Scholarly Malpractice

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article on how the National Geographic's carefully selected team of Bible scholars managed to "screw the pootch" when it came time to translate and explain the Gospel of Judas.

As you recall, the Gospel of Judas was touted as a document that would cause Christians to radically change their understanding of Jesus, Judas and the teachings of Christianity. According to the National Geographic - in a television broadcast to millions - Judas had a most special relationship with Jesus and he didn't betray Jesus so much as carry out His command. We were told that if only this Gospel hadn't been suppressed by the Church (*boo, hiss*), Europe could have avoided the taint of anti-Semitism.

Well, apparently, not so much:

One of the seven million people who watched the National Geographic documentary was April D. DeConick. Admittedly, DeConick, a professor of biblical studies at Rice University, was not your average viewer. As a Coptologist, she had long been aware of the existence of the Gospel of Judas and was friends with several of those who had worked on the so-called dream team. It's fair to say she watched the documentary with special interest.

As soon as the show ended, she went to her computer and downloaded the English translation from the National Geographic Web site. Almost immediately she began to have concerns. From her reading, even in translation, it seemed obvious that Judas was not turning in Jesus as a friendly gesture, but rather sacrificing him to a demon god named Saklas. This alone would suggest, strongly, that Judas was not acting with Jesus' best interests in mind — which would undercut the thesis of the National Geographic team. She turned to her husband, Wade, and said: "Oh no. Something is really wrong."

Hmm...sacrificing Jesus to the demon god Saklas...that can't be good.

Although it kind of sounds important...at least if we want the real story instead of some wifty New Age indictment of the Church (*boo, hiss*).

Likewise:

She started the next day on her own translation of the Coptic transcription, also posted on the National Geographic Web site. That's when she came across what she considered a major, almost unbelievable error. It had to do with the translation of the word "daimon," which Jesus uses to address Judas. The National Geographic team translates this as "spirit," an unusual choice and inconsistent with translations of other early Christian texts, where it is usually rendered as "demon." In this passage, however, Jesus' calling Judas a demon would completely alter the meaning. "O 13th spirit, why do you try so hard?" becomes "O 13th demon, why do you try so hard?" A gentle inquiry turns into a vicious rebuke.

Then there's the number 13. The Gospel of Judas is thought to have been written by a sect of Gnostics known as Sethians, for whom the number 13 would indicate a realm ruled by the demon Ialdabaoth. Calling someone a demon from the 13th realm would not be a compliment. In another passage, the National Geographic translation says that Judas "would ascend to the holy generation." But DeConick says it's clear from the transcription that a negative has been left out and that Judas will not ascend to the holy generation (this error has been corrected in the second edition). DeConick also objected to a phrase that says Judas has been "set apart for the holy generation." She argues it should be translated "set apart from the holy generation" — again, the opposite meaning. In the later critical edition, the National Geographic translators offer both as legitimate possibilities.

Judas is a demon???? He won't ascend to the holy generation????

Hey, that's not very flattering.

And it doesn't sound like much of an antidote to anti-Semitism, which makes sense because the Gnostics were deeply anti-Semitic, which is something known to amateurs like myself.

The essay offers an explanation for this screw-up:

For example, in the documentary, there is a scene in which Meyer is standing in a burial cave in Egypt, explaining the likely story of how the codex was found. The director, according to Meyer, wanted him to say that that very cave was the cave where the codex was found. But, of course, no one knows that, and there are a lot of burial caves in Egypt. In the end, Meyer says on camera that it was probably found in a cave like the one he's standing in. The pressure to sacrifice truth for drama, he says, was constant.

I think that there was "pressure" to "sacrifice truth for drama" is a partial explanation, but hardly gets us back to a first cause. Why, after all, is it dramatic to present a picture of the Gospel of Judas that was so diametrically opposed to orthodox Christianity? Couldn't it have been equally dramatic to confirm Christian orthodoxy?

Well, no, because there is drama and then there is drama.

The nice thing is that this episode helps to separate the sheep from the goats. Unfortunately, one of the goats appears to be Bart Ehrman, whose lectures and early books I thought were basically objective scholarship, but over time I have come to doubt as being dependable [Fn.1]:

In the second edition of National Geographic's Judas book, Meyer tries out a new argument to counter those who have attacked his translation and interpretation. His defense centers on the meanings of "13th aeon," which refers to an eternal realm, and "daimon." A later Gnostic text, called Pistis Sofia, uses some of the same language, and the character of Sofia is neither wholly evil nor wholly good. He posits a connection between the character of Sofia and the character of Judas. Ehrman, in a footnote to his own essay, asserts that Meyer "has effectively refuted" the thesis of DeConick's book.

It's tough to find anyone else who agrees. In an essay presented at the Rice conference, John D. Turner, a professor of religious studies at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, insists that Meyer's use of a much later text to justify his interpretation of Judas "raises fundamental methodological questions." In an interview, he is less courtly. "That's a bunch of crap," he says, part of last-ditch attempt to salvage an utterly discredited view.

My intuition - from working with experts - is that the main translator, Marvin Meyers, succumbed to pressure from National Geographic to come up with the "right kind" of drama, and he made the very human decision to favor on a case by case basis a particular interpretation that might be arguable and satisfied his employer, but in the end was fundamentally askew.

That kind of thing is not unheard of when it comes to expert witnesses.

_________
1. A case in point is Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus." Ehrman makes some superficially startling claims - such as that there are more translation "errors" in the Bible than the number of words in the Bible, but this claim turn out to be "immaterial" for the most part. For example, Ehrman concedes that most of the translation errors - something like 90%+ are the putting the words in a different order, but word order does not change the meaning of a sentence in an inflected language like Greek and unlike English, something which most English speakers might not be aware of.

Likewise, the more substantial differences in meanings found in different textual versions, end up making no real difference in Christian theology.

Finally, Ehrman claims that the pericope of the Woman taken in Adultery was unknown until the "Middle Ages", but this is clearly wrong since Eusebius writing circa 350 knows about the story. (Perhaps Ehrman includes the 4th Century in the "Middle Ages"?)

I can understand that these differences might seem significant and faith-shattering to a former fundamentalist whose faith is underpinned by trust in the inerrant written text. But I have only a finite amount of time to spend on reading, and I can't afford to spend on writers who seem to be willing to abuse the trust I place in them when I invest my time - and, to a lesser extent, money - in their book.