The New York Times has an Op-Ed by April D. Deconick about the gnostic Gospel of Judas, publicized (and translated) by the National Geographic Society last year. Deconick has translated the gospel for herself and says the translaters employed by the Society got it all wrong: According to the text, Judas wasn't a hero, he was a demon.

Deconick criticizes the Society's decision to not allow outside scholars to review the translation before it was published with so much fanfare:

That said, I think the big problem is that National Geographic wanted an exclusive. So it required its scholars to sign nondisclosure statements, to not discuss the text with other experts before publication. The best scholarship is done when life-sized photos of each page of a new manuscript are published before a translation, allowing experts worldwide to share information as they independently work through the text.

Another difficulty is that when National Geographic published its transcription, the facsimiles of the original manuscript it made public were reduced by 56 percent, making them fairly useless for academic work. Without life-size copies, we are the blind leading the blind. The situation reminds me of the deadlock that held scholarship back on the Dead Sea Scrolls decades ago. When manuscripts are hoarded by a few, it results in errors and monopoly interpretations that are very hard to overturn even after they are proved wrong.

To avoid this, the Society of Biblical Literature passed a resolution in 1991 holding that, if the condition of the written manuscript requires that access be restricted, a facsimile reproduction should be the first order of business. It’s a shame that National Geographic, and its group of scholars, did not follow this sensible injunction.

Deconick is the author of The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says.