Indiana Jones and the Gospel of Judas

I just finished reading National Geographic's account of their recovery of the Secret Gospel of Judas. It surprised me on a couple different levels. First, I wasn't expecting a first person narrative to be woven into the history of the document. The author, Andrew Cockburn, interspersed his interactions with the religious leaders he interviewed among the stories of the document's journey from it's discovery near the Nile River in Egypt, to it's theft and return around 1980, the attempts its various keepers have had in trying to sell it quietly for a profit, until it finally fell into the Society's hands.

Parts of it read like an adventure story.

The second thing that surprised me was how the writer (and, by association, National Geographic Society as a whole) acknowledged and accepted the existance of Jesus as a fact. In a magazine so devoted to pure scientific method and research, it's encouraging to find that such an august body silently acknowledges his existance, if not his deity.