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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Judas on Television4/14/2006 11:02:12Last night I had the opportunity to see National Geographic's new special on The Gospel of Judas, a manuscript they helped to restore and translate. It brought in folks like Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels to talk about it, along with a few token Div types with crosses behind them. Most of all it made a great drama about the thing, a great crisis of faith that we should all be having, and all the while desperately trying (and for the most part failing) to make Coptic manuscript experts seem sexy. Theologically, one of the key messages of the show is that the diversity of accounts of Jesus in antiquity offer resources through which we can reunderstand our traditions. I think Pagels really won out in this respect; none of the canon-touters got nearly as much face time or chance to be articulate. This is of course a tricky game to play with belief. It is deeply constructive and gives a perverse authority to ancient wisdom that has not been tempered by practice, experience, and humanness. Certainly we should be able to take some insight from this, as with anything. But authoritativeness should not be a consequence of mere antiquity. To me, the Bible is authoritative because it has been taken as authoritative by many of those who built the world I live in. It is constituitive of experience and succession. Through this God speaks. One of the antiquities dealers interviewed said that she felt she had been given a mission by Judas himself. In terms of scholarship, the Gospel does not appear to be especially groundbreaking. It is fairly typical of what have been classified as the "gnostic" writings, especially those from the Nag Hammadi library. Its interest, therefore, is the opportunity it offers to make the public more aware of the state of the art. In this respect National Geographic does a great service by concocting the media circus. There are a lot of reenactments. We meet actors playing Irenaeus, Jesus, Judas, and some mysterious Egyptian antiquities traders. Taking cue from Mel Gibson, I presume, all of the Jesus scenes, whether they are drawn from the Coptic gospel of Judas or the Greek canonical gospels, are spoken in Aramaic and subtitled. Really above all for me it was a tickle to watch, to see the work we do as scholars glamorized like this. It is also a reminder of the real historical effect and meaning that what we do can have, which is hard to see sometimes from our offices and libraries. I think a good response is for scholars to be humble about what they do, though. For all that we read, we're about as helpless as human beings as the rest of them. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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