I have been reading Robert M. Price’s Secret Scrolls: Revelations from the Lost Gospel Novels (Eugene, Or.: Wipf & Stock, 2011). Occasionally Price contextualizes some of the books he examines with discussions of theories and results of biblical scholarship. Sometimes, however, this contextualizing is drawn from what most of us would consider “fringe” scholarship—for example, dating the composition of the canonical gospels to the mid-second-century, Barabara Theiring’s ideosyncratic views on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the New Testament as “put together and heavily rewritten by Polycarp” (p. 169, appealing to David Trobish, The First Edition of the New Testament [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000]).
Another of Price’s contextual nuggets is the claim that the Gospel of Judas is a forgery (p. 76-77, 181). Price appeals here to an article by Richard J. Arthur, Associate Professor of New Testament at the Unification Theological Seminary (“The Gospel of Judas: Is It a Hoax?” Journal of Unification Studies 9 [2008] 35-47, available online HERE). Price summarizes the article in three points: the text betrays an awareness of modern moral issues (“it seems to be editorializing on the priestly scandals of our time, as it depicts priests sleeping with women and ‘sacrificing’ children, this last perhaps pointing to abortion or molestation”), part of the gospel copies from The Secret Book of John (“the impression one gets from reading it is a patch transferred out of context, no longer making the sense it did in the original”), and it contains a scribal error found also in one of the extant copies of John from Nag Hammadi (Price asks, “what are the chances that the scribe of Judas copied from another [i.e., non Nag-Hammadi] copy of The Secret Book of John that made the very same goof in the very same spot?”).
Price accedes that the papyrus on which Judas is written is genuinely ancient (and, I might add, it was carbon-dated by the National Geographic Society to between 220 and 340 C.E.) but the text is not (but, again, the ink appears to be an ancient recipe). He goes on to declare that the forger is one of the members of the NGS team, but does not say which one (the team includes: Rodolphe Kasser, Gregor Wurst, François Gaudard, Marvin Meyer, and Florence Darbre). Arthur does not make this charge in the original paper, but he does say, “that our hoaxer is a member of the community of modern Coptic scholars who have special regard for Codex II as the first exemplar of the Apocryphon of John from Nag Hammadi to be published. He concludes the paper on a conciliatory note, despite the severity of the accusation: "The Gospel of Judas is probably a hoax, and all the writings in it of recent authorship. These writings were prepared in our time, on some old papyrus leaves, probably from a palimpsest, without a binding. There is no cause for rebuke. One of our colleagues has created great excitement; he is a jolly fellow and has done us all a favor.”
I’m not able to interact with Arthur’s theory on a linguistic level, but I do find his literary and text-critical arguments unconvincing (that the second-century church suffered from similar problems in leadership and its critics hurled at it typical insults does not surprise me, and it is not improbable for a similar error to occur in texts drawing upon common material). I can only assume other scholars have not been convinced by Arthur’s arguments given that I have not come across any other reference to his article. Those interested in the debate over the origins of Secret Mark may find the issue of interest since, once again, we get cavalier accusations of forgery against an eminent scholar in the field.
The book has received some glowing endorsements. John Kloppenborg says of it, "Ancient Gospel or Modern Forgery? brings together most of the key supporters and detractors of the authenticity of the Secret Gospel of Mark in a balanced, probing, and illuminating book…Although this book, carefully crafted by Burke, cannot be said to have brought closure on the issue, it has laid to rest many of the specious and illogical claims that have littered the discussion until now. We can only hope that the ground has now been cleared for a more balanced and scientific discussion of the Mar Saba manuscript." And Bart Ehrman says, "The debate over the Secret Gospel of Mark rages on. Did Morton Smith discover this text, or did he forge it? This terrific collection of essays presents leading voices from both sides of the controversy, stating their views, marshaling the evidence, and allowing readers to pass their own verdicts."