Posted on 11/04/2007 5:26:37 PM PST by blam
Contact: David Ruth
druth@rice.edu
713-348-6327
Rice University
Rice University professor debunks National Geographic translation of Gospel of Judas
A new book by Rice University professor April DeConick debunks a stunning claim by National Geographic's translation of the Gospel of Judas. According to that translation, Judas was a hero, not a villain, who acted on Jesus' request to betray him. DeConick disagrees.
Before releasing her book "The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says," DeConick was intrigued by the original release of the Coptic Gospel of Judas and as a scholar wanted to read it for herself. While researching and translating it, she discovered that National Geographic's translators had made some serious errors.
"Once I started translating the Gospel of Judas and began to see the types of translation choices that the National Geographic team had made I was startled and concerned," DeConick said. "The text very clearly called Judas a 'demon.'"
DeConick contends that the Gospel of Judas is not about a "good" Judas or even a "poor old" Judas. It is a gospel parody about a "demon" Judas written by a particular group of Gnostic Christians who lived in the second century.
"The finding of this gospel has been called one of the most important archaeological discoveries in the past 60 years," DeConick said. "It's important that we get this right."
DeConick said many scholars and writers have been inspired by the National Geographic version.
"It appears to have something to do with our collective guilt about anti-Semitism and our need to reform the relationship between Jews and Christians following World War II," she said. "Judas is a frightening character. For Christians, he is the one who had it all, and yet betrayed God to his death for a few dollars. For Jews, he is terrifying, the man whom Christians associated the Jewish people, whose story was used against them for centuries."
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DeConick is the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies at Rice University in Houston. To read more about her teachings, visit http://reli.rice.edu/rice_reli.cfm?a=cms,c,38,1
"The Thirteenth Apostle" (Continuum International Publishing Group) is available to purchase on www.amazon.com.
April DeConick is available nationwide for media interviews. To book an interview, contact David Ruth at 713-348-6327 or druth@rice.edu.
My taq refers to my attitude about Ockham’s razor. He never actually said that.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke used the Hebrew Matthew as source. Luke of course went quite a bit beyond with his second book.
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Right. Coptic was a fomr of late Ancient Egyptian written in a modified Greek Alphabet
Many Biblical scholars would disagree with you.
There are many mysteries in the Bible, like ther real identity of St. John the Divine.
“That is certainly not the case. I can’t stand it when people pawn off liberal theories as if they were, for lack of a better term, gospel.”
I don;t think its fair to categorize these theories as “liberal”. They aren;t even modern revisionist in the sense that is generally employed.
“It is odd that after 1600 years, people want to consider the gnostic gospels more reliable than the texts the people closest to the events did. And the sole reason they consider them authentic is that the early Church thought they were defective.”
I don’t think it is wrong to keep an open mind about these things. The individuals who reviewed the scriptures at the time to determine their “authenticity” were hardly grammaticists and while they lived closer to the actual events described, they didn’t necessarily have a closer grasp of those events. The ancient world wasn’t eaxcly awash in contemporary newspapers and books.
Nevertheless a lot of these excluded books certainly apear bizzare in their views, given what ius written in the Four gospels and epistles.
National Geographic is a politically correct newsorgan, not a legitimate scientific journal.
The Gnostics were a group of CHristian mystics and a lot of what they believed appeared to derive from Dualistic theories rooted in Zoroasttrianism and other Middle Eastern beliefs.
Given the fact that so little of what they DID believe has survived, a lot of what we know about them and their beliefs are filtered through the eyes, minds, and hands of their opponents.
I agree with everything you say except the statements about the Gospels of Thomas and Judas. They exist. Whether or not you choose to believe them is another issue.
Clearly, if you go by the Gospels, Pilate and the Roman authorities had no interest in Jewish theological issues and Pilate wasn’t exactly overeager to carry out the sentence.
The current revisionist claptrap about the Romans really having an interest in executing a wandering Preacher who, again, according to the Gospels, wasn’t preaching insurrection, although He might have been preaching what the Jews considered heresy, is a modern effort to exculpate the Jews as a nation for the execution for Christ - a guilt that they, as a people never deserved in the first place, since it was the Temple establishment - which many Jews at the time viewed with suspicion if not outright hostility - who were guilty.P> You can' study history in a vacuum. Judea was a key geographic area and a political problem to the Romans for many years.
The Roman government, going back to Julius Caesar, had extended exception privileges to the Jews and to Judea. Jews were exempted from the military conscription imposed on all other subject nations by the Romans, They were premitted to worship their own peculiar (in Roman eyes) Deity and not forced to offer sacrifice to the Emperor or Roman gods as all other subject were required. The taxes imposed on the Jews by the Romans were actually less onerous than those tithings imposed by the Temple. In addition, Jewish merchants were provided with access to one of the largest free trade zones in history, along with protection by the Roman military establishment.
Pilate had had his fingers wrapped by the Palatium several times before the situation with Jesus occurred. In those instances, the finger wrapping had been precipitated by complaints from the Temple authorities. The lessons were not lost, and, although Pilate himself might have preferred to let Christ go, he was probably afraid of another complaint being lodged against him at Rome by the Temple authorities.
You can't have it both ways. You can't say that you are relying on the Biblical as your sole source of information about Christ’s execution, then drag out of nowhere these plots about sinister political motivations by the Roman ruling authorities on this issue. THAT is modern revisionism.
Paul never actually met Christ face to face or studied under Him, did he?
THe AntiChrist was Mohammed.
There are many forms of Ancient Greek. Ancient Greek varied with geography and time.
The Oldest form of Ancient Greek was the Linear B script, written in the syllabary of Ancient Crete, a writing system originally developed for the Ancient Cretan Language which itself has never been deciphered. Most linguists believe it was a non-Indo-European Language spoken by the Minoans.
Later, Crete was invaded from the Greek Mainland by illiterate Mycenaean Greeks who adopted the Cretan script for their own language. This was deciphered by Michael Ventris, a British cryptographer.
The next form of recorded Greek was Homeric Greek in which the Iliad was written. The words to the epic were composed during the Ancient Greek “Dark Ages” and later put to writing in the ancient Greek alphabet, which, in its earliest form had symbols for sounds which had dropped out of the language by the classical period - like digamma.
By the Classical period, there were several dialects of spoken Greek, depending on where you were. Attic Greek was the Dialect used in Attica and Ancient Athens. Dorian Greek was spoken in the Peloponnese, Crete and the Greek States in Sicily. Ionic was spoken in parts of Asia Minor. There were other dialects like Boeotian and Macedonian.
During the Roman period, a “common’ Greek dialect, Koine, was developed and I believe this is the language used in the Biblical texts. Byzantine Greek derived from the Koine/
Modern Greek is the most current form and a modern Greek speaker would have as easy a time reading Homer as we would reading Beowulf in Old English.
Some Greek words appear identical but have different meanings, depending on accentuation.
Anceint Greek had three different accents, grace, acute and circunflex and, unlike Englsih, these were pitched accents, not stressed accents.
THAT is a matter of personal perspective.
“he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin”
Judas.
True Chistians believe our sins, not any one people, killed Christ.
Modern Presbyterians, Methodists and Episcoplaians contain some liberal thinkers who are so far to the left as to be hardly considered Chistians.
I thought that Hebrew was not a living language by the timre of Christ, and that everyone spoke Aramaic, originally the language of Aram, essentially Syria, but which had become the language of the entire region.
Well, I've looked, and they aren't in my Bible, so they apparently aren't Gospels.
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