I'M HERE -- IN OTTAWA. Got here Friday afternoon. (My luggage took a more leisurely route, but that`s another story.) The Internet access my room was supposed to have remains, alas, hopelessly glitched, and the conference has been very full (and very good), so this is the first chance I`ve had to take up Pierluigi's kind offer to use his office computer.

[UPDATE (2 NOVEMBER): Welcome, visitors from Biblical Studies Carnival XI! There's an earlier post on the conference that includes the full conference program and links to my conference paper and a related earlier paper.]

I`ve heard a great many good papers. So far the one that would be of most general interest was by Louis Painchaud, in which he argues (to condense his argument rather drastically) that in the recently published Coptic Gospel of Judas, Judas was actually a baddy, just as in the canonical gospels.

I'm here until tomorrow afternoon and hope to be able to fit in some more blogging between now and then. I have almost 70 e-mails in my inbox, so if you sent me a message, it may have to wait until I'm back home.

It's great to spend a weekend with a bunch of philology geeks who think it's normal to know and talk about Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, etc. and who understand the deep satisfaction that comes only from reconstructing the text of an ancient document from corrupt manuscripts and then deciphering what it says.

UPDATE (3 October): A photo of Louis Painchaud presenting his paper. Paul-Hubert Poirier, in the foreground, chaired the session. (Click on image for larger version.)



UPDATE (4 October): Professor Painchaud has kindly given me permission to post the English abstract of his paper:

Christian Apocryphal Texts for the New Millennium.
Achievements, Prospects, and Challenges

Université d’Ottawa, 30 septembre et 1er octobre 2006

À PROPOS DE LA (RE)DÉCOUVERTE DE L’ÉVANGILE DE JUDAS

Abstract

by Louis Painchaud

Since its publication by the National Geographic Society last April, the Gospel of Judas has been interpreted and presented by the scholars in charge of its edition and translation as rehabilitating the figure of the apostle, who would be the true disciple of Jesus, the only one who understood his mission, to whom the spiritual Saviour would have asked to deliver him from his carnal body. This Judas would be a model of the perfect (gnostic) Christian.

A close reading of the Gospel of Judas reveals a totally different picture. Judas is guilty of sacrificing the man who wore Jesus, he is a demon, misled by his star, and he will never make it to the place reserved for the Holy Generation.

He is both demonized, in the same way as he is demonized in the Gospel of John, and assimilated to Juda the patriarch eponym of Judaism through the question “What advantage…? (GosJud 46:16; Gen 37:26). Like his homonym, he will inherit the government over the lower world, over the other apostles and the generations who will curse him (GosJud 46:23; Gen 49:10). The Judas of the Gospel of Judas is the very symbol of the betrayal of the name of Jesus through the interpretation of his death as a sacrifice in a proto-orthodox Christianity perpetuating the sacrificial cult of the Temple of Jerusalem.

Partly misled by the expectations raised by the reader of a Gnostic revelation dialogue concerning the main interlocutor of the Saviour, the scholars who presented the GosJud in such an erroneous way read into the text what we already knew from Ireneaus and Epiphanius instead of the text itself and saw in Judas the perfect disciple according to their opponents. This led to a reception of this new text perfectly in harmony with the expectations of the Western World in the second half of the 20th century, in need of a rehabilitated Judas in the context of the reappraisal of Jewish Christian relationships.