About two weeks ago I blogged about being offered a complimentary copy of Bart Ehrman's new book, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot. The book arrived today. I'm planning on reading through the Gospel of Judas a few times (see my post on Erhman's essay in the National Geographic book The Gospel of Judas for some background) and then digging in to Erhman's treatment.

We'll see what I think concerning Ehrman's shark-jumping status once I get into the book. I will by all means blog my reactions as I read it.

Either way, thanks to OUP for sending along the copy of the book!

Update: I'm blogging as I'm reading through the book. Entries will be linked to here.

• 2006-10-05: Bart Ehrman on Gospel of Judas, Part I
• 2006-10-10: Bart Ehrman on Gospel of Judas, Part II
• 2006-10-16: Bart Ehrman on Gospel of Judas, Part III

Update I (2006-10-04): Just a test to see how UTF8 Coptic in the proper Unicode range is handled in browsers. Nevermind me ... these are the first few lines of Kasser & Wurst's transcription of the Gospel of Judas, typos are mine:

ⲡⲗⲟⲅⲟ[ⲥ] ⲉⲧϨⲏ̣ⲡʼ ⲛ̅ⲧⲁⲡⲟⲫⲁ
ⲥ̣ⲓⲭ ⲛ̅[ⲧⲁ ⲓ̈]ⲏ̣̅ⲥ̅ Ϣⲁϫⲉ ⲙⲛ̅ ⲓ̈ⲩⲇⲁⲥ

It appears to work on my side, though it assumes you have the font New Athena Unicode installed. Note that the diaresis in the font clashes with the iauda, hence the one-dot-to-the-left look.

Update II (2006-10-05): Coptic works, for me anyway, in IE6 and FireFox 1.5.0.7. It doesn't work in SharpReader (no surpise, it strips style attributes) or BlogLines. I guess I should say that it works in those two, but that the default font has no characters in the Coptic unicode range. The bytes are there, but no characters exist in the font(s) for Coptic. C'est la vie.

Update III (2006-10-05): Phil Harland, with a post titled Judas Iscariot may be evil after all, links to Jim Davila's PaleoJudaica, which has an abstract describing Louis Painchoud's contrarian critique of the National Geographic translation/commentary/etc of the Gospel of Judas. Do check it out, particularly if you think the recently found Gospel of Judas is good fodder for "rehabilitating Judas".

Update III (2006-10-10): Note a post I wrote, Ehrman on Ehrman on Gospel of Judas, (h/t to Stephen C. Carlson (Hypotyposeis)) which points to interviews and such with Ehrman on Oxford University Press' blog.