The Gospel of Judas and the Democratization of Biblical Scholarship
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The Gospel of Judas and the Democratization of Biblical Scholarship:
Or, What the Jesus Seminar Got Right

by

Timothy Paul Jones

            In the last decade of the twentieth century, a handful of scholars concluded that research into the life of Jesus had languished too long in the academy. “We are going to carry out our work in full public view,” Robert Funk declared in the initial public statement from the Jesus Seminar. “We will insist on the public disclosure of our work and, insofar as it lies within our power, we shall see to it that the public is informed of our judgments.”[i] To be sure, many of the Jesus Seminar’s tactics have been debatable. The primary participants in the seminar have been assembled almost exclusively from the most skeptical fringes of the scholarly spectrum. Their bead-based polling method is so convoluted that Jimmy Carter would be taking the final tally if such a practice were instituted in a Third World country. Perhaps most problematic of all, the seminar’s peculiar guidelines for determining the nature of the historical Jesus virtually predetermined the conclusions that they would reach before the fellows bagged their first beads.

            These internal workings are not, however, the most enduring legacy of the Jesus Seminar. The upshot of the Jesus Seminar that will last long after the seminar’s fellows are forgotten has been the democratization of biblical scholarship. Robert Funk and his fellows effectively shifted discussions about biblical history from high-flung ivory towers to the café at your local Barnes and Noble. An editor at HarperSanFrancisco attributed this shift to The Da Vinci Code, claiming that “Dan Brown didn’t invent it, but he made it sexy.”[ii] There may be some truth to this statement—but, years before Dan Brown made biblical conspiracies sexy with his codes, the Jesus Seminar got the Gospels on the nightly news with their beads. Without the Jesus Seminar, The Da Vinci Code would never have scurried up anyone’s bestseller list, The Colbert Report would never have dialed Bart Ehrman’s number to discuss his book about textual criticism, and only a few professional academics would ever have heard of the Gospel of Judas, the James ossuary, and the supposed Jesus family tomb.

 

The Gospel According to Bakers and Bath-Makers

            Some scholars may yearn for those halcyon years before the Jesus Seminar, for a time when discussions about the Council of Nicea never moved beyond college classrooms and scholars could seize exclusive access to archaeological discoveries for decades. As for me, I relish this wresting of theological discourse from the grip of the academic guild. Such a world is not new: It represents a return to the world that thrived in a few regions of the ancient world, that lost its way in the Middle Ages, and that was briefly restored in the Reformation before the Enlightenment fractured Western culture into castes of credentialed experts and ignorable laypeople.

            In the fourth century A.D., debates about the nature of Jesus spiraled to a fever pitch when followers of an elder named Arius stood on one side of the river and chorused, “There was a time when the Son was not!” while the orthodox chanted from the opposite bank, “Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.” It wasn’t a guild of professional theologians that sang these tunes; the songsters were slaves and moneychangers, bakers and bath-makers. “The city is full of workers and slaves who all consider themselves theologians,” it was said in the aftermath of this controversy. “If you ask someone to exchange currency, he will tell you how the Son differs from the Father. If you ask a baker how much his bread costs, he will argue that the Son is less than the Father. If you want to know if your bath is ready, you are told that the Son was made from nothing.”[iii]

            In the twenty-first century, this ancient world has emerged anew. Dan Brown and the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail conduct the chorus on one bank of the river—“There was a time when the Son married Mary Magdalene!”—while a cottage industry of The Da Vinci Code debunkers dances on the opposite verge. Downstream a few yards, you’ll glimpse a similar scene, with John Dominic Crossan, Elaine Pagels, and James Robinson on one shore and a huddle of evangelicals—some angry, some erudite—on the other. On both sides of the stream, you find the contemporary equivalents of bakers and bath-makers, ordinary people talking textual criticism over their caramel lattes.

            What are the results of this democratization of biblical and theological discussion? Ten years ago, as a young pastor and newly-minted Master of Divinity, I mentioned the Council of Nicea to a congregation of farmers and schoolteachers. No one had heard of such an event. For all they knew, it had something to do with the infamous 1997 resolution that called Southern Baptists to boycott the Disney Corporation. Even after I explained the ins and outs of the Council of Nicea, the study group still didn’t see this fourth-century gathering of church leaders as an event of any significance. Today, when I mention the Council of Nicea to a group of laypeople, the results are radically different: Folk may live under the delusion—a la Dan Brown—that the council culminated with a narrow vote on the deity of Jesus; but, at least they know that the council was ancient and that the identity of Jesus was a primary topic of discussion. Perhaps most important, there’s no need to convince them that the Council of Nicea was an event of supreme significance. As for me, I prefer the present propensity to the one that I encountered in the past. Deluded interest beats ignorant disinterest any day.

 

In the Plowboy’s Reach

            Around 1521, a priest seated at a table in a manor known as Little Sodbury suggested to William Tyndale that ordinary people didn’t need to know or to discuss the ordinances of God. To this, Tyndale retorted, “If God spare my life, … I will make a boy that driveth a plow know more of the Scriptures than you do.” Driven by this desire to place the Bible into the plowboy’s hands, Tyndale translated holy writ into ordinary English. Yet, what perhaps even such a forward-thinking soul as Tyndale never envisioned was the fact that, once every plowboy has access to the Bible, at least a few plowboys will find themselves doubting it. And some plowboy’s overactive imaginations may eventually concoct a conspiracy theory that conforms the text to his personal whims. Once the Bible is placed on a shelf that the plowboy can reach, the democratization of discussion is merely a matter of time.

            The only way to avoid such democratization is to safeguard knowledge within a guild of clerics or scholars. When such a club dominates the discussion, the fortunate few with their doctoral degrees in hand dictate the rules of ideological engagement and eliminate anyone who fails to comply. In earlier eras, elimination occurred by execution. In the modern world, it is known as “peer review.” The results of the two processes can be remarkably similar, except that death by peer review tends to leave less physical residue.

 

The Problem with Judas

            I say all of this simply to be forthright about the presuppositions that undergirded my thoughts as I read Dr. April DeConick’s recent critique of how the National Geographic Society dealt with the Gospel of Judas. In 2006, a bestselling book and popular documentary from National Geographic publicized a reconstruction of the Gospel of Judas, based on a fragmented fourth-century manuscript. According to National Geographic, this gospel portrayed Judas as a hero and as “Jesus’ closest intimate and friend.” In her book The Thirteenth Apostle, DeConick makes an alternative case, claiming that the Gospel of Judas does not depict the betrayer as a hero but as a demon. According to DeConick’s New York Times op-ed piece,

 

Several of the translation choices made by the society’s scholars fall well outside the commonly accepted practices in the field. … 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. In fact, the original states that Judas will “not ascend to the holy generation.”[iv]

 

In DeConick’s assessment, a mixed bag of flawed motivations prompted these misportrayals. “The big problem,” she surmises, “is that National Geographic wanted an exclusive.” The secondary difficulty stemmed from “an understandable desire to reform the relationship between Jews and Christians.” At several inexcusable junctures in church history, the character of Judas has functioned as a foil for anti-Semitism. So, with the noble goal of overcoming two thousand years of mutual misapprehension with a single documentary, the National Geographic Society set about “manufacturing a hero Judas”—or so DeConick suggests.

            To be sure, the National Geographic Society’s initial presentation of the Gospel of Judas was not without its problems. Primary among these problems was the society’s suggestion that this Gnostic text, penned at least a century after the time of Jesus, could provide “new insights into the disciple who betrayed Jesus” from “the first or second century.”[v] A different perspective on the function of Judas in second-century theological debates? Perhaps. But “new insights” into the historical personage known as Judas? Not a chance.

            It is also true that a few errors could be found in the first reconstruction of this poorly-preserved text. Still, DeConick’s allegation that “the society’s scholars … altered the Coptic original” represents a serious charge. In the first place, these were not “the society’s scholars,” as if National Geographic hired a handful of academic hacks to support some predetermined agenda. The members of this team represented premier researchers and experts in the Coptic language and early Christian history. Much to the credit of National Geographic Society, the team included not only religious skeptics such as Bart Ehrman and Marvin Meyer but also an evangelical Christian (Dr. Craig Evans) and a Roman Catholic (Father Donald Senior). None of these professors or researchers is infallible—I’ve written an entire book that respectfully takes Dr. Ehrman to task for the theological conclusions that he has extrapolated from early Christian texts. Nevertheless, of this I am quite certain: None of these scholars “altered” any original text, and none of them was concerned with “manufacturing” a heroic Judas.

            Could the team have erred in their reconstruction and transcriptions? On some points, it seems that they did. Yet such slip-ups fall far short of deliberate alterations or fabrications. Furthermore, while some of the team’s initial word-choices—“spirit” for daimon, for example, and “for that generation” instead of “from that generation” for etgenea—may be legitimately questioned, such renderings do not “fall well outside the commonly accepted practices in the field,” as DeConick suggests.

 

Breaking the Grip of the Guild

            So, how should the Gospel of Judas have been handled? According to DeConick, once the codex was restored, the National Geographic Society should have released “life-sized photos of each page … before [the] translation, allowing experts worldwide to share information as they independently [worked] through the text.” So—after spending a reported one million dollars to obtain rights to Codex Tchacos and financing reconstruction of the badly-damaged manuscript, radiocarbon dating, ink analysis, multispectral imaging, contextual investigation, and paleographic research—National Geographic should simply have made life-sized photographs available to scholars and then waited.

            Let’s suppose for a moment that National Geographic Society had pursued such a procedure. What would have been the results? Codex Tchacos was copied in Coptic; as such, only academicians with the requisite training to read this somewhat quirky language could have participated in the conversation. A handful of excellent doctoral dissertations would have explored this gospel’s historical and theological contexts. These dissertations would have excited their readers—all of three or four of them—and landed well-windowed corner offices in the ivory tower for the authors and their doktorvaters. Conspiracy theories would have emerged, speculating about how the established church might have partnered with National Geographic to suppress the dark secrets hidden in this codex. Long after any widespread desire to know about this document wisped away, some academic publisher would finally have produced a few hundred copies of the consummate critical translation of Codex Tchacos, complete with life-sized photographs. And, given the querulous nature of scholars, this long-awaited critical translation would likely have included just as many debated reconstructions as the rendering that Marvin Meyer and his partners provided to National Geographic.

            Perhaps National Geographic did desire an exclusive—but, in her own way, so does DeConick. The exclusivity that she has suggested would have limited the discussion to the scholarly oligarchy, safeguarded within the guild and removed from the public ear until the public’s interest in this gospel passed away.

            In today’s post-Jesus Seminar world of democratized biblical discussion, however, this simply isn’t how the process plays out—and I, for one, am glad. When discussions remain within the guild, research is driven by such trifling questions as, “How does this contribute to our field of study?”—or, in less altruistic instances, “How will this project build my case for tenure and promotion?” When the discussion is aimed at the average Joe, someone must ask the questions that really matter: “How does this publication affect the everyday faith of ordinary people? What discussions will this project provoke at the coffee shop and the pub? How will this change what people believe about their world, about themselves, about their God?” When these sorts of enduring questions frame the discussion, not only academic specialists but also pastors, youth workers, and teachers at the local community college must construct conclusions about the ancient texts.

            A fever for exclusives and some unintended errors may occasionally chafe the research in this old-new world. Yet I have no desire to limit the discussion about new discoveries to the few that know the right words and hold the right degrees. The plowboys of the twenty-first century may not possess Ph.D.’s, but they do possess a keen sense of how our discussions of these ancient documents affect the lives of ordinary people.

            In the early twentieth century, a journalist named G.K. Chesterton offered these thoughts about the British and American jury systems:

 

The trend of our epoch up to this time has been consistently towards specialism and professionalism. We tend to have trained soldiers because they fight better, trained singers because they sing better, trained dancers because they dance better, specially instructed laughers because they laugh better, and so on and so on. … [Yet] our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.^[vi]

 

Maybe the democratization of biblical scholarship is a sign that, in the opening years of the twenty-first century, a new tendency has supplanted the modern trend towards specialism and professionalism. Perhaps the publicity surrounding the Jesus Seminar, The Da Vinci Code, the Gospel of Judas, and host of other discussions represents our culture’s admission that some questions are too crucial to remain the exclusive domain of specialists. To be sure, democratization should never become an excuse for shoddy scholarship—but, whenever the world of academic research intersects the plowboy’s discussions at the local bar, it makes professors and plowboys alike more aware of the issues that ultimately matter.