In 2006, around Easter, there was a media sensation as the National Geographic unveiled the lost ‘Gospel of Judas‘. The media hype surrounding this event was huge – Archaeology was getting front page headlines instead of being relegated to the ‘interesting but unimportant’ sections somewhere towards the later third of the papers.
It was later shown, however, that the gospel was useless in revealing any new information about Jesus or Judas. In fact, there has been much debate and criticism of the National Geographic Societies handling of the find – including not allowing access to the source documents (or facsimiles) for over 12 months after releasing their findings and having all researchers on board sign non-disclosure documents. Once critical translation of the text finally came out, many scholars rebuffed the initial claims from the National Geographic Society and even argued that the NGS had mistranslated the document.
Now, did you know that the NGS released a revised edition of the Gospel of Judas? Much of the criticisms (such as mistranslation) have been ironed out and the impact of the text softened – but who cares? Certainly not the media who failed to report this to the same depth and energy as the prior find.
So to with the recent discovery of ‘Ida’ – the so-called ‘missing link’ in the evolutionary chain of apes to humans – there was a media sensation. And just like the Gospel of Judas discovery the publication of the findings of ‘Ida’ were both shrouded in secrecy and controlled by a tight media group.
Now, I’m not a big promoter of ‘Answers in Genesis’ but they’ve got a list of news clippings from around the Science community which cast strong doubts about the ‘factual statements’ which were bantered around by the media at the discovery of Ida. It appears that all is not well within the science community with some rightly criticising the methods used by the ‘Ida’ team to promote their discovery. Time will tell whether or not any corrections will be published as widely.
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