That title sounds almost polemical. No, it’s meant rather to point to her own interesting post of a similar title (a couple weeks old, I have to admit… I’m still catching up on my blog reading after the quarter has ended). She talks about her experiences with interviewers from the press about her new book The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says. She reflects on how she gets asked what religion she is, which is most likely not a question received by, say, classicists or other types of historians. Naturally, the idea behind the question is to see how the person’s faith has affected their scholarship and perhaps even the conclusions they have come to. Here’s an excerpt:

That said, when I answer the reporter’s question, “What religion are you?”, with “A liberal Christian” or “A progressive Christian”, there is usually a pause as the reporter responds, “but your book is conservative.”

How delightful. How fascinating. How paradoxical.

I am not a liberal or conservative scholar. I am a historian of religion whose main goal is to reconstruct the history and theology of the ancient Christians as accurately as I can. If the text had said that he was a hero, I would have supported that position. But it doesn’t. So I have to follow through, maintaining academic integrity even if this means that I have to take a position opposite many scholars whom I consider to be friends. Judas is still a demon, even in the gnostic tradition. Epiphanius was wrong, as are the scholars who wish it to be otherwise.

I am in complete agreement here. I often say that it may be my deep commitment to Anabaptism that leads me to study social issues in the New Testament and early Christianity, but that I’m not out to prove anything in particular. I don’t have an Anabaptist ax to grind (a funny image, come to think of it). I simply hope to explore and discover the evidence of what may have been the social situation of the early Christians. I want to be completely honest about what I find.

One of the things I find humorous about April’s interviewers’ reactions is: I’m not sure I’d say her conclusions about the Gospel of Judas are conservative. She goes against what the “liberal scholars” (emphasis on the quotation marks here) are saying, but does that make her “conservative”?

It seems to me that a “conservative” would literally want to “conserve” tradition. The traditional understanding of the Gospel of Judas is that Judas is understood to be a “hero.” See Irenaeus and Pseudo-Tertullian, for example (April refers, I think, to the 38th chapter of Panarion by Epiphanius of Salamis, for which I can’t seem to find a good online resource). The “conservative” understanding of the Gospel of Judas, it seems to me, would be that it portrays Judas as a hero. It was considered heresy, after all. So, if anything, the so-called “liberal scholars” on the Gospel of Judas are really “conserving” the traditional understanding of the Gospel of Judas to some extent, whether or not they do so intentionally (they may, however, disagree with the value judgment of the traditional understanding–i.e., that it is heresy). April offers a “liberal” understanding in that it suggests a nontraditional view of the Gospel of Judas: that Judas is not the hero for the gnostics.

But the point is: April is not driven to find a nontraditional view and thus be a “liberal” scholar in this way, but rather that she is simply investigating and reporting what she finds. Just goes to show again the (non)usefulness of “conservative” and “liberal” as identifiers for scholarship.

Update (12/20/2007): See this post from April today regarding Robert Eisenman’s misreading of her work (he calls her a “theologically-minded scholar”).