GJudas: Hurtado on Judas

Prof. Larry Hurtado has weighed in on Judas at Slate (honestly, you have to be pretty hip to be a senior NT scholar writing for Slate Magazine):

The Gospel of Judas has genuine historical value—as one of several bits of evidence showing the diversity of early Christianity, like the writings of such figures as Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons in about 180 A.D. The text's depiction of Judas as the disciple to whom Jesus gave unique mystical revelations is not itself really unique. It somewhat resembles the portrayal of Thomas in the Gospel of Thomas. Nor is there evidence that the Gospel of Judas ever enjoyed much popularity as an alternative to the canon of the New Testament or was considered for inclusion in that canon. This text reflects a profoundly elitist viewpoint, claiming a specially conveyed revelation of religious truths withheld from ordinary Christians and their leaders.

I am looking forward to reading a traditional papyrological description of the manuscript, as I wonder what else this text was bound with. Apparently it also contains a variant of the Epistle to Philip and the Revelation of Jacob, the rest being unreadable, but I have been unable to track down Kasser's original comments on this point.

(Update 4/14: It turns out there is good reason that news on these manuscripts has been so sketchy. No one seems to know who has what and how or when they got it. See above post for more on this.)

The Genizah Collection

Hey, look at this, more news about ancient manuscripts. Well, most of these aren't anywhere close to ancient, but many of them do shed light on ancient near east issues. The Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit has had a website for a while, but this large new grant from the AHRC will provide the resources to catalog and digitize a bunch of these fragments (including interesting things like the "Zadokite" fragment):

"Professor Stefan Reif, Founder Director of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection, said: “The Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Library offers a window on the world of the 10th–13th centuries. The largest and most important collection of medieval Jewish, Hebrew and Arabic documents in the world, it is at least equal in importance to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Whilst the Dead Sea Scrolls chronicled the life of a dissident sect that cut itself off from the world, the Genizah fragments tell the story of ordinary people dealing with everyday life, love and lore."

The collection has taught us more about people like Maimonides, given us greater textual clarity on Talmud literature, and even afforded us access to a few Greek and Syriac texts that had been scraped and reused by later scribes (palimpsests). The relation of the collection to New Testament studies is limited, but it certainly helps to add dimension to what we already know about the language and customs of that era.

It will be especially interesting to see some of these fragments in greater detail, as some of them are amulets made of cloth (this particular one "has the aim of making the heart of the loved one burn with passion", others are rather well preserved pages of paper and vellum. With this large range of materials and manuscript types, I look forward to seeing the variety of book formats represented by this collection.

GJudas: Obligatory Gospel of Judas Nod...

The "Unveiling"

One would be hard pressed to put together anything much better than Mark Goodacre's characteristically comprehensive rundown of the Gospel of Judas from academic bloggers seriously "in the know." As I was not able to see the National Geographic documentary, his summary is rather helpful. He certainly hasn't missed much on this one.

I have little other to add that hasn't already been said: "publicity stunt," "we have known about the text ever since Irenaeus" (A.H. I.31), "this particular manuscript has been discussed since Rudolph Kasser delivered a paper on the manuscript in 2004," "Michael van Rijn has followed this story for ages," and "a guy named Roger Pearse has had a site on the manuscript (with images and transcriptions!) for quite some time." All right, a few of those may be new to you. I had actually poked through the images on that last site a week or two before the National Geographic site was launched.

The Skullduggery

The Christian Century even had an article on it in the Dec. 27, 2005 issue. In this article there is an interesting anecdote about James Robinson's first experience with the text and its publication strategy:

"But in 2004, Rodolphe Kasser of the University of Geneva announced in Paris that by the end of 2005 he would be publishing translations of the Coptic-language version of the Gospel of Judas. As it turned out, the owner was a Swiss foundation, and the torn and tattered papyrus text had been hawked to potential buyers in North America and Europe for decades after it was found at Muhazafat Al Minya in Middle Egypt.

The "Judas" saga was confirmed in detail last month at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Philadelphia. Retired Claremont Graduate University professor James Robinson, general editor of the English edition of the Nag Hammadi Library, said he was first contacted in 1983 about negotiations to buy certain texts, including the Gospel of Judas. Many years later, he saw blurry photographs of part of the text.

Robinson said that early in November he learned that Kasser and several European, Canadian and U.S. scholars had signed agreements with the National Geographic Society to assist with a documentary film and a National Geographic article for an Easter 2006 release and a succession of three books.

Robinson was critical of the secrecy and inaccessibility surrounding the document—a recurring academic problem that delayed for decades the publishing of translations of some Dead Sea Scrolls and many Nag Hammadi codices. In his talk, Robinson called the practice "skullduggery"—with a glance at fellow panelist Marvin Meyer of Chapman University, a longtime colleague in the field and one of the contracted authors."

And apparently, the plot thickened quite some time ago. In a paper delivered at the 2005 SBL Congress (in particular the "Al-Minya discovery"), James M. Robinson works through some of the material that has become his book on the subject:

The first information about the existence of this text, which is in a papyrus codex along with a version of 1 Apoc. Jas. and a dialogue of Jesus with his disciples not identical with NCH III 5, was given by J. M. Robinson and S. Emmel at the Third International Congress of Coptic Studies in Warsaw in August 1984.

Koenen later sent me some almost completely illegible photographs he had obtained of some of the Coptic material. I made copies of them available to Wolf-Peter Funk. Ultimately, I turned over my copies, for safekeeping, to Stephen Emmel, at the quadrennial congress of the International Association for Coptic Studies meeting in Paris, on June 27, 2004. For he was the person involved from the very beginning, and has subsequently become the Editor of the Newsletter of the International Association for Coptic Studies. Hence, the Institut für Ägyptologie und Koptologie that he directs at the University of Münster, Germany is in effect the Secretariat of the International Association for Coptic Studies.

I had long since forwarded in March 1991 what I could read to Marvin W. Meyer, who was preparing the critical edition of The Letter of Peter to Philip:

According to the reports of James M. Robinson and Stephen Emmel, a somewhat divergent Coptic text of the Letter of Peter to Philip is to be found in a papyrus codex which at the present time is neither published nor available for study.

Further:

On July 1, 2004, at the quadrennial congress of the International Association for Coptic Studies held this time in Paris, Rodolphe Kasser announced that he was publishing The Gospel of Judas late in 2005. Given his slow track record in publishing the Tripartite Tractate of the Jung Codex (Nag Hammadi Codex I), no one has expected him to meet that deadline. It has already been rescheduled for early in 2006. He has added a co-editor, Gregor Wurst, which gives some hope that his edition will ultimately appear and make the text available to the rest of us.

Kasser’s report has led to all-too-sensational German articles in journals for a larger non-scholarly public, first by Ralph Pöhner in FACTS, then by Roger Thiede in Focus.

Thiede included an interview with Stephen Emmel. Although Emmel displays in exemplary form the necessary academic caution concerning a text that is not yet available, Pöhner and Thiede do the very reverse, with disastrous results. And of course Gilles Quispel got into the act, in another sensational essay by the Dutch journalist Hank Schutten.

Pöhner had interviewed me by phone from Zürich, and yet what he reports about my involvement is so littered with errors that one must be very tentative in using what he reports anywhere in his article. Of course one would hope that he might be in better control of the facts insofar as they have to do with his own Switzerland.

There is a lot more there. Robinson goes on to tell the twisted tale of how this text surfaced in the recent antiquities market. The long and the short of it is that this set of manuscripts has been so badly handled, unless we can chart "who sold what when" a full codicological description of the "find" in its entirety will never be possible. They need to shelve The Da Vinci Code, I want to see this movie. Donald Sutherland would probably make a good James Robinson.

The Fallout

It is unfortunate that the terrifically shady publication strategy of this otherwise interesting manuscript has perverted public (read: non-specialist) perception of what the Gospel of Judas actually is. If only this kind of cash and publicity could get thrown at any number of far more important early Christian manuscripts, things like The Da Vinci Code would be more immediately recognized by the non-specialist public for what they are: Foucault's Pendulum rip-offs featuring far less invigorating hermeneutical acrobatics. Imagine having such an accessible dedicated manuscript site for the Freer holdings, for example. Is it wrong to sense irony in the fact that the greatest early Christian manuscript publicity scam involves The Gospel of Judas? I think not.

I don't want to downplay the significance of actually having this text. It was one thing to have Irenaeus' mention of it, as we have always understood the theological nature of the text. But now that the manuscript is available to the same critical methodologies that have opened up the relationship between things like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, or the Odes of Solomon and the canonical Jesus traditions, we may actually have some interesting scholarship emerge. It may also shed further light on a project I am currently engaged in, namely assessing the characterization of apostle figures in late gospel writing.

And perhaps what may be most important about this find is the light that it has shed on the means by which such texts finally make it into the hands of scholars. Who is to say what NT fragments have never surfaced due to the vicissitudes of grey market antiquities dealings? Any excitment about this particular find should be tempered by the fact that we don't have as much of it as we should.

Crossing Our "t's" In The Passion Narrative

A new study by the Royal Society of Medicine calls into question the traditional imagery of Jesus' crucifixion. Since there is evidence that the Romans crucified villians in a remarkable variety of ways, there is no way of knowing exactly how Jesus was crucified. Thus the macabre "head-up" depiction passed down to us by tradition may have no basis in the ancient history of criminal torture. As this article sees it, the fact is:

"only one piece of archaeological evidence has ever been found about a crucifixion, mainly because crucified people were not formally buried but left on a rubbish dump to be eaten by wild dogs and hyenas, say Masien and Mitchell.

This case entails a young Jewish man, whose inscription on an ossuary, found near Giv'at ha-Mivtar in Israel, suggests his name was probably Yehonanan ben Hagkol.

The clue to his demise comes from an 11.5-centimetre (4.8-inch) iron nail that had been hammered through one of his heels, attaching it to the side of the cross. But there are no signs of any nail holes in the bones of the wrist or the forearm."

The sad tale of Jehohanan ben HGQWL can be seen in more detail here and here at Frontline's From Jesus to Christ series (a reprint of an Expository Times article). In this article, Charlesworth concludes:

"In conclusion, we now have empirical evidence of a crucifixion. Death on a cross could be prolonged or swift. The crucifixion of Josephus' acquaintance who survived should not be projected to the crucifixion of Jesus. The major extrabiblical paradigm for crucifixion is no longer Josephus; it is the archaeological data summarized above. The crucifixion of Jesus, who did not possess a gladiator's physique and stamina, did not commence but culminated when he was nailed to the cross. After the brutal, all night scourging by Roman soldiers, who would have relished an opportunity to vent their hatred of the Jews and disgust for Palestinian life, Jesus was practically dead. I see not reason why the Synoptic account does not contain one of the few bruta facta from his life when it reports that, as he began to stagger from Herod's palace to Golgotha, he was too weak to carry the cross; Simon of Cyrene carried it for him. Metaphors should not be confused with actualities nor faith with history. It is not a confession of faith to affirm that Jesus died on Golgotha that Friday afternoon; it is a probability obtained by the highest canons of scientific historical research."

To be fair, the findings of the RSM are reasonable, as crucifixion imagery does depend more on the visual tradition of the earliest church than say, an actual diagram in the margin of an early manuscript of the Gospel of John. Yet there argument from silence falls apart in the claim that "Given the uncertainty as to exactly how he was crucified, the answer may only ever come if some new archaeological evidence or piece of writing emerges from the shadows of the past, it says."

As far as a "piece of writing," I wonder if the Gospel descriptions count. They each simply use the verb "to crucify," but John 19:33-35 and Luke 24:39 (along with John's parallel) at least put us in the ballpark. After the New Testament We do have reference in Clement of Alexandria to the cross as the "symbol of the Lord" (somewhere in the Stromata), and Tertullian speaks of the cross as a symbol of Christian suffering, and object worth of adoration (Apology). It is also Tertullian that speaks of the cross specifically as sort of an early Christian identity marker (in De Corona). But we don't have any explicit reference to the cross in early Christian artwork until the fifth century, they tended to depict Jesus pastorally or would use lamb imagery when referring to his suffering. We may find reason for this in the criticism levelled against Christians often found in Tertullian's apologies, namely that they were "cross worshippers." Thus we find things like the anchor, trident, and various monograms of Jesus name (such as the "chi/rho") in which the cross is more implicit.

The RSM though might have overlooked a crucial bit of evidence found in the use of the staurogram in some of our earliest manuscripts. This "tau/rho" combination looks remarkably like the cross found again in fifth century artwork. Perhaps it is this unique manuscript marker that serves as a link between eyewitness accounts of the crucifixion and later Christian imagery. I'll see if I can scratch up some images...

SBL 2006 Papers

I'll go ahead in joining the biblioblogging trend of posting what seminar I will be participating in this year in DC. Mark Goodacre posted a few other announcements. There are four or five of us coming over from New College to deliver papers on our work this year at SBL, but I am not sure if they would be comfortable in having their topics broadcast at this point.

The Bible in Ancient and Modern Media section asked for papers on the use of the Bible in films that really don't have much to do with the Bible. (I suppose the frogs at the end of Magnolia are a good example of what they are looking for.) So I tossed together this:

"Jesus Beyond His Genre: The Non-Canonical Jesus Films."

Abstract

There is an interesting sub-genre of "Jesus films" that relates well to the "treatment of biblical themes in films that are not expressly biblical." This genre is distinct both from films that attempt to directly adapt the canonical gospels to the screen, and from films that simply feature a discernable Christ figure as a central theme. The films that populate this sub-genre rest somewhere in between, being filmed narratives that have nothing else to do with Jesus other than the suggestion of a title, a set of visual themes, or an abstract yet fully intentional nod to the nature of Jesus. This paper will outline the contours of this interesting genre by looking at three of its most effective examples, and attempt to identify the hermeneutics at play in such profoundly inter-textual works of art. At first glimpse, Bruno Dumont's controversial realist masterpiece "La vie de Jesus" is only related to Jesus by title. But beneath the surface of the film lies commentary about mortality and materiality that expands to fill the Christological brackets set by Dumont in the title. Gus van Sant's recent film “Last Days” narrates the last few days of Kurt Cobain’s life in the context of a loosely fictional stand-in that becomes increasingly cloaked in Jesus imagery until a final resurrection scene. And finally, Bresson’s “Au hazard Balthazar” quite boldly turns a dilapidated donkey into a provocative metaphor for the odd presence of Christ in contemporary culture. All three of these films are intentional and provocative allusions to Jesus in decidedly non-biblical narrative worlds. This paper will track the reflective strategies of this "non-canonical" genre through these three close readings in their appropriate film theoretical context, and articulate the rich potential for re-narrating Jesus by means of the startling generic conflict embodied by these films.

I should have added in the abstract that Dumont's film reportedly takes its title from Ernst Renan's famous volume of the life of Jesus. But I look forward to (briefly) covering this overlooked section of Jesus films. I don't think I will exhaust the range of explanations for this anomaly in the above paper, but ever since being exposed to these films I have always wondered how they manage to catch aspects of Jesus' life as narrated in the Gospels and tradition far more incisively than their more "faithful" counterparts produced by Christians seeking to tell the story of Jesus visually.

We may be able to add The Last Temptation of Christ and Jesus of Montreal to this list, but the key feature of the above films is that while not providing a metanarrative of Jesus' life and purpose, they do focus in on specific elements that add an intertextual dimension to the primary narrative. I would want to argue that, as Kazantzakis poses it, The Last Temptation of Christ is less about Jesus than it is about the human experience of spirituality. But that is a different paper for a different time, each context deserves closer scrutiny. And to be honest, I have a hard time with Jesus of Montreal as it is my least favorite of Arcand's films and its mimicry of the Gospel narratives seems to lack grounding in a broader sense of redemption or social justice. I am more than open to correction on this point.