First Person: Sensationalizing Gnostic Christianity

A story on the new Gospel of Judas, released by the National Geographic Society at a news conference a week before Easter, appeared on the front page of almost every newspaper in the world the day after it was announced. The promotion was a masterful display of professional hype by National Geographic—two books, a major article in its magazine, a TV special, an exhibit in Explorers Hall and the new gospel’s own Web site. Was all this justified? James Robinson, the distinguished editor of the Nag Hammadi codices that include several Gnostic gospels similar in many ways to the […]