Last month, a man once so hated, especially in the historically Christian countries of Europe and the Americas, that he was widely regarded as the most evil man ever to have lived experienced something of a rehabilitation in the popular media, who were once among his principal detractors. What? you ask. Has The New York Times finally found something good to say about President George W. Bush? No, no, nothing like that. As if! But one of Mr. Bush’s predecessors as the civilized world’s most notorious and iconic villain, Judas Iscariot, was championed by the Times among others in the media as a wronged man, at the very least “a victim of a theological libel which helped to create anti-Semitism” as one scholar has put it—even, perhaps, a misunderstood hero who was a favorite of Jesus’s and only doing his Lord’s bidding in “betraying” him. This conclusion was reached on the basis of a newly translated Gnostic text, known as the Gospel of Judas, which was written in Coptic and dates from the fourth century of the Christian era but is presumed by most scholars to have been translated from an earlier Greek original.

“The text gives new insights”—or so “scholars reported,” according to the Times—“into the relationship of Jesus and the disciple who betrayed him.” Well, yes and no. Some scholars came close to saying something like this, but most cautioned that any such “insights” had to be heavily qualified by the fact that the so-called