Also worth noting — DeConick seems to base her criticisms of the NG translation on a couple of very small points, including her insistence that “daimon” MUST be translated as “evil demon.” Says who, exactly?? Throughout the ancient world, especially in the Hellenistic and Roman cultures that would have heavily influenced the Gnostics, “daimon” was understood to be a sort of benign “spirit” (sometimes even a spirit of a person — Alexander was thought to have been taken over by a sort of divine “daimon,” for instance. Not really buying the “evil daimon” argument. For her to say NG made a “mistake” or that their translation was an error goes way beyond what translation really is. All translations are INTERPRETATIONS. National Geographic assembled a team of the best Coptic translators and scholars in the world, and all of them came to a consensus translation of the Gospel of Judas. They interpret it one way; DeConick and a few others interpret a few small points in the translation differently. That does not make the NG translation a “mistake”!

Everyone should take a look at National Geographic’s rebuttal to the Chronicle article here — which really spells it out:

http://press.nationalgeographic.com/pressroom/index.jsp?pageID=pressReleases_detail&siteID=1&cid=1212171846974
(Copy/paste entire link into your browser.)

Also, note the response to the Chronicle article by the four translators involved in the National Geographic project. This was printed in the Chronice of Higher Education, but since you have to be a subscriber to link to it, I copy it for you here:

National Geographic Translators’ Response:
>>Anyone who thinks scholars don’t get bellicose should take a look at “The Betrayal of Judas.” To be sure, there are issues that need to be addressed regarding the Gospel of Judas, and they are being addressed — for example, in the new edition of the text. Yet it remains remarkable, in spite of a few protestations to the contrary, that most scholars agree about a great deal in the National Geographic translation of the Gospel of Judas. We produced what we called a consensus translation, with input from all the members of the National Geographic Society team.

The points of contention with April DeConick and others concerning the translation have involved little more than the interpretation of the single instance of the term “daimon” and the understanding of a Coptic idiom that is ambiguous and open to interpretation, as well as two passages with extraordinarily difficult Coptic transcriptional issues (the ink traces on the papyrus are hard to decipher). These issues were addressed well before the publication of DeConick’s book, in the critical edition of the translation and in updated materials we distributed to our colleagues.

Why DeConick insists on raising old issues that are long past remains a mystery. She received a revised Coptic text and English translation of the Gospel of Judas at a conference in Paris in the autumn of 2006. To put it in clear terms: She discusses in her book and her public interviews an understanding of the Coptic text of the Gospel of Judas that had been abandoned by the National Geographic team long before the time she entered public discussions of the text.

Scholars are in essential agreement about almost everything else in the translation of the Gospel of Judas, though we interpret the text differently. DeConick asked at a recent conference, where we circulated page proofs of the paperback edition and welcomed suggestions, if we would change only one minor reading (the reconstruction of “[Se]th,” which we consider almost certain) — and we accommodated her wishes, for the sake of collegiality. So much for a translation that she says we “messed up.”

Our hope is that we can move beyond this sort of rhetoric and work together as colleagues to study a text and a codex that represent a precious recovered literary witness to our cultural tradition.

Rodolphe Kasser
Emeritus Professor of Coptic Language
and Literature
University of Geneva
Geneva

Marvin Meyer
Professor of Bible and Christian Studies
Chapman University
Orange, Calif.

Gregor Wurst
Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Patristics
University of Augsburg
Augsburg, Germany

François Gaudard
Research Associate
Oriental Institute
University of Chicago
Chicago>>