The fact that this Gospel still causes conflict today, just as it did when it was first written is amazing by itself. The primary detractor to National Geographic's vision arose mere months after the release of the first translation. April DeConick aggressively argued that the National Geographic team not only mistranslated several key terms and phrases within the Gospel of Judas, but accused them of doing so based on a desire to spark public controversy and address allegedly anti-Semitic passages within the text. These accusations along with the damning critique from authoritative church figures, brought shame upon National Geographic and caused many to question their methods, but was it deserved? N.T. Wright asserted (as I quoted above) that the scholarly hype behind this alternative Judas was simply the product of some academics looking for yet another way to re-invent the Historical Jesus. However, this has been explicitly denied by almost every scholar on the National Geographic team with only one scholar attempting to argue that the Gospel should affect our historic understanding of Jesus' betrayer. A possible misunderstanding could have arisen from small provocative headlines such as Bart D. Ehrman's book: The Lost Gospel Of Judas: A New Look At Betrayer And Betrayed. He also claimed that the Gospel provides an "alternative vision" of Christianity. A few other scholars have made similar statements but, as stated earlier, almost every one has denied any historical merit to the Gospel. Bart D. Ehrman has most explicitly denied it's historical value in both his book and many of his public lectures on the subject. The only conceivable way to claim that the National Geographic team claimed historical value in the text would be the misinterpretation of the provocative titles. As for April DeConick, she and Marvin Meyer (a top member of the NG team) got into a rather extensive online debate over several essays and blog posts where they responded to each other critiques and translations. DeConick's most popular criticisms included: the claim that the NG translation of "spirit" was obviously "demon" and that NG's mistranslation casts Judas in a positive light that betrays the Gospel's intention, the claim that when it is said that Judas is "set apart for that holy generation", the proper translation is not "for" but "from", and the claim that NG was seeking to rehabilitate the Judas character in order to help end the vicious anti-Semitism the character has caused. Marvin Meyer was quick to respond to DeConick's claims (which she published a book on) with an essay of his own titled, "The Thirteenth Daimon: Judas and Sophia in The Gospel of Judas". In this essay and in others he refutes DeConick's claims with statements such as:
- the word daimn (44,21), a term of Greek derivation, is used in the
Gospel of Judas within a statement in which Jesus calls Judas the "thirteenth daimon," and the term may be translated "demon," understood in a negative sense, as DeConick suggests. But with all the references to daimones in Platonic, Middle Platonic, Neo-Platonic, Hermetic, and magical texts, where the term is often imbued with neutral or even positive connotations, it may just as easily be translated as "spirit," as we translated it, or even "god," as Professors Karen King and Elaine Pagels translate it in Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity. Commonly daimones are thought to be intermediary beings that find their place between the divine and human realms.
- the Coptic verbal form porj= e- (46,17) may be translated as either "separate/set apart for" or "separate/set apart from" in the Gospel of Judas, in spite of Professor DeConick’s suggestions. According to the gospel, Judas asks Jesus, "What is the advantage that I have received? For you have set me apart for—or from—that generation." Walter E. Crum’s Coptic Dictionary (271b-272a) gives both "be divided from" and "be divided into" (reflecting the Greek aphorizein [etc.] eis) as possible 3 meanings of prj e-. So initially we translated the phrase at 46,17, which differs from the usual construction in the text and codex (prj ebol e-/n- = "separate/set apart from"), with "set apart for," though a footnote in the critical edition gives the alternate translation "set apart from," and Rodolphe Kasser’s French translation reads "tu m’aies séparé de cette (présente) génération-là." While I have indicated elsewhere that I also am increasingly inclined to translate this difficult Coptic phrase as "set apart from," the fact remains that either translation is possible. Karen King and Elaine Pagels are in agreement on this point.
And in response to the "deliberate" mistranslations, Meyer states: In her Op-Ed piece, she writes, "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." There is hardly a more damning accusation that one can make against one’s fellow scholars: that we deliberately altered the Coptic text for our own purposes, and hindered the scholarly quest for understanding. Nothing could be further from the truth, as anyone who has observed us and our work, including Professor DeConick, knows. I can only hope that, if given the opportunity, Professor DeConick would be willing to retract a defamatory charge that somehow came out wrong. Now the same accusation has been picked up by The National Review, which repeats Professor DeConick’s indictment. That is, alas, the way slanderous comments get around. In The Thirteenth Apostle DeConick goes on to offer a conjecture for how we arrived at the earlier reading, guessing that we assumed an otherwise unattested abbreviation of a Greek verb. I recalled nothing of the sort. Hence, I called Gregor Wurst in Augsburg, and he assured me that he had recently contacted DeConick to tell her that she had misunderstood our translational decision, which was based on a normal Coptic idiom found in Crum’s dictionary. But now that too is in print.
These responses at least show that the accusations DeConick has made are not nearly as well substantiated as the press would lead us to believe. Not to mention the vast majority of translation issues that were addressed in the Critical edition of the NG release. Ironically, DeConick and others seem to be aggressively critiquing these scholars for what appears, for all intents and purposes, to be a completely legitimate attempt at translating and releasing the Gospel of Judas for the public. Debate and disagreement over certain translations and beliefs is not only inevitable but healthy. The ability to do so is what has helped scholarship progress for centuries, but let us not resort to such violent and humiliating accusations against scholarly integrity before thorough discussion on the topic at hand. The Gospel of Judas is a bittersweet example of how lack of communication between a (undoubtedly) flawed National Geographic team and other scholars lead to a rift in the relations between these academics based on unsubstantiated (but well publicized) claims.
