Remember the big media story a while back about the Gospel of Judas? Remember the stories about how Judas was really a good guy? It appears now that the text (which is in any case a late Gnostic text, and thus not as significant as some people wanted to make it) was seriously misrepresented—and that National Geographic is in large part to blame. It’s clear they wanted to make use of Judas for their own purposes, and that one of those purposes was to make their thirty pieces of silver off him. They wanted the media splash, they wanted headlines like “Ancient Text Says Jesus Asked Judas to Hand Him to the Romans” (that one courtesy of the Arizona Republic), and they wanted the profits that came with that, courtesy of the high-profile documentary, the DVD sales, and the book sales. And if proper scholarly procedures, and with them proper scholarly standards, went by the wayside as a result—taking a proper scholarly concern for accuracy and truth with them—then so be it.
