Update: I was so quick to smack Pagels and ivy-league colleges around that I mis-remembered that Pagels teaches at Princeton not Yale. Corrected below.
When last I posted, I was complaining about an earworm. Mercifully, that lasted only a few days. But I also said that there were other things I wanted to write about, specifically the "Gospel of Judas" story. Others can speak better and more authoritatively about the subject. Overall, after seeing the National Geographic Channel program on the subject, I was left with several impressions:
- NGC clearly was hyping and sexing (not literally) up the find probably because of the interest in the Da Vinci Code movie. They were too breathless in the presentation, which I found oft-putting.
- There were moments in the program that were very good and demonstrated how finds like these can be helpful to Biblical scholarship even while they are rejected as canonical.
- Waa-aay too much hint that the "Gospel of Judas" was the victim of a conspiracy of the Church (see the Da Vinci Code). The process of canonization came about because it had too, specifically because of the emergence of mystery religions, gnosticism, and etc as they impacted (orthodox) Christian claims.
- Is the artifacts world really as seedy and disreputable as the show implied? I hope not!
- The biggest point I wanted to make was the one I posted over at the Volokh Conspiracy that asks: "Is Elaine Pagels a Fraud?" David Kopel writes:
Jesuit Paul Mankowski, in his essay "The Pagels Imposture," suggests that Pagels' reputation for expertise is undeserved. Dissecting a Pagels passage about Ireneus (an early church father who wrote an essay against heresies), Mankowski shows that "Pagels has carpentered a non-existent quotation, putatively from an ancient source, by silent suppression of relevant context, silent omission of troublesome words, and a mid-sentence shift of 34 chapters backwards through the cited text, so as deliberately to pervert the meaning of the original."
I wrote in the comments (what I had intended to write on my site) the following (edited here for typos and clarity, with links added):
Pagels was often referenced when I [was] in seminary (I graduated from Candler School of Theology, Emory University). My impression was always that she was waa-ay to sympathetic to gnostics but her research was an important resource.
But her status as a scholar was completely blown for me after watching NGC's The Gospel of Judas. At the conclusion of the program the "scholars" were giving their last thoughts on the discovery when one of them said something (I'm paraphrasing from memory) "The Gospel of Judas tells us a lot about 3rd and 4th Century gnosticism (-me: for that was when the document was carbon-dated) but nothing about Judas or Jesus.
Quick edit to Pagels who said (I thought quite haughtily) "While this document is from the 3-4 century you can't say that earlier copies don't exist".
And I thought, gee, if a Yale professor can't [see] the logical falliablity of proving a negative, then Yale deeper problems than its Taliban problem.
Update and correction: Pagels teaches at Princenton, not Yale. Bad memory! Mea culpa!
