Gospel of Judas

In time for the annual media Easter frenzy (seemingly designed for quite some time now to cast doubt and/or aspersions on orthodox Christianity! Ever wonder why they don't do the same with Islam?!), National Geographic has been spectacularizing the Gospel of Judas. Two books were published by NG on April 6, 2006 (The Gospel of Judas by Kasser, Meyer, and Wurst, with commentary by Ehrman; and The Lost Gospel by Krosney). The next day Robinson's The Secrets of Judas arrived from HarperSanFrancisco. This page provides some basic links to various info, initially designed as a launching point for a presentation that I made at a pastor's conference here at the Seminary on 4/11/2006. I've not linked a lot of sites; the frenzy will soon dissipate. This page will remain here for historical purposes, though I'll not likely make it a high priority update page, so after a few months you'll probably begin finding broken links. [April 2006]

• Complete text of the Gospel of Judas in: Coptic and English (pdf format) available here

• National Geographic Channel preview of the 2-hour TV special April 9; alt location (search for "Judas" in Search all video--but sometimes doesn't work?!)

• National Geographic Channel, main Gospel of Judas page (with photos of GJ section of the Codex Tchacos)
• National Geographic Channel  photo gallery
• National Geographic.com site, main Gospel of Judas page (a multimedia site)
• A helpful discussion on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog, including links to various resources
• Slate article by Larry Hurtado--one of the better such articles.
• What should we think of the Gospel of Judas? Craig Evans
• Crosswalk: Responding to GJ, Al Mohler
• Mark D. Roberts GJ Special Report
• Christianity Today, The Judas We Never Knew
• Christian Century (Dec 2005!) Long-lost Gospel of Judas to be published

Here is the PowerPoint file of my initial presentation. As ppt, it's only the main outline, though I've cited GJ extensively at some key points. The audio is available in our chapel audio archive; here's a direct download (only) link to an mp3 version (updated link Aug 06; right click and "Save target as..." to download; this is not a streamed file and will not play directly if you just click the link). I've also now posted an outline of the basic presentation content in pdf format.

This presentation is based on:

• reading the Gospel of Judas carefully several times,
• reading the vols. by Kasser and Robinson (and skimming Krosney),
• reading the entire NG web presentations (both sites),
• a lot of other discussion on the web,
• and a fair bit of additional reading in/about the Gnostic literature from Nag Hammadi.

The three new books on GJ are as follows:

Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, Gregor Wurst, and Bart Ehrman. The Gospel of Judas. Washington DC: National Geographic, 2006. [This is the important book; it contains the complete English translation of GJ along with various related discussions. Ehrman's chapter is rather over-blown and sensationalized--about par for his recent work.]

Herbert Krosney. The Lost Gospel: The Quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot. Washington DC: National Geographic, 2006. [This is a narrative account of the supposed history of the MS. Reads more like a soap opera/novel in places. Not a pretty story.]

James M. Robinson. The Secrets of Judas. NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 206. [Some sour grapes here, but provides a larger picture of the history of GJ--which did not take the world of scholarship by surprise--despite what you read in the media; its existence has been known for some time.]

For some additional bibliography (highly selective! out of many thousands of items!), particularly on Gnosticism (the appropriate context for GJ as opposed to Christianity), see:

William W. Combs. "Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism, and New Testament Interpretation." Grace Theological Journal 8.2 (1987): 195-212.

Pheme Perkins. "Nag Hammadi and the New Testament." TSF Bulletin (Sept.-Oct. 1982): 6-7.

James M. Robinson. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. 3d ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988.

James M. Robinson. "The Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices." The Biblical Archaeologist 42.4 (1979): 206-24.

Edwin Yamauchi. Pre-Christian Gnosticism. 2d ed., Baker, 1983. (A summary of the 1st ed. from 1973 can be found in New Dimensions in NT Study, ed. R. Longnecker and M. Tenney [Zondervan, 1974], 46-70.)

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Page first posted 4/11/2006. Last edited 08/30/2006.