The Gospel according to Judas

The Gospel of Judas

 

 

 

 

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The gospel of Jesus' favorite disciple, Judas, was on show yesterday in Washington's National Geographic Museum before its return to Egypt where it was found 30 years ago. The fragile codex -- made up of 13 papyrus leaves -- has been restored with a two-million-dollar fund from the National Geographic Society (NGS) and the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery. Its most recent owners, the Basel-based Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art (MFAA), will now hand the codex over to the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo.

The gospel, written in Coptic in the third or fourth century, is believed to be a translation of an original Greek text belonging to an early Christian sect sometime before AD180. The document offers new insights into the relation between Jesus and Judas, whose betrayal led to his capture and crucifixion. Unlike the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, in which Judas is portrayed as a reviled traitor, the new gospel depicts him as acting on a request by Jesus to hand him over to the Romans.

The codex also contains a text entitled "James", otherwise known as "The First Apocalypse of James", the "Letter of Peter to Philip" and a fragment of a text that scholars are provisionally calling "The Book of Allogenes".

The codex was found in the late 1970s by a farmer near the village of Beni Mazar, near Minya in Upper Egypt. A year later this man sold it to a Cairo antiquities dealer, but after two years it was stolen along with other objects and smuggled abroad. The Egyptian dealer managed to recover his collection in Geneva and offered the codex for sale, but his price attracted no buyers so he deposited it in a bank in Hicksville, New York. There it languished for another 16 years, deteriorating until it resembled dry autumn leaves.

Read the Gospel of Judas

In April 2000 the Zurich-based antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos bought the codex and presented it to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for examination and possible sale. It was there that Yale papyrus expert Robert Babcock discovered that Tchacos held the Gospel of Judas.

This gospel was known previously only from references such as those by St Irenaeus of Lyons about AD180, and may have been suppressed by early Christian leaders. According to the Gospel, Judas received 30 pieces of silver for the act of betraying Jesus to Roman soldiers by identifying him with a kiss. Later the guilt-ridden Judas committed suicide. However, the Gospel of Judas identifies him as Christ's favorite disciple and depicts his betrayal as the fulfillment of his mission to enable the crucifixion -- and thus the Christian movement -- to take place. The text quotes Jesus as saying to Judas: "You will exceed all of them [the other disciples] for you will sacrifice the man who clothes me."

In a statement, the NGS said the text indicated that Judas, by helping Jesus to be rid of his physical flesh, would help liberate the true spiritual self or divine being within. This view is similar to that held by the Gnostics -- members of a second-century breakaway Christian sect that challenged the early Church. They believed Judas was the most enlightened of the apostles, and that he alone understood Christ's mission.

Having made its initial discovery Yale, concerned about its provenance, did not purchase the codex. In 2001, following another failed sale, Tchacos sent it to the MFAA which teamed with the NGS and the California-based Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery to restore, authenticate and translate it. The codex was in a deplorable condition, and the MFAA turned to Coptic scholar Rodolphe Kasser, formerly of the University of Geneva, and other experts and conservators. Nearly 1,000 small and blackened fragments were reassembled, but closer examination revealed a further problem. The sheets had been reorganized in a random pattern -- probably to increase the codex's appeal to buyers by shifting pages in better physical condition to the forefront. The original pagination was lost, complicating the task. Five years later, 90 per cent of the text has been put together -- including an additional half page that recently surfaced in New York.

Handwriting experts studied and compared the text. "The kind of writing reminds me very much of the Nag Hammadi codices," Stephen Emmel, professor of Coptic studies at Germany's University of Munster, said, referring to a cache of manuscripts also found in Egypt. "It's not identical script with any of them. But it's a similar type of script, and since we date the Nag Hammadi codices to roughly the second half of the fourth century or the first part of the fifth century, my immediate inclination would be to say that the Gospel of Judas was written by a scribe in that same period, let's say around the year 400."

The Nag Hammadi texts also contain Gnostic writings similar to those found in the Judas codex.

Meanwhile, the University of Arizona's radiocarbon dating lab in Tucson -- the same lab that tested the Dead Sea Scrolls -- dated five tiny samples of papyrus and leather binding from the codex to between AD220 and 340.

McCrone Associates, a firm specializing in forensic ink analysis, found the components were consistent with ingredients in known inks from the third and fourth centuries AD. They reported that the Gospel of Judas might have been penned with an early form of iron-gall ink that included a small amount of soot. If so, it could be a previously unknown link between the ancient world's carbon-based inks and the iron-gall alternatives popular in mediaeval times.

The Gospel of Judas is only one of many texts discovered in the last 65 years, including the gospels of Thomas, Mary Magdalene and Philip, believed to be written by Gnostics. Gnostic beliefs were often viewed by early church leaders as unorthodox. The discoveries of Gnostic texts have shaken up Biblical scholarship by revealing the diversity of beliefs and practices among early followers of Jesus.

Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton and a specialist in Gnosticism, said in a statement: "These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion, and demonstrating how diverse -- and fascinating -- the early Christian movement really was."

However, Bishop Basanti of the Helwan and Massara Coptic Orthodox Church told Al-Ahram Weekly that the New Testament gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John were the only gospels accepted at the council of Nicaea in AD 325 and recognised by Eastern and Western churches. "Any other gospel... are not authenticated or accepted," Basanti said.

Father Senior, president of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, which advises the pope, told the New York Times that the Vatican was unlikely to regard the Gospel of Judas as a threat. He said that the Roman Catholic Church's response would probably be to "affirm the canonical texts" in the New Testament rather than seeking to refute each new discovery.

"If the Gospel of Judas suddenly became something that hundreds of thousands of Christians were claiming as their revelation and scripture, perhaps the church would come out with some kind of statement. But mostly I think it's just not even on the radar screen," Fr Senior said, adding: "I'm just glad it wasn't found in a bank vault in the Vatican."

The only known copy of the Gospel of Judas, which casts an unorthodox light on events leading up to the Crucifixion, is returning to Egypt. Nevine El-Aref related the story of the codex and its conflicting perspective.

The article appeared in  Al-Ahram Weekly April 13 -2006

 

Learn about the Gospel of Judas:

The Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic gospel, the text of which was partially reconstructed in 2006. It has a strong positive focus on Judas Iscariot, who according to the canonical Gospels betrayed Jesus Christ to the Roman authorities who crucified Jesus. The Gospel of Judas frames this act positively (in line with Gnostic thinking - the Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter portrays Jesus as laughing while being crucified), as an obedience to the instructions of Jesus, rather than a betrayal.

The true significance of the Gospel of Judas is still unknown, since it has only recently been translated and even the original is highly fragmented. The recent public revelation of this ancient text provides new insight into the diversity of early Christian beliefs.

There are roughly fifty works that purport to be gospels of the early church, but there exists further information for only twenty of these gospels, four of which are the canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The Gospel of Judas is one of the sixteen other gospels about which some information has historically been preserved in early church writings. Of these twenty writings, however, the four canonical gospels were the only ones that the emerging early Christian orthodoxy considered to be inspired.

The only known manuscript that included the text of the Gospel, the Codex Tchacos, surfaced in the 1970s, after 1700 years in the desert of Egypt as a leather-bound papyrus manuscript. The papyri on which the Gospel is written are fragmentary, with some sections missing. In some cases, there are only scattered words; in others, many lines. This is most likely due to the wear and tear associated with the elements and the passage of time. According to Rodolphe Kasser, the codex originally contained 62 pages; but when it came to the market in 1999, only 26 pages remained because individual pages had been removed and put up for sale. From time to time, these missing pages appear and are identified.

The only known manuscript of the Gospel of Judas was radiocarbon dated to between 220 and 340 by Timothy Jull, a carbon-dating expert at the University of Arizona's physics center.

Due to textual analysis for linguistic quirks, such as arcane language features, and features that become lost in translation, most academics who have analyzed the Gospel of Judas believe that it is probably a translation from an older Greek work dating to AD 130–170. For a comparison, the generally accepted dating for the canonical Gospel of John is only a few decades earlier in AD 95-110, and as well as the earlier estimates coming from a number of Christian scholars, several other academics have proposed later dates for the Gospel of John that overlap with those for the Gospel of Judas.

The early Christian writer Irenaeus of Lyons referred to the Gospel of Judas, presumably the same text, as early as 180, and so presents a terminus ante quem for its composition. Irenaeus is also one of the first people to extensively quote from the canonical Gospel of John; hence the ancient witnesses to the existence of Judas are no weaker than that of John. While it is clear that the author of the Judas was almost certainly not Judas Iscariot, the authorship of the Gospel of John has been questioned by a large number of scholars as well.

 

Ancient Fragments

Irenaeus mentions a Gospel of Judas in his anti-Gnostic work Adversus Haereses, written in about 180. He writes there are some who:

declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to themselves… They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictional history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.

This is in reference to the Cainites, a sect of Gnosticism that especially worshipped Cain as a hero. The Cainites, like a large number of Gnostic groups, were semi-maltheists believing that the god of the Old Testament—Yahweh—was evil, and a quite different and much lesser being to the deity that had created the universe, and was responsible for sending Jesus. Such Gnostic groups worshipped as heroes all the Biblical figures which had sought to discover knowledge or challenge Yahweh's authority, while demonizing those who would have been seen as heroes in a more orthodox interpretation.

The text rediscovered in 2006 is similar to what is loosely termed Sethian forms of Gnosis. Jesus appears to be equated with Seth: "The first is Seth, who is called Christ" although this is in part of an emenationist mythology describing both positive and negative aeons. Gnostics were not averse to rewriting other people's scripture, as what was valuable to them was the deeply underlying teaching that was presented, and the effect of the Gospel on the mind of the listener/reader (c.f. koans), rather than being particular to the precise details of the narrative that framed them.

For metaphysical reasons, certain of the Gnostics maintained that Judas acted as he did in order that mankind might be redeemed by the death of Jesus' mortal body. For this reason, they regarded Judas as worthy of gratitude and veneration. In this theory, it is suggested that Judas, who in common with the other disciples looked for a temporal kingdom of the Messiah ("the anointed one"), did not anticipate the death of Jesus, but wished to precipitate a political crisis and hasten the hour of triumph, thinking that the arrest of Jesus would provoke a rising of the people who would set him free and place him on the throne. In support of this, they point to the fact that, when Judas found that Jesus was condemned and given up to the Romans, he immediately repented of what he had done. These theories are at odds with those of mainstream church doctrine as derived from canonical scripture.

This Cainite group has always been one that historically was treated delicately by the orthodox church. The Christian church has always held that Jesus underwent his passion and death freely, because of the sins of mankind and out of infinite love, in order that all could have the opportunity to reach salvation. Thus, Judas' betrayal of Jesus, even from an orthodox viewpoint, can be looked at as only a personal betrayal of Jesus and a violation of Judas' position as an apostle and not as a doctrinal violation.

Indeed, the Gospel of John, unlike the synoptic gospels, contains the enigmatic statement of Jesus to Judas, as the latter leaves the Passover meal to set in motion the betrayal process, "Do quickly what you have to do." (John 13:27) (trans. The New English Bible). Some view this as a direct command to Judas to do what he did, while others cite the first portion of the same verse, in which it says that "Satan entered into him," leaving the possible interpretation of the passage to mean that Jesus was speaking instead to Satan. Whether to Satan or Judas, the context of statement may carry a different meaning than that of a command. This interpretation of the meaning of the passage is more commonly held among traditional Christian scholars. The João Ferreira de Almeida Portuguese translation, and other translations of the verse similarly interpret Jesus as saying "That which you plan on doing, do it soon." Verse 29 of the same chapter indicates that even some of the disciples found ambiguity in the meaning of the statement.

Some two centuries after Irenaeus' complaint, Epiphanius of Salamis, bishop of Cyprus, criticized the Gospel of Judas for treating as commendable the person whom he saw as the betrayer of Jesus, and as one who "performed a good work for our salvation." (Haeres., xxxviii).

Modern Rediscovery

The portion of the manuscript that could be translated by later scholars tells of Judas being the favorite disciple of Jesus, possibly intended to be interpreted as the beloved disciple. Like much Gnostic writing, which was written only for those who had attained a certain level of initiation, the Gospel of Judas claimed to be a secret account, specifically "the secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot".

While over the ages many philosophers have contemplated the idea that Judas was required to have carried out his actions in order for Jesus to have died on the cross and hence fulfill theological obligations, the position was frequently condemned as heresy, and was not supported by any canonical account. However, the Gospel of Judas not only asserts that the actions of Judas were necessary, but that Judas was acting on the orders of Jesus himself.

The Gospel of Judas states that Jesus told Judas "You shall be cursed for generations." It then adds to this conversation that Jesus had told Judas "you will come to rule over them," and that "You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."

Unlike the four canonical gospels, which employ narrative accounts of the last year of life of Jesus (three years in the case of John) and of his birth (only in the case of Luke and Matthew), the Judas gospel takes the less structured form of a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus and brief dialogues between Jesus and Judas without being embedded in any narrative or worked into any overt philosophical or rhetorical context. Though somewhat odd in the light of the New Testament, such dialogue gospels were popular during early Christianity, and the New Testament apocrypha contains several examples of the form, the most notable being the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of Thomas.

Like the Judas portrayed in the canonical gospels, the Judas of the Judas gospel converses with the scribes looking to arrest Jesus and receives money from them after handing Jesus over to them. But unlike the Judas in the canonical gospels, who is portrayed as a villain, and excoriated by Jesus, "Alas for that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would be better for that man if he had never been born," (Mark 14:21; Matthew 26:24) (trans. The New English Bible), the Judas gospel portrays him as a divinely appointed instrument of a grand and predetermined purpose. "In the last days they will curse your ascent to the holy (generation)."

Another part shows Jesus favoring Judas apart from other disciples, saying, "Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom," and later "Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. The star that leads the way is your star."

Muslim scholars point out that the discovery of the new manuscript is historical evidence of the Quranic narration that it was actually one of Jesus' beloved disciples—namely Judas—who was to die on the cross. They cite portions of the manuscript that describe Jesus praising Judas, "You will exceed all of them," Jesus says, and that Judas would "grieve a great deal" to enable him to ascend to the heavens. However, the Qur'an makes no mention of Judas, and the Gospel of Judas does not say that Judas was crucified.

Sale and study

Through the decades the manuscript was offered about, very quietly, but no major library felt ready to purchase a manuscript that had such questionable provenance. Eventually the 62-page leather bound codex was purchased by the Maecenas Foundation in Basel, a private foundation directed by  lawyer Mario Jean Roberty. Its previous owners now claimed that it had been uncovered at Muhafazat al Minya in Egypt during the 1950s or 1960s, and that its significance had not been appreciated until recently. It is worth noting that various other sites were mentioned in other negotiations.

The existence of the text was made public by Rodolphe Kasser at a conference of Coptic specialists in Paris, July 2004. In a statement issued March 30, 2005, a spokesman for the Maecenas Foundation announced plans for edited translations into English, French and German, once the fragile papyrus has undergone conservation by a team of specialists in Coptic history to be led by a former professor at the University of Geneva, Rodolphe Kasser, and that their work would be published in about a year. A.J. Tim Jull, director of the National Science Foundation Arizona AMS laboratory, and Gregory Hodgins, assistant research scientist, announced that a radiocarbon dating procedure had dated five samples from the 62-page leather-bound papyrus manuscript from 220 to 340 in January of 2005 at the University of Arizona.  This puts the Coptic manuscript in the third or fourth centuries, a century earlier than had originally been thought from analysis of the script. In January 2006, Gene A. Ware of the Papyrological Imaging Lab of Brigham Young University conducted a multispectral imaging process on the texts in Switzerland, and confirmed their authenticity.

Over the decades, the manuscript had not been meticulously handled: some single pages may be loose on the antiquities market (one half page turned up in Feb. 2006, in NYC, and the text is now thought to be less than three-quarters complete. "After concluding the research, everything will be returned to Egypt. The work belongs there and they will be conserved in the best way," Roberty has stated.

 

Scholarship

Results and reactions

Professor Kasser revealed a few details about the text in 2004, the Dutch paper Parool reported.Its language is the same Sahidic dialect of Coptic in which Coptic texts of the Nag Hammadi library are written. The Codex has three parts: an Epistle to Philip that is ascribed to Peter (a variant is in the Nag Hammadi collection), the Revelation of Jacob (also known from Nag Hammadi), and the Gospel of Judas. Up to a third of the codex is currently illegible.

A scientific paper was to be published in 2005, but was delayed. The completion of the restoration and translation was announced by the National Geographic Society at a news conference in Washington, D.C. on April 6, 2006, and the manuscript itself was unveiled then at the National Geographic Society headquarters, accompanied by a television special entitled The Gospel of Judas on April 9, 2006, which was aired on the National Geographic Channel.

Terry Garcia, an executive vice president of the National Geographic Society, asserted that the codex is considered by scholars and scientists to be the most significant ancient, non-biblical text to be found since the 1940s. However, this announcement was met with some doubts and an overall lukewarm response.

James M. Robinson, one of America's leading experts of such ancient religious texts, predicted that the new book would not offer any insights into the disciple who betrayed Jesus because, though the document is old, being from the third century, the text is not old enough. According to Robinson, it was probably based on an earlier document. However, Robinson also suggested that the text would be valuable to scholars concentrating on the second century, but not because it provided a greater understanding of the Bible.

National Geographic responded to Robinson's criticism by saying that "it's ironic" for Robinson to raise such questions since he had "for years, tried unsuccessfully to acquire the codex himself, and is publishing his own book in April 2006, despite having no direct access to the materials."

Robinson describes in The Secrets of Judas: The Story of the Misunderstood Disciple and His Lost Gospel (2006) ISBN 0061170631, the secretive maneuvers in the United States, Switzerland, Greece and elsewhere over two decades to sell the Judas manuscript, while a novel by Simon Mawer, The Gospel of Judas (published in 2000 (UK) and 2001 (US)), revolves around the discovery of a Gospel of Judas in a Dead Sea cave and its effect on a scholarly priest.

The uniqueness of the codex

The president of the Maecenas Foundation, Mario Roberty, expressed the unqualified opinion that it was possible the copy the Maecenas Foundation acquired was not the only copy in existence; but rather the only known copy. Roberty went on to make the suggestion that the Vatican probably had a copy locked away, saying:

“In those days the Church decided for political reasons to include the Gospels of Luke, Matthew and John in the Bible. The other gospels were banned. It is highly logical that the Catholic Church would have kept a copy of the forbidden gospels. Sadly, the Vatican does not want to clarify further. Their policy has been the same for years – ‘No further comment.’”

Mario Roberty provides no evidence to suggest that the Vatican possesses any additional copies. The Vatican has not commented one way or the other about the existence of copies of the gospel of Judas, which it considers to be heretical.

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