The text is a series of conversations set in the last week, with a short scene of the handing-over at the end and no crucifixion. It opens with Jesus laughing at the disciples as they give thanks over bread, and telling them that in doing so they are serving their god, not his. They are angry; he challenges any of them who is strong enough to stand before him, and only Judas can, who names Jesus as having come from the immortal realm of Barbelo and says he is not worthy to speak the name of the one who sent him.
Jesus takes Judas aside. The disciples describe a vision of a temple where priests sacrifice at the altar, some of them slaughtering their own wives and children, and Jesus tells them the priests are themselves and the sacrifices are their own converts. Judas then asks about his own star and his fate, and receives instead a long cosmological discourse: the great invisible Spirit, the self-generated Autogenes, the luminaries and aeons, and below them the rulers of this world, named Nebro, also called Yaldabaoth, and Saklas, who make Adam and Eve. These are the standard markers of Sethian mythology, the same system found in the Apocryphon of John, and they are what place the text within a known school rather than in a vague category.
Judas is told he will exceed the others, because he will sacrifice the man that clothes Jesus. The line is central to every reading of the book: the body is not Jesus, and handing it over releases what is not the body. He is also told he will be cursed by the other generations, that he will grieve, and that he will rule over them. The closing scene is brief. Judas goes to the scribes, who question him, he receives money, and he hands Jesus over. The book ends there.