoth who lives in the 13th realm above the earth. Judas is his human alter ego, his undercover agent in the world. These Gnostics equated Ialdabaoth with the Hebrew Yahweh, whom they saw as a jealous and wrathful deity and an opponent of the supreme God whom Jesus came to earth to reveal.
Whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas was a harsh critic of mainstream Christianity and its rituals. Because Judas is a demon working for Ialdabaoth, the author believed, when Judas sacrifices Jesus he does so to the demons, not to the supreme God. This mocks mainstream Christians’ belief in the atoning value of Jesus’ death and in the effectiveness of the Eucharist.
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.
Just another road to the same truth?
“Were they genuine errors or was something more deliberate going on? ”
I don’t know…. How can the error of reading the blessing of Homosexuality in Scriptures be explained? I don’t know.
wo points:
“Daimon†in Greek can indeed be translated as “spirit†. . . in pre-Christian and pagan literature! (See e.g. Plato’s Symposium, where Love is a “megas daimon.”) Daimones were thus good or bad, “spirits†or “demons,†depending on context, or on whose ox was being gored. The temptation to translate it as “spirit†here, where is has been moved into a coptic context, is understandable, if erroneous.
Second, alarm bells should have gone off when it was claimed that this gnostic text made Judas a hero. Judas appears elsewhere in gnostic literature, and he is never, to my recollection, a hero. Rather, it is the nature of his betrayal that differs. In one gnostic (docetic) tradition, Judas is to be made to appear like Jesus and suffer on the cross in Christ’s place as punishment for his betrayal.
Well, so much for that dreadful woman at Princeton and her Judas boosterism. LM
#4 But that, of course, is how you get tenure.
Thanks, IRNS, for the scholarly input. Taken separately, simple errors are possible. But the tone of the whole campaign has been anti-Christian. Find a text that can be read differently, and bingo! the whole New Testament collapses. The wishes of the critics affect their work.
#6 Of course, and the media couldn’t care less. Time and time again, these sensational things are debunked but never a retraction of any kind.
And NYT “online” doesn’t count.