The Gospel of Judas: A Lost Gospel, a Looted Codex and a Disputed Translation

Around 180 CE, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, listed the books of groups he called heretics. One group, he wrote, honoured Cain and the men of Sodom, and "they produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas." For 1,800 years that one sentence was all that was known of it. Then, in the 1970s, a leather-bound papyrus codex in Coptic was found, probably in a burial cave near al-Minya in Middle Egypt. On its pages, after a letter of Peter and a text about James, was a work ending with the words "The Gospel of Judas."

The codex's journey

• Dealers took it out of Egypt. Offered for sale in 1983 for a huge price and unsold, it spent sixteen years in a safe-deposit box in Hicksville, New York, where damp and heat crumbled it.
• In 2000 the Zurich dealer Frieda Tchacos Nussberger bought it and named it Codex Tchacos after her father. After another failed sale it was placed with the Maecenas Foundation, which partnered with the National Geographic Society to conserve and publish it. The codex was to be returned to Egypt, and is now in the Coptic Museum.
• Restorers reassembled about a thousand fragments. Radiocarbon dating by the University of Arizona placed the codex between 220 and 340 CE. Ink analysis was consistent with antiquity.
• The Gospel is a Coptic translation of a Greek original, most likely the one Irenaeus knew, so written before c. 180.

What the gospel says

The text is a dialogue. Over a week before Passover, Jesus laughs at the disciples' piety, telling them they worship a lesser god. He takes Judas aside and reveals the mysteries of the kingdom: an unseen realm, a great invisible Spirit, luminous aeons, and below them rulers such as Nebro/Yaldabaoth and Saklas who made this world. It is the cosmology of Sethian Gnosticism. It ends abruptly with Judas taking money and handing Jesus over.

Hero or demon? The translation dispute

On 6 April 2006 National Geographic unveiled the text, in a television documentary and a book, as the story of a good Judas, the only disciple who understood Jesus, acting on his instructions in betraying him. Almost at once specialists challenged it. April DeConick of Rice University, in The Thirteenth Apostle (2007) and in The New York Times, argued that the team had made crucial choices in the most flattering direction:

• daimōn, which in early Christian texts normally means demon, was rendered "spirit", so "thirteenth demon" became "thirteenth spirit".
• A line saying Judas would not ascend to the holy generation was read as saying he would.
• "You will exceed them all" was read as praise. DeConick and others read it as saying Judas would do the worst deed of all.

Other scholars, including members of the original team, defended parts of their reading. A newly surfaced fragment later helped settle some readings and not others. Most specialists now see Judas in this text as a tragic or demonic figure, not a hero, although the question remains debated.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Thirteen. Judas is the thirteenth, set apart from the Twelve. In Sethian cosmology the thirteenth aeon is the realm of the lower ruler, so the number may place Judas with the world-maker, not with the divine.

Laughter. Jesus' laughter, a motif in several Gnostic texts, marks the gap between true knowledge and the disciples' misplaced devotion.

The star. Jesus tells Judas that "the star that leads the way is your star". Astral fate, and escape from it, runs through the text.

Connections

Gnosticism (ch17), Early Christianity (ch16) and Pistis Sophia (ch45). Compare the Nag Hammadi Codices (V08), which contain other Sethian texts, and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife (V17) for how a sensational announcement can shape a manuscript's reception.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/gospel-of-judas.html