I've just finished reading Dr. Elaine Pagels and Dr. Karen King's book Reading Judas on the recently-published Gospel of Judas. I'm afraid I have to put off what I think of the book in order to make room for a rant.

I've been picking though the Gospel of Judas in Coptic. National Geographic, rightly, published the original Coptic of the Gospel of Judas on their website, along with their English translation. (They also published a few photos I've been losing my eyesight over: I can't wait for the full manuscript, not just Judas but the three other works discovered with it.) Coptic usually isn't taught in degree programs on New Testament/Christian Origins. I understand why: it's Egyptian.

Yes, it's written in the Greek alphabet (plus a handful of extra letters), yes its peppered with Greek loan words - but, no, it's not Greek and knowing Greek won't let you read Coptic. (Coptic grammar is, well, Copticy - I think the current term is 'the Afro-Asiatic language family'. The Semitic languages I know don't particularly help, although knowing them is better than trying to make the jump to Coptic from Latin or Greek (which work in a completely different way.))

That said ... here, let me open my New Testament for a moment. This is the Nestle-Aland 27^th edition of the New Testament in Greek (equivalent to the UBS 4^th edition, if you're keeping track — see the American Bible Society link), this is the Greek New Testament that scholars use because it footnotes most of the early manuscripts (read Dr. Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus for why that's important). Every page has footnotes, in tiny type, mostly abbreviations and squiggles, that 'decode' into a paragraph's worth of information about manuscript variations for nearly every passage in the New Testament. (From everything as small as a dropped or added 'and' to entire phrases changed.) My point is, these footnotes and abbreviations refer to manuscripts in 7 languages: the original Greek and early translation from Greek into Latin, a dialect of Aramaic called Syriac, Coptic Egyptian, Classical Ethiopic, Georgic, and Armenian. (For the truly passionate there are also (not footnoted there) manuscripts in Arabic and a half-dozen medieval European languages (mostly starting with "Old High...."), and perhaps some scholars might also argue for including Classical Persian, too.)

Given this fact, the standard education for New Testament scholars (in seminaries and for professors) includes Latin and Greek. And the other five languages? Sorry, it's tremendously difficult to find places that will teach any one of them. (I've studied two and made creeling noises over the other three, and I've eyed Persian, as well.) I am sure there are historians who will argue for each of them, but I'm putting down a soap-box today on behalf of Coptic.

You've heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls - older than our other Old Testament/Hebrew Bible manuscripts by 1,000 years, upset several standing theories in Hebrew Bible Studies, tell us all kinds of unexpected things about Judaism's many forms shortly before Jesus, Josephus, and around the time of Philo. They're in Hebrew: any Hebrew Bible scholar can pick up a Dead Sea Scroll (or rather, of course, a photo of one) and read it.

(Well, provided it's in enough of one piece to be read, at all. The pretty, well-preserved scrolls make all the photos, but the majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls were small fragments that had to be put together like a jigsaw puzzle.)

So, the next year a cache of books (not scrolls) was found in Egypt, the Nag Hammadi Library - texts copied after the books in the New Testament were written but before the New Testament (as a collection) had taken shape, they upset several standing theories about how Christianity developed and how heresy worked (to the degree that historians don't use the term heresy any longer...), tell us all kinds of unexpected things about the many forms of Judaism and Christianity that existed, and ought to be as much a part of New Testament Studies as the Dead Sea Scrolls are of Second Temple Judaism and Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies.

We have carbon dated the Dead Sea Scrolls, but that just tells you the age of their paper (or rather, parchment.) How old are the works in them? Especially the ones that are lot like - and a lot unlike - Biblical books we're more familiar with? The situation is worse with the Nag Hammadi Library: there are a lot of arguments about dates with these Coptic works, since the NHL is heavy on ideas and light on contemporary references (scholars are forced into arguments about how quickly or slowly a certain very esoteric idea developed within Judaism or Platonic philosophy when one clear mention of who was consul in Rome would clear things up, nicely....)

And the Nag Hammadi Library is in Coptic. At the time of its discovery, almost no one could read Coptic: a few specialists in odd corners of early Christianity, a few linguists, a few specialists in the literature of the Orthodox Church in Egypt. Thirty years after their publication, this is still the case.... The problem is that most people who write books and blogs and articles about why Gnosticism/the Hammadi Library/the Gospel of Thomas/the Gospel of Mary/the Gospel of Judas is or isn't important for understanding how Christianity formed can't read Coptic. (This is like trying to be a specialist in how Charles Dickens' journalism influenced his literary career without knowing a word of English - or any language in any way related to English.) Dr. Elaine Pagels can and Dr. Karen King can - in fact, they're both translators who have worked with Coptic texts before. Most people commenting on the quality of their work can't.

That's a terrible gap of understanding and detail, and I say if scholars are so interested in the question of these texts' usefulness then they should help out and learn Coptic - the museums and libraries of Europe are stuffed with texts (as Dr. Mirecki and Dr. Hedrick can attest) that are simply in storage, untranslated, because there aren't enough people trained in that language. (The same is true for Syriac (a form of Aramaic), which (after the alphabet) is a snap if you already know Hebrew. Only a few obscure specialists know it and the storehouses of Europe are chock full of untranslated texts in it, too.)

My rant is: O Fellow Scholars, carp after you know Coptic and can work with the text at the same level of detail as Elaine Pagels and Karen King, or Mirecki and BeDuhn, or Dr. Marvin Meyer, or Dr. James M. Robinson (and translate some things that are collecting dust in museums while you're at it... ) and remember that until you do, your academic colleagues who know Coptic will take you about as seriously as you'd take someone who writes on the Bible without knowing Hebrew or Greek. One can learn a great deal from reading translations - I start most of my research with translations and there are places where I have to depend on them completely* - but at some point all of us must speak to a detail or understand the text without some translator's understanding interposing itself, and out comes the original language version of the text, the reference grammars, and the dictionaries (and, if you're me, the magnifying glass.)

[* Kushana's To Do List: Learn Tocharian]

You must know this already as historians, you know well how Hebrew and/or Greek has transformed and enlarged your understanding of the Bible - so think in the same way about the Gospel of Judas or the Nag Hammadi texts. How can you know they are late and historically useless without first reading them? If you are using a Church Father as your source, have you compared his account to the text apparently under discussion? Are you confident, given that he very likely isn't writing in Coptic, that he has the same text before him? How well does his account of this or that group square with the primary sources we have, now? (Please, we have had some of them (the Gospel of Mary, the Apocryphon of John, parts of the Gospel of Thomas) for 100 years; it is no longer so that we must rely on the Church Fathers because we have no other source of information.) To go a bit further: how can you tell where a quotation comes from without being able to read Coptic? Yes, a particular Gnostic work quotes the Gospel of Luke - but GLk manuscripts of what age? In Bohairic? In Sahidic? In Greek? In Latin? In Syriac? What textual family? Is it really a quote or an agrapha? Can you distinguish sayings tradition material from written quotes? Can you tell from the Coptic whether our Egyptian scribe is hearing (or remembering hearing) the passage from liturgy or memorization — or whether they are looking back and forth between their work and an older manuscript before them? (And while you're at it, can you explain why they're so fond of putting random "h"'s in their Greek loanwords?) Yes it's easier and safer and less upsetting (and less time consuming) to stay with just what your degree program taught you: but primary sources do not exist at our convenience.

Learn Coptic. (Until you do I'll keep asking, "How do you know that?")

-Kushana

Note: Coptic uses different grammar - separate verb tenses and sentence structures - depending on which of three 'gears' a sentence is in. Although these three different types of sentences occur side-by-side in Coptic texts, their grammar is largely separate. Any textbook that makes a hash of explaining these three 'gears' (or which was written before they were discovered...) will hopelessly confuse students. There are some splendid websites with resources for learning or reading Coptic, but because of the unusual nature of Coptic grammar, I can't recommend any textbook but Layton's. Coptic is not a difficult language, it never approaches the structural labyrinths found in Greek or Arabic, but you just have to start off on the right foot when describing how it's put together.