Stephen C. Carlson informs us that Hypotyposeis is three years old on Monday.

Congratulations!

I recall when I started ricoblog just over two years ago, Stephen was one of the first to link to me and has been an honest, encouraging, and critical (when he needs to be) supporter.

Please do head over and check out his blog, Hypotyposeis. And if you haven't read his book on Secret Mark yet ... well, you need to.

[see Part I in this series on Ehrman's Gospel of Judas]

I'm through the first eight chapters of Bart Ehrman's The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed. Perhaps it's time for a listing of chapters, so you'll know what I've been reading:

1. My Introduction to the Gospel of Judas
2. Judas in Our Earliest Gospels
3. Judas in Later Gospel Traditions
4. Before the Discovery: Our previous Knowledge of a Gospel of Judas
5. The Discovery of the Gospel of Judas
6. The Gospel of Judas: An Overview
7. The Gospel of Judas and Early Christian Gnosticism
8. Jesus, Judas, and the Twelve in the Gospel of Judas
9. Who Was Judas Iscariot?
10. What Did Judas Betray and Why Did He Betray It?
11. The Gospel of Judas in Perspective

So, I've read the first eight (through page 140) and I'm in the midst of chapter nine, though I'll only report on chapters four through eight here.

Earlier, I mentioned something about the book title being misleading since (to the point I'd read to) the book was more about examining the canonical gospels than the Gospel of Judas. Well, that was true for the first 50 pages, though the emphasis on the Gospel of Judas is alive and well in the last 3/4 of the book. So ... I get to retract that criticism. Please make a mental note of it, apologies for misleading anyone.

Now, on with the new stuff.

Ehrman gives a pretty standard run-down of pre-2005 knowledge of "Gospel of Judas" in referring to Irenaeus' description. Ehrman's typical battle-of-the-competing-orthodoxies vibe runs through this section. You can pick up the vibe in sentences like this:

To help make sense of Irenaeus's comments about the Gospel of Judas, I need to provide some background information on Irenaeus himself and on the book that he produced, in which he attacks "heretical" groups of Christians as nefarious enemies o the truth. (Ehrman, 55-56, quotes are his).

Here's another:

Irenaeus was particularly distressed about the widespread presence of Gnostic Christians in the midst of the church. He viewed Gnostics as false believers propagating a false gospel, sowing weeds among the pure wheat of the true people of God. These heretics needed to be rooted out and destroyed—not by torture and execution by by invective and argument. For the church to be pure, it had to embrace the true teaching about Christ and his apostles. And so Irenaeus wrote a long attack on Gnostic [RWB: are big-G Gnostics different than little-g gnostics?] heretics in which he detailed their nefarious views, described their insidious writings, attacked their heretical perspectives, maligned their immoral teachers, and generally tried to se the record straight so that his readers would know the "truth" about the Christian religion they claimed to profess. (Ehrman, 56-57, quotes are his).

Maybe we need a "Gospel of Irenaeus" so we can rehabilitate our views of Irenaeus. (Yes, that's sarcasm).

Ok, getting back to the show. Again, I can only really say that there is decent information in the book once you get through the trying-too-hard-to-be-folksy approach used to introduce entry-level readers to the larger topics at hand. But getting through that (as in the Irenaeus sections quoted above) can lead to grinding of teeth. Perhaps it reads well if my primary reading on gnosticism (or Irenaeus for that matter) has come from the notes in the NIV Study Bible, and perhaps that's the audience. It just gets tiring after about five minutes.

Chapter five is a recounting of the modern end of the tale, the finding and mis-handling of the Gospel of Judas. Ehrman recounts it just fine, so there's no need to detail it here.

Chapter six is an overview of the Gospel of Judas itself. Again, it is serviceable and adheres largely to the text as established by Kasser/Wurst and translated by Meyer.

Chapter seven paints GJudas in the gnostic milieu. There's nothing really new here, either. And because Ehrman is talking in generalities about gnosticism (or is it Gnosticism?) there's no opportunity to fuss about differences in different accounts. At the end of the chapter, though, he begins to bring out the idea that there are traces of Jewish Apocalypticism within gnostic texts in general and GJudas in particular.

Chapter eight begins to look back again where we left off in chapter three—back to Jesus, Judas and the Twelve. This time, however, they're looked at in the context of the Gospel of Judas. And here we come to the point where, upon reading a sentence (the bold-italicised one below), my only comment was "Why, Bart? Why?!" (you can ask my wife, she heard me say it!). Here's the text:

The Gospel of Judas provides an alternative vision [RWB: context here: 'alternative' to standard treatments with Judas as bungling but vengeful revolutionary fueled by zealousy, greed, sin and devil-possession and subsequently painted as anti-semite]. It is true that over the years some Christians have wondered if the consistent denigration of Judas was fair. Theologically, some have asked, if Christ had to die ofr the sins of the world, and Judas is the one that made it possible, wasn't that a good thing? SOmething that Christ himself wanted? moreover, some scholars have noted that with the passing of time our ancient traditions portray Judas in increasingly villainous ways. Could it be that in the very earliest traditions, which now have been lost, Judas was seen as an itimate of Jesus who simply did his master's will?

If Judas ever was portrayed this way, there is no surviving evidence of it, no text that speaks of Judas in any positive way—until now. The Gospel of Judas stands alone in insisting that Judas was not only close to Jesus but also was the only one among the disciples who understood who Jesus was and did what he wanted. (Ehrman, 138)

Note to folks that are writing books: If you write sentence that, on first draft, causes you to smile smugly and say "yeah, that's awesome!" ... well, flag it to review in two weeks. Chances are you'll read it then and say "How could I have written that cliché-ridden tripe?!" Have a good friend who can write read it, and they'll say the same thing. Then remove the offending line and re-write the paragraph.

This, in a nutshell, is my interaction with Ehrman's popular work. The bent to sensationalise. I can hear the carnival barker now imploring me to check out the wonders of the incredible, new-found gospel. It makes me cringe. But at the same time, there is enough one can scrape out (once the sensationalism is disposed of) that is decent introductory material (though the babbling about "all the differences" and "competing orthodoxies" does get tired).

I plan on one more post to finish up the book. The last three chapters are where discussion on the "historical Judas" take place, and the part I'm most interested to read. I'm afraid of what I'll read, though; I keep fearing it'll be about inconsistencies of accounts. But I keep telling myself: "It'll be OK. He'll come around, and the sensationalism will be muted at the end. Really." Tune in and see where we end up.

I've recently finished working through looking at variants (in the four Gospels) between Scrivener's 1881 Greek New Testament (ostensibly the Greek text behind the Authorised Version, with variants from the Greek text behind the Revised Version in bold) and the NA27.

In what will come as a surprise to no one who has read of variants between the various TR editions (loosely 'Byzantine') and the NA/UBS editions, I make note of the following sorts of general differences:

• Scrivener's TR seems to be the more harmonizing of the two in accounts among the synoptics.
• Scrivener's TR adds specificity where NA/UBS assumes things. For example, in Jn 20.29, Scrivener's TR explicitly adds Θωμᾶ (Thomas) while NA27 assumes it.
• Also, when editions are different, Scrivener's TR will tend to make pronoun references explicit by including the name (likely with article) instead of the pronoun. This is seen when things like NA/UBS have "and he answered and said to them" where Scrivener will have "and Jesus [with article] answered and said to them" (sorry, no easy refs at hand).
• When different, Scrivener's TR routinely adds an article to personal name (though not neccesarily place names) where NA/UBS lack the article.
• John has far fewer differences (and they're far easier to reconcile) than the synoptics do.
• Differences of case and number (but same word)
• Differences of orthography
• Bona-fide, different-word variants. Though likely to Bart Ehrman's dismay, they are not earth-shattering or of the nature to severely change the meaning of the text in the vast majority of instances. And where they are, they are well-documented in the apparatus and commentaries.

I post this anecdotal list not to present some new, gasp-inducing information; rather it is simply to record it for myself. Writing helps me remember things, which is why you've no doubt noticed that when I discuss things like this, many times I simply restate the obvious or conventional wisdom in different words.

I will say, however, that working through each and every variation (thinking about which parts of the two editions are the same, and which parts are different) underscored the sorts of variations one finds in the Gospels of these two editions. And that, of course, will help me in the future when examining variants of all stripes. "Oh yeah, like the diffs we find in the gospels of NA and TR editions". Note that most Bible Software support textual comparisons for this sort of purpose. Logos has a video showing the feature used with English versions (go to around 1:14 for the specific feature), but it works with any language.

At least for me, it's one thing to read an abstract, digested version of information (such as you'd find in an a book on textual criticism or the Byz/NA debate) and quite another thing to actually work through primary data and come to my own conclusions. The above anecdotal notes are nothing different than an introductory tome on the matter would make note of; but for me, it sticks in my head better (with examples more readily in mind) because I actually worked thorugh it.

I will also say that as I go through Acts, at least at present, the variations are of a different character than the gospels.

Stephen C. Carlson (Hypotyposeis) points us to the OUP Blog for some stuff by Bart Ehrman on the Gospel of Judas. Two posts:

• Oct 9, 2006: A Few Questions for Bart Ehrman
• Oct 10, 2006: Why I Wrote The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot

I have been discussing this book. The intro post, along with an index to subsequent posts, is Bart Ehrman: The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot.

I've read through approx. 3/4 of the book and should have another post either later today or tomorrow. I'll revise some of the statements I made earlier, and discuss some of the content I've read.

In addition to Klauck's Ancient Letters and the New Testament and Ehrman's Gospel of Judas book, I have a few others in the hopper at present:

• The Expectant Father by Armin A. Brott
• What to Expect When You're Expecting by Heidi Murkoff
• Great Expectations: Your All-In-One Resource for Pregnancy and Childbirth by Sandy Jones

Hmmmmmm ... what's the common theme here?

The SBL Forum has a short article by Stephen C. Carlson (Hypotyposeis) regarding his examination of "Archaic Mark" and its veracity. It serves as a bit of a preview to the paper he'll give on the subject at the National SBL meeting in November.

Do read it. It is typical in its Carlsonian excellence.

Peter Head of the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog asks a Statistical Question.

Actually, it's just a counting question — I'll let others derive statistics based on counts.

He wants to know the number of letters in each book of the Greek New Testament.

Since I have easy-to-query data to hand here at Logos, I thought I'd write a quick script to generate some word and letter counts for various texts.

Note, however, that the simple act of counting "words" gets complex pretty quickly. For these purposes, words are things delimted by spaces and punctuation. Thus instances of crasis (e.g. KAGW) are counted as one word, not two. Anthony Kenny, in his book A Stylometric Study of the New Testament, has decent discussion on this. He uses the Friberg morphology and ends up with a total word count of 138019. You'll note my total count is 138020. I'm fairly sure this is due to MHTIGH in 1Co 6.3 being counted as two words instead of one word. NA27 has "MHTI GH" while UBS4 has "MHTIGH". So UBS4-oriented counts (Friberg uses the UBS as source) have 138019, while NA27-oriented counts should end up with 138020.

Letters are letters. I've counted a unicode source, but I've stripped all breathings, accents and iota subscripts. I've also stripped all brackets from the text, even those intervening words, and counted the bracketed text (including things like the longer ending of Mark) as part of this source.

I have counts for the NA27, for Maurice Robinson's 2005 edition of his Byzantine text, and for Scrivener's 1881 edition representing the Greek text behind the KJV. [Update: Added data for Tischendorf's Eighth edition.] Some overall totals; details in the files themselves if you're interested.

• NA27 words / letters: 138020 / 680942
• Byzantine words / letters: 140155 / 690536
• Scrivener words / letters: 140597 / 689960
• Tischendorf (8th) words / letters: 137548 / 679688

Please note that the NA27 letter counts are at variance with the counts reported in the comments by Casey Perkins on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog.

More info (broken down by book) in the respective text files:

• NA27
• Byzantine (Robinson 2005)
• Scrivener
• Tischendorf (8th)

Update I (2006-10-06): Added data for Tischendorf's Eighth edition.

Update II (2006-10-09): Some responses to comments. First, Casey Perkins who notes:

My program had a bug in it. My figures now match yours for NA, with the exception of Acts (1 char diff), and 2 Cor and Hebrews (2 char diff). Probably a difference in our source files. Beyond that I won't pursue it.

So we're close to the same page. That's good.

Second, Peter Head who notes:

You said: "I've also stripped all brackets from the text, even those intervening words, and counted the bracketed text (including things like the longer ending of Mark) as part of this source."

Strictly speaking you should have distinguished between single square brackets [in which the bracketed words are considered to be part of the NA27 text] from double square brackets [[in which the bracketed words are NOT considered to be part of the text]]. This may require a little human intervention.

True, true. But that wasn't as easy to distinguish in the source files I was working with. I knew it would matter which is why I noted exactly what was included in the figures. I also knew that I would run the same comparison on different texts so I figured I'd stay consistent with reflecting the count on the page. If someone comes up with updated figures such as Dr. Head describes, I'll gladly post a pointer to them here or even host the files. Please let me know if you're aware of such data.

Update III (2006-10-10): Please note that Casey Perkins has provided further adjustments to account for [[double-bracketed text]] in the NA27. Casey reports that double-brackets are "only relevant in Mark, Luke and John". You can retrieve the figures in the comments to the original post on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog; I've also saved the entire comment reporting the figures as a text file with due attribution, you can reach them here. Thanks, Casey!

Disclaimer/Note: Data that produced these counts was used with permission from my employer, Logos Research Systems, Inc.

Well, the portion I've read (about the first 50 pages) is less about the newfound Gospel of Judas and more about Judas in the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John). Ehrman starts with Mark, then moves to Matthew, then Luke/Acts, then John. He notes each gospel's use and reference of Judas in an effort to begin considering the "historical Judas".

While reading, though, I've finally been able to discover what it is that I don't like about Ehrman's writing. Sure he's engaging, and he does a good job of accounting for the reader who is unfamiliar with recently scholarly/academic trends in Biblical Studies — though sometimes he can seem a bit patronizing in his descent to explain to the uninformed reader. But (and I'm willing to chalk this up to hyper-sensitivity on my part) Erhman always seems to focus on differences between accounts, going as far as calling the differences in the accounts of Judas' death in Matthew and Acts irreconciliable:

The book of Acts has a different account [than Matthew] of Judas' death and its relationship to this field. It is probably impossible to reconcile the details of these two accounts. (Ehrman, 36)

It wouldn't be so bad (to me, anyway) if Erhman actually built his argument. But he hasn't really, at least not yet. He's focused on noting differences in the Gospel accounts of Judas. But he's said very little regarding similarities between accounts outside of the flat-out obvious. He's willing to contrast differences between Gospels but he's relying on the reader to track what is similar between the accounts. So the reader is left to conclude similarities like (the list is not exhaustive, and is off the top of my head, where two or more canonical sources [Gospels/Acts] concur on some aspect of Judas' life):

• Judas Iscariot is listed as one of the twelve
• He was named or clearly implied to be the betrayer
• He was paid a price for the betrayal
• He was with the party that apprehended Jesus
• He died an untimely, un-natural death (suicide or horrible circumstance) after his betrayal
• His payment was associated with the purchase of the "field of blood"

Several times (at least three, I think) when he verges on getting down to brass tacks, he adds thoughts like "those are the questions we will ask at the end of the book". Like this whole paragraph (pp. 33-34), which occurs after noting that complete synthesis of gospel accounts is bad. I agree it's bad (duh!) but that doesn't mean that we throw out the vectors that do meet between accounts. Erhman (at least at present, up to and around page 50) seems to distrust all of it:

The historical conclusion is that we have different accounts from different authors writing at different times to different audiences for different reasons. Given the differences of the accounts, we will eventually want to reexamine them to see if it is possible to draw some kind of historical conclusions about what really happened. In some cases, the differences between the accounts turn out to be irreconcilable. ... [brief hint of Matthew/Acts item mentioned above] ... Accounts that contain discrepancies cannot both be historically accurate. Is one more accurate than the other? How would we know? What can we say for certain about the life of Judas — what he did and why he did it — based on our few surviving sources? Those are the questions we will ask at the end of the book, after looking at other ways Judas was portrayed, first from other surviving Christian sources such as the book of Acts, the Gospel of John, and several apocryphal works (in the next chapter), and then in the newly discovered Gospel of Judas, a book with its own agenda and distinctive portrayal of this one who betrayed Jesus. (Ehrman, 33-34).

Note the focus on differences? Why is nothing said about similarities of accounts? Why not compile and check similarties along with differences as the literature is cumulatively examined through the course of the book? Perhaps he will do this as the book progresses; I've just read about the canonical gospels. But — showing my bias here — I'd say that's our best shot at getting to the "historical Judas". Why not lay both sides of the foundation? Why save (I hope) part of it for later? Well ... focusing on differences (much like focusing on textual variants) really is the more sensational thing. And I've blogged before on what I think regarding Ehrman's sensationalistic tendencies.

So, basically, the first fifty pages of the book is less about the Gospel of Judas and more about examining Judas himself, throwing on the newly-found Gospel of Judas for good measure since we can. Let me be clear, though, that this aspect of the book (brief intro/analysis of the canonical gospels and then examining Judas' role in them) is, apart from focusing primarily on differences between accounts, quite good. There's good information here. It's the undertow of the sensationalism (again, I may be hypersensitive ... I'll easily admit that) that sticks in my craw.

Given this, the book title does seem a bit misleading (along the same lines of the the "Misquoting Jesus" title, where textual variants outside of the words attributed to Christ were, as I understand it, where most of the discussion was centered). [paragraph nixed, this isn't fair to say based on the balance of the book. RWB 2006-10-11]

I'll blog more as I get further into the book.