1.21 The Perfidy of Judas - The Ethiopic Book of the Cock (original) (raw)
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The Ethiopic Book of the Cock_2024_An English translation
This paper presents an annotated English language translation of the Ethiopic Book of the Cock (Mäṣḥafä Dorho / መጽሐፈ፡ ዶርሆ፡), also known as the Ge'ez Book of the Rooster. The text narrates the events leading up to the Last Supper, the arrest, trial and execution of Jesus. While the text's basic framework is a harmony of the canonical gospels, the Book of the Cock contains many non-canonical narrative features.
A miracle story of apocryphal origin (supposedly the Act of Peter), transformed into a plot with a typical paradoxical element, became popular in the oriental Christianity and in medieval Europe: this is how it got into the apocryphal New Testament narratives; among others into the newly discovered Ethiopian Book of the Cock, some early Coptic fragments and the medieval manuscripts of the Gospel of Nicodemus as well. The purpose of the present study is to document this unusual process (a story from an apocryphal source is transformed during traditional transmission, and finds its way into some versions of other apocryphal texts). The data attesting to the presence of the characteristic motif in orality are especially valuable. Conscious fieldwork and records from the 19th and 20th century reveal the oral variations, which take the form of an origin legend, aiming at an explanation of the world.
Paper written for the Parish Episcopal School (college prep students and faculty), 2006, regarding the publication of the Gospel of Judas manuscript and its possible implications for New Testament studies.
2013 The Dispositio of the Gospel of Judas
Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 17,1 , 2013
Upon first reading, the Gospel of Judas gives the impression that it is a work composed by an author who was not greatly concerned with organizational matters. However, when we look more closely at it, we are obliged to rethink this first impression. Patterns in the recurrence of themes and language in the Gospel of Judas show the structural importance of a concentric series of inclusions; when these inclusions are taken into account, we see that the work is organized around two sections, with each section echoing and clarifying the other. This bipartite dispositio (to use a term from contemporary Greco-Roman rhetorical analysis) coheres perfectly with the text's content, in which the holy generation is opposed to mortal humans and in which a great deal of use is made of antithesis. The bipartite structure, the thematic dichotomy between the two groups, and the use of antithesis as a technique all work together to encourage readers to choose between the two options offered to them.