The May 2006 issue of National Geographic reported on the Gospel of Judas, the latest darling of academics, treasure hunters, and antiquities smugglers. For those too young to recall, there have been many artifacts discovered, held in the hands of adventurers and ne’er-do-wells, and belatedly released to or from academics. The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Gospel of Thomas, and many others have created much angst and so much adventure that novels have been inspired (The Word, Irving Wallace) and movies have been shot. Maybe it will sell magazines, too.

The National Geographic article lists the facts that place the Gospel of Judas in perspective.

– The manuscript is not precisely dateable. In other words, no one can say when it was written.

– Possibly, it was authored in the second century.

– The manuscript could be a copy dated from the third or fourth century. [That is a little like saying we have a manuscript dated sometime after 1806 but before 2006; it covers an enormous span of history, time and many lives.]

– The language is Coptic, an Egyptian translation of Greek, and not a language in use, but exclusively in the province of specialized academics, such that very few people will ever likely be able to read it for themselves.

– The manuscript was found in the Egyptian desert (they all seem to be found in some desert).

– The manuscript spent many years in the “netherworld of antiquities traders,” resulting in mis-handling, shuffling, and damage. By 2001, academics reported the manuscript was in the worst shape of any they had seen. The pages had been shuffled but the top section of each page, where the pages may have been numbered, had been torn away and lost.

The story reminds me of the novel by Irving Wallace, entitled The Word. It was inspired, as I recall, by the Gospel of Thomas, which seems to have come to public awareness about the same time.

National Geographic’s story, by Andrew Cockburn, also contained the usual misinformation. Possibly, the story should have been entitled “The Destroyer of Truth, A Brief History of the Church.”

Mr. Cockburn asserted that “the four Gospels, for example, treat Roman governor Pontius Pilate gently…” It will be interesting to hear Mr. Cockburn, or National Geographic, try to wash their hands, pun intended, of this subjective conclusion. Maybe Mr. Cockburn was raised in a non-western culture and has never been faced with someone washing their hands of all moral responsibility.

Mr. Cockburn asserted that “Christian thinkers found it increasingly convenient to blame the Jews…” This subjective conclusion was the same accusation leveled recently at Mel Gibson’s movie relating the passion of Christ. Bigots that claimed affiliation to Christians have always existed and have been responsible for all sorts of racial and ethnic crimes. But, such people are not, in fact, Christians. While general statements about the hundreds, if not thousands of documents that were generated by the early church, are risky, no general “blame the Jews” doctrine emerged from orthodox Christianity. Indeed, that would be impossible for a Christian that accepts the New Testament as true, because the people that accused, convicted and murdered Christ were not honestly Jewish. They were collaborators with Roman occupiers and their religious beliefs were as for sale as was their political allegiance. They were traitors to their people, their beliefs, and God. Murdering God’s son was simply one more crime among, from their perspective, the many they committed. That is part of the reason why they knew not what they did. But, National Geographic does not seem to be able to read the New Testament with sufficient attention to detail to pick up on such nuanced language.

Finally, National Geographic asserted “we cannot know how many books were lost as the Bible took shape…” That may be true. But, in the one to two hundred years between the authorship of the Gospel of Judas and the time the presently discussed manuscript was copied, it had free distribution. National Geographic does not imply that church based suppression of the Gospel of Judas came to the fore until at least the reign of Constantine in the early fourth century. If a novel, or magazine article, or a tract had been published in 1906 and freely distributed until it was suppressed in 2006, would we be legitimate in concluding that its suppression caused it to be lost? Of course not. It simply did not stand the test of time or there would be copies in every attic, garage, library, and “secret” collection. Suppression would have to be systematic using modern means of tracking ownership in order to prevent even casual ownership from continuing unabated, and modern means were not available in 313AD.

The “suppression” asserted by National Geographic was merely that the church did not accept it, and no scholarship formed to resist that rejection that withstood the test of time. There was no suppression and there is no credible evidence of suppression of this stack of papers. Mr. Cockburn’s assertion is modern era New Age bigotry coming to the fore. The Gospel of Judas was simply ignored, and by that means “lost.” How many copies of The Word, by Irving Wallace, remain on our shelves? It simply was not Shakespeare, although I remember enjoying the novel, and the Gospel of Judas was simply never accepted as canon, and both were forgotten.

The Gospel of Thomas, with its less than Hollywood ready physical description of Jesus, is still on my shelf, it is a historical artifact, but it will never be considered as part of the canon by any thoughtful person unless much more information is discovered.

Is it true that every article in the National Geographic is updated and rerun every five years such that if you subscribe for five years, there is no real need to subscribe for another five years? Maybe two hundred years from now someone will pick up that question in a blog restoration project and assert it for the truth of the matter asserted. Maybe that would be unfair, and maybe that would be a shame, but will it be the byproduct of modern scholarship as practiced by National Geographic today?