Friday, January 18, 2008

Response (5) to Marvin Meyer: The Thirteenth Daimon

5. Transcription problems are another thing entirely. There are two transcription errors that NGS has corrected from the time it published the first popular book to the Critical Edition. These have been corrected, so why are they still important to point out? Because the public doesn’t know about them and because the corrected transcription makes for completely opposite readings in vital interpretative areas. The original wrong readings have affected the way that this text was initially interpreted and presented to the public.

Bottom p. 46 of manuscript. How did I see that the original NGS publication had emended this text and translated it: “they will curse your ascent to the holy [generation]”? I compared this reading to their Coptic transcription which had been posted on-line. An [n] appeared in brackets in front of nekktê. This reads nekktê as a noun rather than an emphatic negative future verb. Through this emendation (when the n was added), the negative is no longer present in the sentence. When we met in the Sorbonne, several of us raised this point quite loudly, and then we were given another provisional transcription that would form the basis for the Critical Edition. In that edition, the emendation was gone and ktê was replaced with bôk. Now it reads: “they […] to you, and you shall not ascend to the holy generation.” The negative emphatic future is back, but with a different verb.

By the way, there is no footnote in the popular edition to indicate that the team had altered the text and that their translation was based on that alteration. There isn’t even a bracket around [your ascent]. The footnote arrived in the Critical Edition when two outside scholars, Nagel and Funk, pushed the issue.

My point is that emendations are very dangerous and often wrong because they are conscious decisions. No matter how innocent they may seem, they should be avoided except where there is no better explanation. This is especially true when we are dealing with emendations that change the sentence from negative to positive or positive to negative.

I have not made any damning, slanderous, or defamatory charges against Meyer or anyone else on the NGS team. What I have said is that the text was altered by the team when this emendation was made. This is a fact that can easily be observed. I also go on in my Op. Ed. piece to say that I do not know why this mistake (and the others) were made, but it is a question that I would like answered. I think that the emendation of this text was a mistake, that consequently the altered reading of this text has led the public and other scholars to believe that Judas ascends to the holy generation when he does not.

I have not made any statement of intentionality. I have left this as an open question in the Op. Ed. piece, wondering about two possibilities: that the task of reconstruction was difficult and that the scholars were working under conditions abnormal and harmful for the academic process. Meyer has now answered that question in his response to me: the text was a nightmare; that they kept working on it after the popular translation was published; that they got feedback from external scholars which made them put away the emendation.

7 comments:

paulf said...

It's kind of disingenuous to deny that you made any accusations. You did say in the op-ed that someone was "manufacturing a hero Judas."

Now I know a careful analysis of the text would reveal that you may not have been specifically referring to Meyer in that sentence, but just about anybody reading the article in a less-than-Talmudic manner would have inferred that Meyer's team was the offending party.

Maybe you are not done with the responses yet, but so far it seems you are picking at the little points but not at the larger ones.

1) Whether or not you are right about the translation of a handful of words, what about the larger sense of the book?

As Meyer puts it: "What
about the Sethian confession of Jesus’ identity uttered by Judas and Judas alone? ... And how to explain the textual opening or
incipit, promising revelatory conversations between Jesus and Judas Iscariot? And Jesus’
private revelations to Judas, including the sprawling cosmogonic revelation that
dominates the central portion of the text? And Jesus’ repeated statements that he has
revealed the mystery of the kingdom of God to Judas and told him everything?"

2) The strongest part of his rebuttal comes from the section comparing Judas to Sophia. I'm not qualified to judge the references, but the overall sense of what he is saying on its face sounds more plausible than parody.

Again, I know little about this, but the sense you call the book a parody doesn't fit with the other uses of ancient parody you cite. Those involve parody within a book, while your interpretation makes Judas a book of parody. Not the same thing.

April DeConick said...

Paul,

Thank you for your comment. I believe the subject of that sentence was "we" and NOT Marvin Meyer or the NGS team.

paulf said...

April,

Again, I'm not disagreeing with what you just said. I believe you did not intend to call anyone out on their integrity, but that is the way it was interpreted by most readers. And not completely irrationally, given that the NG team was the main target of the piece.

I understand -- I write for a living and not everything comes out the way I intend and sometimes I'm surprised that words are interpreted in ways I would not have imagined.

April DeConick said...

Paul,

The e-mails I got were quite interesting in this matter. The largest number of them criticized me for not being tough enough. These readers thought that I didn't say what they felt needed to be said, but was protecting my colleagues.

I have found that you cannot control how readers interpret the written letters, and that these interpretations can be quite the opposite the authorial intent. I don't know what to do about this. As a writer, I try my best to be clear. But in the end the interpretation is left to the reader.

J. Montserrat Torrents said...

The critical edition, page 46,25, has:
...auo nekbok...
This form is not a third negative future, but an imperfect. You rightly conjecture a "n", even if there is no place for it in the manuscript. So your rendering of the text should be:
... and you (will not) ascend...
J. Montserrat Torrents

J. Montserrat Torrents said...

The critical edition, page 46,25, has:
...auo nekbok...
This form is not a third negative future, but an imperfect. You rightly conjecture a "n", even if there is no place for it in the manuscript. So your rendering of the text should be:
... and you (will not) ascend...
J. Montserrat Torrents

April DeConick said...

Actually that is incorrect. You cannot have BOK in this form in a durative sentence.

This codex has negative emphatic future with only one "N" throughout. This is a common spelling.