Sunday, January 08, 2006

THE COPTIC GOSPEL OF JUDAS is getting some more attention, thanks to John Dart's recent article. In yesterday's Time Herald, Jim Ketchum comments in an article entitled "New text may deepen Judas debate." He concludes:
Apparently, National Geographic plans to take the wraps off all this by Easter. Hopefully they have done enough homework to authenticate what they have.

If not, this could turn into another case similar to the purported Hitler diaries, the contents of which were judged to be bogus only after a German publication had invested great amounts of time, money and prestige into publishing them.

If this second-century text in fact is real, it will provide grist for theologians to debate for decades to come.

For the rest of us, this new 2,000-year-old story will be an interesting footnote that probably won't do much to change basic Christian beliefs.

Or do much to make over Judas' reputation.

It's always worthwhile to be skeptical of unprovenanced manuscripts, but a fake of this length and complexity would be awfully hard to pull off. But I am skeptical about the second century date. I'm not a Coptologist, but I'm suspicious about the way that texts in fourth and fifth-century Coptic manuscripts are often assumed to be translations of second-century Greek originals. We know that's the case with the Gospel of Thomas, because we have second-century Greek fragments of it. But we also know that Coptic borrowed a lot of Greek words as a matter of course. And I think a lot more homework needs to be done before we can be very confident of distinguishing Greek-translation Coptic from Coptic composed in a biblical style. Anyhow, we'll see.

I doubt that theologians will be very interested. The real importance of the Coptic Gospel of Judas is for the understanding of Jesus and his disciples in Coptic-speaking (and perhaps Greek-speaking) Christianity of roughly the second through fourth centuries CE. For specialists in Christianity of late antiquity, it is of great interest indeed. Plus, a popular audience will think it's cool because it's so countercultural.

UPDATE (17 January): More

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