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On the Waterfront with Judas -- Statement from Marvin Meyer, one of the Translators of the Gospel of Judas
Well, who's going sensationalistic on the Gospel of Judas now? The overly strong comments of my friend and colleague Professor April DeConick on the Gospel of Judas require a response. I have Professor DeConick's book, The Thirteenth Apostle, on my desk. Her translation and interpretation present a revisionist perspective on the text, and while I find her perspective to be very interesting, there are issues and problems in what she is doing.
Professor DeConick speaks too boldly in her observations in the Times when she talks about our mistakes in translation. She knows better. The issues of translation she highlights are almost all discussed in the notes in the popular edition and critical edition of the Gospel of Judas. The word daimon may easily and naturally refer to the spirit that defines the inner person, as it does in the Platonic literature that had a huge impact upon the formation of the Gospel of Judas, and it need not be an exclusively negative term. The significance of "thirteen" in the Gospel of Judas may suggest that Judas is linked to the demiurge Yaldabaoth, the creator of this world of mortality, as in other, later Sethian texts, as Professor DeConick maintains, or else that he is simply excluded from the twelve disciples, hence the thirteenth, or even that he is connected to the most exalted, thirteenth divine realm above, also in another Sethian text. Even if Judas does end up with the demiurge, what might that mean? A few lines before the discussion of the Gospel of Judas in the heresiologist Irenaeus of Lyon, it is said that some such folks understand that Christ himself sits down at the right hand of Yaldabaoth in order to help in the salvation of the souls of people!
Further, it is not clear that any of the answers based on later Sethian sources provide appropriate insights into the Gospel of Judas. The use of later--in some cases much later--texts to interpret such an early text as the Gospel of Judas raises fundamental methodological questions.
Professor DeConick's additional insinuations of ulterior motives on the part of her fellow scholars in the establishment of the Coptic text and the development of an appropriate translation are extremely disappointing and disturbing. She must know how we struggled carefully and honestly with this difficult text preserved in fragments, since she herself is struggling with it now.
On the basis of her interpretation of such obscure passages in the Gospel of Judas, Professor DeConick comes up with her thesis about the meaning of the text. To do so, she must virtually ignore all the positive things said about Judas in the text. This text is, after all, entitled the Gospel--the Good News--of Judas, and the opening of the text features the role of Judas in conversation with Jesus. In the text, Judas has the correct confession of who Jesus is, from a Sethian perspective, and Judas is the main recipient of revelation from Jesus. It is Judas who receives the central cosmological teaching from Jesus in the Gospel of Judas--which is, after all, the main point of the entire text--and elsewhere in the text he is said to have heard the mysteries of the kingdom from Jesus. Near the end of the gospel Judas hands over what is called the man who bears Jesus to the authorities (the betrayal of Jesus), but that figure must be the mortal body of Jesus, not the true, inner person of Jesus. Judas (or Jesus) is described entering the light--some light, maybe the highest expression of divine light, maybe some other light. Irenaeus, who knows something of the Gospel of Judas and denounces it in about 180 C.E., is dismayed by the text. Irenaeus charges that Judas is favored in the Gospel of Judas as the one who knows the truth, beyond the others, and Irenaeus understands that the Gospel of Judas proclaims a different sort of betrayal of Jesus by Judas, which he calls the mystery of the betrayal.
Now Professor DeConick sees the Gospel of Judas not as Gnostic good news at all, but as a Gnostic parody of a gospel. Personally, I rather like her post-modern, Kafkaesque reading of the Gospel of Judas, but I am not at all sure that it fits the text itself or accounts for the contents of the text. I know of no gospel of this sort in the entire world of antiquity and late antiquity.
In the end, Professor DeConick's Judas recalls Brando in "On the Waterfront." He coulda been a contenda, he coulda been somebody--if he just were not so demonic.
However we may wish to nuance the precise role of Judas Iscariot in the Gospel of Judas, the proclamation of the text focuses the attention of the reader upon the revelatory message of Jesus, understood from a Gnostic point of view, as communicated to Judas. That is the good news of the Gospel of Judas.
And Judas is still a contenda.
Marvin Meyer
Marvin Meyer is Griset Professor of Bible and Christian Studies at Chapman University, Orange, California, and one of the original editors and translators of the Gospel of Judas. He is also the author of Judas: The Definitive Collection of Gospels and Legends about the Infamous Apostle of Jesus.
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Contacts:
M.J. Jacobsen
National Geographic Society
202-857-7759
mjacobse@ngs.org
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