Remember the recent furor over the discovery of the ancient manuscript entitled “The Gospel of Judas”? The media reported that the document presented Judas as a good guy, implying that the church had gotten it wrong over all these centuries and that we would now have to re-evaluate our knowledge of Jesus. Some accounts made it sound like the manuscript was written by Judas. The translation became a bestseller and National Geographic, which was behind the publication of the text, made a TV documentary on the subject. But now read the rest of the story from the authoritative Chronicle of Higher Education on how genuine scholarship got high-jacked by media sensationalism, pop culture superficiality, and commercial temptations.
Where have you and G.E.V. been? I blogged this story way back in December 2007, and again when the Chronicle of Higher Ed. covered it in May.
But it deserves repeating, because the original brouhaha got all the mainstream headlines, and few will notice the corrections.