I have a friend who frequently reminds me not to attribute to bad motives that which can be explained by simple incompetence. But how many times does, for example, The New York Times have to "forget" to investigate a story which seems to confirm its biases? And why do all the errors seem to fall in one political direction, when random chance would imply half-and-half?

At a certain point, you can't suspend disbelief anymore. You can't believe something is that improbable, or that someone could really be that selectively stupid.

GetReligion links to a story (in the Times, to its credit) about the "mistakes" made in translating the text of the "Gospel of Judas". Turns out there were quite a lot of those "mistakes", and that they all seemed to have the same effect: of undermining the traditional Christian narrative concerning Judas, and confirming the view which is vogue today (for example, in Godspell).

Instead of telling us Judas was called a "demon" in the text, we were told we was referred to as a "spirit." We were told Judas receives the mysteries of the kingdom. But the text actually says he was barred from going there. They even omitted a "not" so we're told Judas is a part of the "holy generation", rather than than being prohibited from joining. In short, the translation errors all happened to transmute Judas from a literal demon from hell (as he is portrayed in the GoJ text itself) into a hero (as he was portrayed in the news reports).

And the copies that National Geographic released to the public "were reduced by 56 percent, making them fairly useless for academic work" -- i.e. making it impossible to check their translation in a timely manner.

Rather a stunning set of "coincidences", don't you think?

Now, frankly, I could care less if a group of third-century Gnostics thought Judas was a great guy or not. But I'm having a little trouble buying into the idea that all those errors happened entirely by chance -- and that the timing of the translation similarly just happened to put it in line to produce anti-Christian Easter headlines. That doesn't sound like mere sloppiness, as Mollie at GetReligion seems to imply. (And the GoJ re-translator seems to think it's an insoluble puzzle as well.)

Don't get my tone wrong: I'm not fuming about some plot to undermine the faith to which I adhere. That's all rather common and ho-hum. But I'm frankly rather surprised at the extent to which some will go.