Gospel of Judas controversy

Over on the Palm Tree Garden we've been chatting with Dr. April DeConick of Rice University about her new book, The Thirteenth Apostle. She's been terribly long-suffering and gracious about our non-academic questions.

She's just put an opinion piece in the New York Times about, among other things, the ghastly mishandling of the Gospel of Judas text by the National Geographic Society and the release of an inaccurate and misleading translation to the public.

Readers might remember I took an intensive on both The Gospel of Mary and The Gospel of Judas with Dr. Bruce Chilton last year as part of my DMin. studies, and we walked carefully through the (now admittedly flawed and corrected) NGS translation in its public-release form. So I'm not altogether unfamiliar with the content.

Now I have been trying to get hold of a copy of Dr. DeConick's book, with little success thus far. But in the meantime I do have her comments from her excellent blog, the PTG thread, and the NYT piece. Please understand I do not question her scholarship, but I do question the fact that some of the things I'm hearing don't make any sense. For instance:

While National Geographic’s translation supported the provocative interpretation of Judas as a hero, a more careful reading makes clear that Judas is not only no hero, he is a demon.
Several of the translation choices made by the society’s scholars fall well outside the commonly accepted practices in the field. For example, in one instance the National Geographic transcription refers to Judas as a “daimon,” which the society’s experts have translated as “spirit.” Actually, the universally accepted word for “spirit” is “pneuma ” — in Gnostic literature “daimon” is always taken to mean “demon.”

Now my good friend and Coptic scholar Jesse has confirmed that, during the period of authorship of this text, daimon did in fact equal demon. The problem that remains is this: that in both previous and later eras, the word "daimon" does mean "spirit"; or perhaps a closer translation would be "intelligence" or "spiritual entity" with neither explicitly positive or negative association. This is how everybody from Socrates to Jung has used the word; everyone except, apparently, the authors of second century Christian and related documents. Like I said, I haven't read the book, but this just doesn't "feel" right, although I acknowledge it as "accepted".

Next problem:

So what does the Gospel of Judas really say? It says that Judas is a specific demon called the “Thirteenth.” In certain Gnostic traditions, this is the given name of the king of demons — an entity known as Ialdabaoth who lives in the 13th realm above the earth. Judas is his human alter ego, his undercover agent in the world. These Gnostics equated Ialdabaoth with the Hebrew Yahweh, whom they saw as a jealous and wrathful deity and an opponent of the supreme God whom Jesus came to earth to reveal.

There are a LOT of contradictory (and clearly personal to the authors) cosmologies in Gnostic literature. Where is the evidence to support that the authors of Judas were familiar with one in which Ialdabaoth was "the thirteenth"?

Because Judas is a demon working for Ialdabaoth, the author believed, when Judas sacrifices Jesus he does so to the demons, not to the supreme God. This mocks mainstream Christians’ belief in the atoning value of Jesus’ death and in the effectiveness of the Eucharist.

While it would, in this assumed scenario, compromise "the atoning value of Jesus' death", how could this in any way diminish the effectiveness of the Eucharist? This simply doesn't follow.

And finally,

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 coins. For Jews, he is the man whose story was used by Christians to persecute them for centuries. Although we should continue to work toward a reconciliation of this ancient schism, manufacturing a hero Judas is not the answer.

We have to touch on the fact that there's at least one other document from that era called "The Gospel of Judas" which seems to be unrelated to the one we have, aside from the title. Setting that aside, when I first heard of the "appointed Judas" version, it rang true with me. In fact it always has.

Either Judas was part of the plan all along and integral to Jesus' salvific death and resurrection (which proves that Jesus knew what he was doing) OR Judas was the bad guy, Jesus never saw it coming and the salvific death of Jesus was pretty much an accident. Christianity is going to have to make up its mind.

Why did Christianity vilify Judas, and yet make Pilate a folk hero cum lay-saint for centuries? Without Pilate, so the reasoning goes, there would be no Crucifixion. Well, likewise for Judas.

I look forward to finally getting my mitts on a copy of Dr. DeConick's book and perhaps having some of my questions addressed.