Christian faith. The National Geographic special on the Gospel of Judas, on the other hand, purported to be a historical, scientific investigation of a long lost gospel, a gospel which puts a different spin on the traditional Christian story. In keeping with one very prominent contemporary view, they argued that the Gospel of Judas represents an equally valid version of the gospel story, ultimately implying that the canonical Gospels represent nothing more than one version among many that existed in the first-century Church.
the founding of the so-called Jesus Seminar. This group asserted with great fanfare that very little of what is traditionally attributed to Jesus in the Gospels is authentic—that the vast majority of the sayings of Jesus are really sayings of the Early Church retroactively attributed to Him. Since that time the group and its findings have been severely criticized in the academy, yet very few critiques of their work have been reported by the popular press.
Orthodoxy, then, is simply what emerged from the first-century multiplicity of views. But is this the case? James Robinson, one of the most prominent scholars on Gnostic forms of Christianity in the second century, says, “Since the Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic tractate written in the middle of the second century, it does not add any new information about what happened in Jerusalem around 30 C.E. Though it is an important text for specialists in second-century Gnosticism . . . it has been misrepresented so as to sensationalize it in order to make as large a profit on its investment as possible” (The Secrets of Judas). The release of this story at Easter time in 2006 was much ado about nothing; again the academic rebuttals to the story went mostly unnoticed by the press.
Remember also TIME magazine’s damning portrayal of the Catholic Church’s handling of the sexual abuse scandal just prior to Easter 2002? Or, more recently, the release of the National Geographic special on the Gospel of Judas and the release of The Da Vinci Code movie just before Easter in 2006? While The Da Vinci Code was a work of pure fiction, it nevertheless became a cultural and religious phenomenon precisely by making historically inaccurate claims about the
This year’s Easter Surprise came when James Cameron (of Titanic fame) held a joint press conference with the Discovery Channel to announce the airing of his documentary on the supposed ossuary of Jesus—a stone bone box with Jesus’ name on it. The box itself was found in a tomb in Talpiot, just south of Jerusalem, during the 1980s and has been sitting in the Israeli Antiquity Authority’s Bet Shemesh warehouse ever since. Included in the tomb were nine other boxes, and
The Easter Surprise Steven Hunt, associate professor of biblical studies, and his student Jordan Montgomery ’09 wondered about the timing of well-publicized attempts to debunk the historicity of the Gospel accounts. Together they set out to investigate. There are two topics you shouldn’t talk about with friends and family during the holidays: politics and religion. Nothing can bring meaningful conversation about the weather to a halt quicker than these. Politics and religion have something else in common: both come with a “surprise” based entirely on the calendar. The “October Surprise,” as it’s called in politics, is the release of some damaging story about a candidate in late October just prior to a November election. The tactic has a long and illustrious history in American politics and has been used effectively by both Republicans and Democrats to wound their political opponents just days before an election. With another presidential election looming in 2008, we have only to wait for the details. A similar pattern relates to Christianity’s calendar. During the past few Lenten seasons we’ve seen a significant number of news stories which have, to say the least, disquieted the faithful. This trend began in the mid 1980s with
4 STILLPOINT | SUMMER 2007