I would like to write a review of Pagels and King's Reading Judas but I keep bumping into things that I'd better save for articles.  I will say in general that the historical context they give for the Gospel of Judas is sound, the details they notice about the Gospel of Judas are astute (and not points other scholars have yet made), and their book is eminently readable.  (Indeed everything published so far on GJudas is admirably easy to digest.)

I've heard people say that Pagels (or the Jesus Seminar, or whomever they disagree with) wishes to add books to the New Testament.  I always ask them to show me the quote where a New Testament scholar has said that, and none has been able to pin that assertion down.  I was pleased to see Pagels and King address this issue in their book, it at least gives me something to quote other than our shared sense of professional ethics:

Many people have asked what we should do about these other gospels.  Should we reopen the canon to include some of these long-rejected books?  We think that doing so is not useful — and is beside the point.  Church leaders established the canon at a specific and crucial time in history and for a specific purpose:  to endorse a list of books "approved" for reading in public worship in order to unify the movement under their leadership.  Certainly the canon has helped to do just that, since even today people who belong to an enormous range of churches — Methodist, Pentecostal, Baptist, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Seventh Day Adventist, Episcopal, to name only a few — all draw upon the same collection of New Testament books, and read them in worship.  Gospels like this one, then do not belong in the canon — nor, we think, do they belong in the trash.  Instead, they belong where we have placed them here:  within the history of Christianity.
Reading Judas, (hardcover) p. 103.

After going over the Gospel of Judas in Coptic, I have no quarrel with King's translation of the Gospel of Judas (more moments of "Oh, that's interesting" when they chose one option or another with a difficult verb tense or a garbled phrase — or places in the text where the National Geographic team's current working notes must have progressed past the Coptic transcription that National Geographic put on their website, at first.)  They make a good point about why the Gospel of Judas was copied into a book alongside its three neighbors (The Letter of Peter to Philip, the Book of Allogenes/the Book of the Stranger, and the (First) Apocalypse of James  — but their is a bit difficult to verify without reading those texts as they appear in Codex Tchacos. (There may or may not be significant differences between the Codex Tchacos versions and the Nag Hammadi Library ones.))

I'm not sold on Pagels and King's thesis that the Gospel of Judas was written in a climate of persecution:  the ancient document lambastes the Twelve Disciples for a lot of things, no one's arguing that Judas was written to protest a wave of early Christian criminality (although one could equally get that impression from the passages King and Pagels are pointing to.)

The author of the Gospel of Judas is angry — so is the author of The Book of Thomas the Contender (a book so vituperative that even specialists have avoided it.)  I am as happy as anyone to see a Gnostic texts tied down to history instead of drifting among shifting catalogs of angels and divine personifications ... but I'd still prefer a reference to who was Emperor or Consul when our author was working.  (The Gospel of Judas is older than the book it appears in:  we'll be able to date the book from the paper scraps used to make the paper-mache (cartonnage) that stiffened its covers, but this is not help in telling us how long GJudas was around before Irenaeus of Lyons wrote about it — a day?  Six months?  Some years?)

It's going to take a long time for even specialists to sort out the full historical context and usefulness of the Gospel of Judas.  It already promises to upset () our understanding of the branch of Gnosticism it was part of (Sethian Gnosticism) and that branch's history.  It's also a very early source for Gnosticism, in general — that's sure to change some things, as well. 

None of this is quick work:  it's a bit like putting together one of those exasperating jigsaw puzzles where all the pieces are the same shape.  One holds a new Gnostic text up against the rest of its background and looks for recognizable bits and similarities ... at first the piece seems to fit in several places, and each time someone has to point out "That doesn't go there:  for this reason ...."  It not enough to know enough about Gnosticism, even at a scholarly level — one must know the fine details of Sethian Gnosticism, in particular to do that kind of work.

I went to the Big Chain Bookstore again, I saw Darrell Bock's latest book The Missing Gospels: Unearthing the Truth Behind Alternative Christianities, I should read it.  (I can't find his CV (academic resume) online, could someone tell me if he knows Coptic?)

I've now seen a second dummy's guide  to the Gnostic Gospels, I'll read them when a mood for fact-checking strikes me.

Meyer's new translation of the Nag Hammadi Library is out, it includes two of the works from Codex Tchacos:  the Book of the Stranger (preliminary references called it the Book of Allogenes, not to be confused with a similarly-named Nag Hammadi Library text) and the Gospel of Judas.  (Hm, I just revised the Wikipedia article on the Gospel of Judas, I doubt it will hold. )  This will be the first place the Book of the Stranger has been published, to my knowledge:  it promises to be interesting reading.  (And it will tide me over until the complete translation of the Codex Tchacos appears later this year.)

-Kushana

Note to self: talk about Manichaeism.