Gospel of Judas

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.

The codex is thought to have been found in the 1970s near Maghagha in Middle Egypt and sold in Cairo in 1978. It was stolen and taken to Geneva in 1980 and recovered two years later. Stephen Emmel examined it on the market in Geneva in 1983 and recognised its importance, but the asking price was refused and no institution bought it. For the next seventeen years it was moved between Europe and the United States in a cardboard box and kept for long periods in a safe deposit box in Hicksville, New York, in unstable humidity. In that time its thirty-one leaves deteriorated to a fraction of their original condition, with the papyrus breaking into fragments.

In April 2000 it was bought by the dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos, from whom the codex takes its name, and briefly deposited at Yale. Later that year it passed to the Ohio dealer Bruce Ferrini, who put it in a freezer. Freezing separated ink and sap from the papyrus fibres and did more damage in a short period than the preceding decades. In 2001 it went to the Maecenas Foundation in Basel, and restoration began: some fragments had to be placed by matching fibre patterns, and the reconstruction is incomplete, with gaps at critical points in the text.

Radiocarbon analysis at the University of Arizona in 2005 dated the papyrus and binding leather to roughly 220 to 340, and ink analysis in 2006 was consistent with third-century Egyptian production. The Coptic is a translation from Greek, and composition is generally placed in the second century, before about 180. The condition of the manuscript is not a detail of provenance but a fact about the evidence: several of the disputed readings turn on letters that sit at the edge of a break.

The National Geographic Society announced the restored text on 6 April 2006, with an edition by Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer and Gregor Wurst and commentary by Bart Ehrman, and a documentary days later. The presentation was that the text portrayed Judas as the one disciple who understood, chosen to perform a necessary act and set apart for the holy generation. That framing travelled worldwide within days.

April DeConick of Rice University challenged it in 2007, in a book and a New York Times piece, on textual grounds. Where the edition rendered a Greek loanword as "spirit", she argued that in this literature daimon means demon, and that Judas is being called one. Where the edition had Judas set apart for the holy generation, she read the text as separating him from it. Where it had Jesus tell Judas he would ascend to that generation, she read a negative in the damaged line: that he would not. And the description of Judas as the thirteenth she took not as an honour but as a mark of the thirteenth realm, the domain of the world-ruler.

Specialists in Sethian literature, among them Louis Painchaud, John Turner and Einar Thomassen, reached similar conclusions independently. The National Geographic editors replied that the disputed points were flagged in the footnotes of both editions, and the 2007 critical edition altered some renderings, leaving daimon untranslated. Meyer continued to defend a qualified positive reading. The net position now is that the text is a polemic against the apostolic church rather than a rehabilitation of Judas. Even on the harsher reading he is not the villain of the canonical accounts; he is an insider who knows the truth, performs the act that frees Jesus from the body, and is damned by it.

Irenaeus, writing around 180, describes a group who produced a fictitious history called the Gospel of Judas, holding that Judas alone knew the truth. He does not call them Cainites; that label comes from later heresiologists. Whether the work he had heard of is the work in Codex Tchacos cannot be shown, and the surviving text does not venerate Cain. The connection is plausible and usually assumed, but it is an assumption.