The Gospel of Judas holds the key to undoing the anti-Semitism for which Judas Iscariot has so long been the catalyst. With this concept in mind, Marvin Meyer wrapped up his lecture to over one hundred listeners at Los Angeles’ University of Judaism subscription lecture series, Archaeology and the Bible. Presenting a lecture entitled “The Recently Published Gospel of Judas, Gnosticism and the Jewish Connection,” to a Jewish audience, Meyer spent time outlining some of the background and intrigue that led to the final reconstruction and translating of the Gospel of Judas in April this year. Meyer is Professor of Bible and Christian Studies at Chapman University, Orange County, and one of the leading translators of the Gospel of Judas.
A seasoned raconteur when it comes to telling a story, Meyer held his audience’s attention for an hour before coming to the relevance of this “Christian” document to the Jewish world. Surprised at the initial public interest in the gospel, he credited the resources and marketing skills of the National Geographic Society who funded its translation, publication of two books on the subject as well as producing a documentary on the process of recovery and translation. Despite the flush of publicity, Meyer wryly noted that humility was in order in that with all those resources, the book never came close to outselling Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog. Clearly we are going to be presented with more on Judas Iscariot. Meyer mentioned that he is producing another title for release next spring that will document the way in which Judas has been treated in Christian literature since the first century. For him, the Gospel of Judas stands in stark contrast to that treatment. But the orthodox are striking back at Judas. Several books have hit the news stands discussing Judas and his newly translated gospel. Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham and one of the Church of England’s leading scholars has a book entitled Judas and the Gospel of Jesus: Have We Missed the Truth about Christianity? Simon J. Gathercole of the University of Aberdeen, also has a title in production. More are likely to follow. Expect alterations to the text of the gospel when the critical edition is launched in the spring. Meyer discussed some of the challenges of translation and inferred that changes will take place to the text. Time will tell whether these will be as far reaching as those suggested by Craig Evans, another of the translation team, reported in a CBC News report on the same day as the lecture. (See http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/12/04/judas-scholars.html.) For Craig Evans, the translation team read the script the wrong way. Instead of being the hero of the work, Judas is a dupe. Scholars meeting at the recent Society of Biblical Literature in Washington, DC., apparently supported the alternate reading of Evans. Meyer concluded by noting that more ancient texts have been found in Egypt by a Polish team of archaeologists digging in the famed Valley of the Kings. His hope is that another copy of the Gospel of Judas will come to light to help fill in the blanks that are left in our only copy of the document. Meyer teased his audience with the hope of more surprises and discoveries. Even of this document, a minimum of some 42 pages are still possibly missing from the codex if the page numbering is correct. These could possibly appear from another library or source in which they have been held since the codex was discovered in the 1970s. In addition, the papyrus used to add substance to the covers of the codex are still to be translated. These are normally old receipts, memos and documents that were no longer necessary, but give an interesting insight into the environment in which the book was first created. PETER NATHAN Related Articles
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