The Judas Codex

The recent fuss (see blog entry below - roundup of news links here over the contents of a set of limestone boxes containing bone fragments has been overshadowing an earlier find. A limestone box found in an Egyptian cave in 1978 contained not only bone fragments but a leather-bound codex. This has been carbon-dated to 220-340 AD, indicating its four papyrus texts were written only a generation after the official New Testament gospels. One of the texts has the sensational title ‘Gospel Of Judas.’ It was probably the title that initially stirred public interest. Despite its title, the Gospel is not Judas’s own account, but it is about his special role as an insider among the disciples.

That such a gospel was written has been known for a long time – it was summarised by an early (pre-Nicene) Church Father, St Irenaeus the 2nd Bishop of Lyons, in his anti-Gnostic tract Against Heresies or On the Detection And Overthrow Of So-Called Gnosticism, around 180 AD. (“Others … declare that Judas the traitor … alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas."[Bk III, s.8]

Since 1978, the leather-bound codex has been mouldering away, wrapped in newspaper and packed in shoe boxes, held in safe-deposit boxes as a series of antiquities dealers tried to get an estimated $3 million for it. Its acquisition by an ad hoc Swiss foundation called Maecenas 7 years ago meant the start of a long battle to restore the crumbling pages before translation could begin of the crumbling, damaged papyrus codex.
Exact translation of what is known to dealers as the ‘Codex Tchacos’ (after the surname of the modern donor) was the main issue here. The surviving codex of 220-340 AD is taken to be an ancient Coptic (Egyptian) translation from the Greek original of circa 150 which Irenaeus denounced around AD 180. Nevertheless, the scholarly hope was that a modern computer-aided translation of a 2nd-C text of a long-lost – as opposed to church-edited - gospel will throw light on the oddities behind the official NT versions. The main oddity is of course why did the Romans need Judas to identify (with the famous ‘Judas kiss’) a public figure like Jesus? The canonical gospels make little sense here - was the betrayal perhaps something other?

While the deciphering of the codex was proceeding apace, Dan Brown was working on The Da Vinci Code. By the time an official annotated translation, The Gospel Of Judas appeared in 2006, along with a tie-in feature-length National Geographic documentary (now on DVD ), TDVC was a runaway bestseller and there was widespread public interest in what would have been normally just a scholarly work. For unlike the ‘Jesus family tomb’ enterprise, this project is being run by Bible scholars - so antagonistic church reps needed to make a more considered response than the personal attacks prompted by James Cameron’s recent ‘we’ve found Jesus’s family tomb’ claim. (Cameron was at once accused of being an anti-Christian Freemason etc.)
In the event, the response was not much of an intellectual advance on the arguments of Irenaeus. His view was summed up as “there are four corners of the universe and there are four principal winds, and therefore there can be only four gospels that are authentic.” ) The press reported that the Pope ‘poured scorn on the Judas text by insisting on the traditional view that the apostle was a greedy traitor” for whom "money was more important than communion with Jesus." And Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams in his Easter 2006 sermon criticised the public's interest. He blamed books like The Da Vinci Code for encouraging disbelief, so that people were “walking out into an unmapped territory, away from the safe places of political and religious influence." (This echoes his earlier pronouncement the internet was dangerous as an “unpoliced conversation” which allowed “paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry.”) He reflected a more general church view that as the manuscript is younger than the canonical (Church-edited) gospels, nothing it might say can ever be credited. (The papyrus was carbon-dated to the 4th Century by the National Geographic Society, for their own "Gospel of Judas" documentary, and it is over a century old than the 2nd C. original Greek version Irenaeus read.)

The gospel portrays Iscariot as Jesus’s close confidant, which makes his betrayal harder to understand, at least in terms of the Western church. (In the Eastern Orthodox church, Judas is not treated as a traitor.) The Coptic text implies he was acting on Jesus’s orders when he identified him to the Roman soldiers, so that he might fulfil his mission of martyrdom. Apparently in it Jesus also denounces the Old Testament god as a different, false one to the true god, who he calls “Barbelo” – a term otherwise unknown.
Irenaeus condemned it as the product of the Gnostic school of heresy. It apparently takes the Gnostic view that there are actual secrets to be learned, beyond the example of supreme self-sacrifice. Jesus tells Iscariot: ‘Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom.’ Judas is told to free Jesus from “the man who clothes me”- his earthly form, the implication being that Judas was a loyal accomplice in a deliberate martyrdom.
The project was inevitably accompanied by intrigues. The chief editor of the Nag Hammadi documents Prof. James M. Robinson, described in the press as ‘America's leading expert on such ancient religious texts from Egypt,’ only discovered by chance the NGS had this codex, and that this was being kept secret until the book and documentary came out at Easter 2006. He quickly produced a rival work, The Secrets Of Judas: The Story Of The Misunderstood Disciple And His Lost Gospel.

Here, he described the behind-the-scenes machinations by dealers since its discovery in Egypt in the 1970s to obtain a multi-million dollar price tag for the only surviving copy, a tale of "smugglers, black-market antiquities dealers, religious scholars, backstabbing partners and greedy entrepreneurs." The National Geographic replied his view was “ironic” as for years "he tried unsuccessfully to acquire this codex himself, and is publishing his own book in April, despite having no direct access to the materials." Robinson accused the NGS of sensationalizing its contents "in order to make as large a profit as possible." (Its book and documentary were announced, coincidentally, just before the TDVC film premiered.) He said he had for decades opposed the close secrecy a small clique of scholars had maintained over the deciphering of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi papyri. The dispute then developed into arguments over the exact translation of words like ‘betrayal’.

The background to the matter is described in The Lost Gospel: The Quest For The Gospel of Judas Iscariot by H. Krosney. Some of the surrounding intrigues were also described in The Jesus Papers: Exposing The Greatest Cover-up In History by HBHG co-author Michael Baignent, who seems to have been the outsider on this one. A separate translation-with-commentary, The Lost Gospel Of Judas Iscariot: A New Look At Betrayer And Betrayed (Oxford University Press), was also published by Dr. Bart Ehrman, a Professor of Religious Studies and author of Misquoting Jesus and Truth And Fiction In The Da Vinci Code. He had helped the National Geographic Society authenticate the manuscript, calling it ‘the most important discovery of a Christian text in the last 60 years.’

This is by no means the end of books based around this lost-and-found Gospel. At New Year’s, there was a somewhat surprising announcement. The novelist Jeffrey Archer has written a novelised account of the Gospel, with the help of Professor Frank Moloney, ‘eminent Australian biblical scholar.’ (For American readers who don’t know who Archer is, he is a high-flying Conservative politician who began as a young Thatcherite protégé before becoming a popular novelist to avoid bankruptcy in 1974. When running as Mayor of London, he was jailed in 2001 for two years for perjury in a libel case he brought, and gave up politics for novel-writing fulltime.) Archer and Moloney’s The Gospel According To Judas: By Benjamin Iscariot is being published in March by Macmillan, the hardback including a video CD showing Archbishop Desmond Tutu reading passages from the book. Archer says the book ‘will attempt to rehabilitate the life of Christ’s betrayer.’ (You can see the appeal this would have for the disgraced Archer.)

This is not in fact the first such novel from Judas’s viewpoint. Archer has been accused of plagiarism before, but in fairness there is a small subgenre of novels speculating about Biblical events from the viewpoint of one gospel figure or another, and offering as radical an interpretation as anything in TDVC. Nikos Kazantzakis's Last Temptation Of Christ is perhaps the best-known, though Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According To The Son is most recent. Even the English comedian Les Dawson of all people wrote one some years ago, now a sought-after cult item, about Jesus escaping crucifixion via a substitute, his 1988 A Time Before Genesis (where "at the last moment Judas had a change of heart and picked out one of the other apostles and not Jesus.") Now the ex-politician Archer is adding his own spin to the story, depicting Jesus as “an ineffectual leader who is not up to the task of throwing the Romans out of the Jewish homeland,” and Judas “as a seasoned politician who hands over his master as part of a plan to throw the Romans out.” Told by Iscariot’s son, it will have Judas’s son setting down his father’s story in a gospel to counter the “libels . . . repeated by followers of Jesus”. Archer’s modern political-CoE take on it might seem like the end of the line in terms of exploitation, but this still may not be the end of the matter.

There has been speculation there are more pages extant than in the now-published version of the codex. Roughly a dozen pages of the original manuscript, now missing but seen briefly by scholars in the 1970s, are believed to have been sold off separately to dealers. And the lawyer who heads the Maecenas Foundation which arranged the translation has speculated there may be another copy - perhaps more complete - held in the Vatican archives which they won’t admit to having … So, now we’re back in the territory of Dan Brown and “Vatican conspiracy” thrillerdom again. If Brown is still looking for a plot hook of his next-but-one bestseller (after 2008’s The Solomon Key), he need look no further ….

Some Not So New Bones Of Contention

A new holy-relics controversy has manifested itself overnight, best summed up by a typical headline [26 Feb 07] “I've Found The Coffin Of Jesus, Says Film Director”. It is the result of Titanic director James Cameron’s NY press announcement of a documentary speculating on the identity of three of a set of ten ossuaries – 1st-century limestone caskets or bone-collection boxes. These were found some time ago in a hidden private crypt south of Jerusalem, in a rock-cut family tomb similar to the one described in the Bible as belonging to Joseph of Arimatheia.
The existence of the "Tomb of the Ten Ossuaries" has in fact been known to archaeologists for decades. However it is only now, in the post-TDVC era, when a Hollywood director announces he has completed a £2 million feature documentary on the relics at a press conference that the press picked up the story. For before that, Cameron and his partner, Israeli-Canadian documentarist Simcha Jacobovici, worked for three years in secret. They obviously anticipated the controversy that has now enveloped around them, for they kept the matter quiet until only ten days before its TV airing. The Lost Tomb Of Jesus will air March 4th on the Discovery Channel in the USA and later on Channel 4 in Britain. (Trailer here or here.)
A companion book is being published: The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery That Will Change History Forever, co-written by Jacobovici with Charles Pellegrino (Cameron’s collaborator on his Titantic followup deep-sea documentary /book project). The names they associate with three of the 6 inscribed caskets in the tomb were what guaranteed world-wide headlines - "Jesus, son of Joseph," Mary (his mother’s name) and Mariamne (supposedly Mary Magdalene).
The problem with anyone claiming to have found the bones of Jesus is that contradicts the idea he was bodily resurrected from the dead and ascended to heaven, and there is some equivocation here, Cameron saying they don’t have Jesus’s actual bones. Yet they cite DNA tests done on the ‘Jesus’ and ‘Mary Magdalene’ bone fragments that their owners were not related by blood – hence their being interred together indicates they were probably related by marriage. And then there was the question of the children …. One of the boxes is inscribed "Judah son of Jesus." This is new to Biblical tradition (in the DVC-HBHG tradition, there is only a daughter, Sarah), though there are now claims that a few fleeting references could refer to a son.
The producers must also have been aware not only of controversies over films like TDVC and books like HBHG, but also of archaeological ones also – notably the long-running ‘James-brother-of-Jesus’ ossuary scandal, which is still ongoing. (I’ve been collecting clippings on it since at least 2002.) It may in fact be related, a missing piece in the new jigsaw puzzle. One of the ten ‘Jesus family’ caskets disappeared and its bone contents were ‘destroyed.’ Now some suspect this missing tenth casket was the mysterious one that surfaced earlier, from nobody knows where (the area is basically a war zone) with the controversial inscription ‘James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus' - in Aramaic Ya’akov bar Yosef akhui di Yeshua – the New Testament’s James The Just, who became leader after his brother’s crucifixion. The existence of a true, non-divine brother (not just half-brother) is inherently controversial in Christian terms - as one headline put it, “Ossuary Suggests Mary Wasn't A Virgin.” (Its finder says he has bone fragments taken from this ossuary, which he has declined to have analysed.) He was charged with forging the second part of the inscription, but academic opinion remains sharply divided on this. (The argument is over presence or absence of an ageing patina over the lettering of the 2nd phrase. A new piece of evidence, an old photo showing the entire inscription, has just turned up.) The owner of a popular American Christian magazine, Biblical Archaeology Review, champions it, having got it put on display in a Canadian museum (insured by Lloyd's of London for US$1 million), and producing a book and a TV documentary.
However here there is no question of any modern forgery with the "Tomb of the Ten Ossuaries", ossuary (re-)burial being a Pharisee practise based on a belief in bodily resurrection, abandoned when the Fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 destroyed the old ways. Israeli antiquities authorities have said in fact the inscribed names were common ones for the era. Despite the hype, this is not the first documentary on the ‘Jesus Tomb’, it having been the subject of an Easter 1996 BBC-TV special The Body In Question produced after the Israeli Antiquities Authority first publicised the find in their own IAA magazine. The UK press got hold of the story and the Sunday Times ran an in-depth pre-broadcast ‘spoiler’ feature, "The Tomb That Dare Not Speak Its Name", saying the discovery "challenges the very basis of Christianity."
Current press reports say the argument still “strikes at the foundation of Christianity in the same manner as the novel The Da Vinci Code” for Cameron is claiming the coincidence of these Biblical names occurring by chance is too remote. Predictably, Cameron is touting this nevertheless as “one of the greatest archaeological finds of all time.” Just as predictably, within hours of the press conference, church and scholarly forces began massing against the film, sight unseen.
One could build a metaphor around Cameron’s association with Titanic (act of hubris stopped by encountering an immovable object), but perhaps it’s best just to leave it for now and see how the story develops.

Will The Real Mona Lisa Please Stand Up?

There are press reports The Da Vinci Code is causing a problematic boom in art tourism to museums appearing in the novel and film. One recent report [19 Feb 07], titled “Roll Up, Roll Up, And Watch The Mona Lisa Weep - The World's Cultural Icons Are Blighted By Hordes Of Tourists” says staff at The Louvre are striking because of the overwhelming upsurge. The equivalent of the entire population of New York now crowds in each year, mainly in the tourist season starting at Easter. The connection made by The Da Vinci Code with religious conspiracy has amplified the potential security problem, the image appearing on the cover of book and film. The story adds the new fans are also often aggressive and disrespectful, and suggests that before disaster strikes the only solution might be to put a replica on view. Art historians recoil at the idea of replicas of paintings as it undercuts their entire ethos, but there have also been attacks on and thefts of, the Mona Lisa in the past, and it is now covered with bullet-proof glass. The irony is that the millions of visitors to the Louvre may not be seeing the original Mona Lisa anyway.

Art historians have found a 1584 reference to two similar portraits, one called the Mona Lisa and the other, La Giaconda. The one currently besieged by masses of tourists in the Louvre was the one that was bought by the French King in 1516, who kept it at his palace. In the wake of the French Revolution, it was moved from Napoleon’s bedroom to the Louvre to be put on public display. From there, it was famously stolen in 1911 so that undetectable replicas could be made for sale to private dealers. (Picasso was one of the painters questioned by police.) The conspiracy theory here is that the painting that was recovered two years later was one of the forgeries, but that the forgery was ‘authenticated’ for the sake of national honour - and the dollar value to tourism of ‘the world’s most valuable painting.’ (Other press stories have indicated that up to half the paintings on the art market may be forgeries, authenticated by greedy art dealers.)

Even if the Louvre painting was indeed by Leonardo Da Vinci, it still may not be the true, original Mona Lisa, but the other portrait, La Giaconda. The painting is famous for its half-smile, and is sometimes known by the compound name ‘Mona Lisa - La Giaconda’, which is translated as ‘The Smiling One’ (In Italian, giaconda means light-hearted, happy). This is slightly odd, because Mona Lisa was the actual title (Mona is just an abridgement of Madonna) and name of one woman (Lisa Gherardini), while ‘La Giaconda’ was the nickname of another, Costanza d'Avalos, the mistress of one of the famous Medici family. There are a pair of related, complicating arguments here. One is that Leonardo essentially painted self-portraits, and the other is that, like some modern rock singers, he aspired to creating an ‘angelic’ androgyne (both male and female) human form transcending gender identity. So his portraits of young men like John the Baptist can appear to be female, and his Mona Lisa may be, visually, an androgynous self-portrait in disguise. This of course offers an alternative, confounding explanation of a key moment in The Da Vinci Code - how one of the disciples in Leonardo’s The Last Supper appears to be female.

In 1914, an English art connoisseur discovered in the home of an English nobleman another version, which he bought for a few guineas. After studying it, the collector, Hugh Blaker, claimed this was the actual or original Mona Lisa. His version was larger, and more closely matched a contemporary sketch done by the Renaissance artist Raphael, who saw the work in progress in Leonardo’s studio in 1504. It was unfinished – Leonardo rarely finished any of his paintings – and perhaps later touched up by others. The Raphael sketch and this Mona Lisa both have the woman sitter framed by Grecian columns [see b&w image] not seen in the Louvre version. It also showed the same woman, in the same pose and dress, but younger, indicating an earlier version, evidently abandoned. Kept in Hugh Blaker’s Isleworth art studio, it was nick-named “The Isleworth Mona Lisa.” (Isleworth is a west London district where artists like Turner and Van Gogh once had studios.) It was bought by American art collector Henry Pulitzer, who championed it as the true Mona Lisa in a 1960s book, Where Is The Mona Lisa? (Dan Brown tried to claim the ‘London Mona Lisa’ was commissioned as the ‘original’ was too full of symbolism - but like his other claims, it doesn’t fit the known facts. Laurence Gardner, who trained as an art conservationist, outlines in his The Magdalene Legacy the history of the painting in its various states and versions.) Adding to the problem is the existence of various copies in other museums, some of which may be pre-1914 copies of the Isleworth Mona Lisa, as they show the Grecian columns. (The counter-argument the Louvre version had its columns later trimmed off has been disproved by recent examination.) There are major vested interests in both camps, and Pulitzer for his part has been keeping his version in a Swiss vault, so the security and overcrowding problem at the Louvre is likely to get worse until it too is inevitably removed from public view for its own safety.