The Gospel of Judas?

Long-lost gospel of Judas recasts 'traitor'

By Dan Vergano and Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

Lost for centuries and bound for controversy, the so-called gospel of Judas was unveiled by scholars Thursday.
With a plot twist worthy of The Da Vinci Code, the gospel — 13 papyrus sheets bound in leather and found in a cave in Egypt — purports to relate the last days of Jesus' life, from the viewpoint of Judas, one of Jesus' first followers. Christians teach that Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, but in this gospel, he is the hero, Jesus' most senior and trusted disciple and the only one who knows Jesus' true identity as the son of God.

"We're confident this is genuine ancient Christian literature," said religious scholar Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He and others on the translation team spoke at a National Geographic Society briefing, where they released a translation.

The manuscript claims that Jesus revealed "secret knowledge" to Judas and instructed him to turn Jesus over to Roman authorities, said Coptic studies scholar Stephen Emmel of Germany's University of Munster, one of the restoration team members. In the gospel text, Judas is given private instruction by Jesus and is granted a vision of the divine that is denied to other disciples, who do not know that Jesus has requested his own betrayal. Rather than acting out of greed or malice, Judas is following orders when he leads soldiers to Jesus, the gospel says.

Other theologians, biblical scholars and pastors say this contrary text is not truly "good news" (the meaning of "gospel") and will make no difference to believers as Easter approaches. The Bible, they say, is a closed book, nearly universally accepted as the official church teachings since the fourth century.

"Just because you can date a document to early Christian times doesn't make it theologically true," said Pastor Rod Loy of the First Assembly of God in North Little Rock "Do you decide everything you read on the Internet is true because it was written on April 6, 2006? Fiction has been around for as long as man."

Found by a farmer

Radioactive-carbon-dating tests and experts in ancient languages establish that the document was written between A.D. 300 and 400, the team said. Written in Coptic, an old Egyptian language, the gospel was unearthed by a farmer in a "tomb-like box" in 1978, said Terry Garcia of the National Geographic Society. It is part of a codex, or collection of devotional texts, found in a cave near El Minya, Egypt.

The farmer sold the codex to an antiquities dealer in Cairo, without alerting Egyptian antiquities officials. In a secret showing in 1983, the antiquities dealer, unaware of the content of the codex, offered the gospel for sale to Emmel and another scholar in a Geneva, Switzerland hotel room.

Given a hurried half-hour to examine the codex, Emmel first suspected the papyrus sheets discussed Judas, he said, based on a hasty glimpse of the text, which was littered with references to the disciple in Coptic. But the asking price was too exorbitant, as high as $3 million, Garcia said.

For the next 16 years, the document moldered in a Hicksville, N.Y., bank safe-deposit box, deteriorating until Zurich-based antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos purchased it in 2000, alarmed at its fragmentation, Garcia said. National Geographic said it did not know the purchase price.

In 2001, the codex was acquired by the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Switzerland, Garcia said. The foundation invited National Geographic to help with the restoration in 2004 and also reached an agreement with the Egyptian government to return it after its restoration.

Restoration of the thousands of papyrus fragments has made 80% of the gospel legible. The National Geographic Society learned of the find 2½ years ago, Garcia said. The society recruited the scholarly restoration team and got a $1 million grant from the Waitt Foundation for Historical Studies.

The gospel "is an intriguing alternative view of the relationship between Jesus and Judas," Emmel said. It also has Jesus relating a new creation myth and account of humankind's origins to Judas, which suggest God didn't create the world, contrary to conventional Christian belief.

The key passage has Jesus telling Judas "'you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me,'" Emmel said. The passage reflects the view that material things and the body are traps for the inner soul and also suggests a form of mysticism found in some early Jewish thought, said team adviser Marvin Meyer of Chapman University in Orange, Calif.

The Judas gospel is probably a copy of a heretical text denounced by a Christian bishop around A.D. 180, Emmel said. But other scholars, such as Michael Penn of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., say there is no way to be certain it is the same text, given the plethora of devotional texts that were floating around among early Christians.

The Judas papyrus is one of dozens of gospels found in recent decades whose texts fall outside the canon of today's New Testament Bibles. The canon was largely set at the Synod of Rome in 382 when the dominant Christian leaders of the time established the authority of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as the accepted version of Jesus' birth, life, crucifixion and resurrection.

Scripture, like history, was codified by the winners, by those who emerged with the greatest numbers at the end of three centuries of Christianity, said Michael White, director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins at the University of Texas-Austin, He has counted more than three dozen gospels that didn't make the canonical cut. The ones that did, he said, were not in total harmony but shared a theological view of the passion, the crucifixion and their significance that became the core of the new religion.

"In the ancient world, Christianity was even more diverse than it was today," Ehrman said. Not until later centuries did the standard devotional texts known as the New Testament become the bedrock of the Christian faith. Dozens of alternative gospels and creeds lost out in the process.

"I suspect the gospel of Judas was not one of the close calls in this process," said Penn, who was not on the National Geographic team.

The gospel of Judas is broadly representative of "gnostic" beliefs prevalent in the two or three centuries after the death of Jesus, said the Rev. Donald Senior of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, who was an adviser to the restoration team.

Gnostic beliefs hold that secret and personal insights are the key to redemption, rather than faith in Jesus' resurrection, for example. Rather than shedding a new light on Judas' relationship to Jesus, Senior suggested, the gospel illuminates the diversity of thought among early Christians.

And as for Judas' supposed betrayal?

Craig Hill, professor of New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., would let the villain off history's hook, papyrus or not.

"What Jesus did — raising crowds and civic unrest — would have gotten him killed anywhere in the Roman Empire," Hill said.

National Geographic is banking on the new gospel to capture the modern imagination. It plans to feature the gospel in its magazine, books and TV special this Sunday (National Geographic Channel, 8 p.m. ET/9 PT). The Maecenas Foundation will give the manuscript to Egypt's Coptic Museum after the restoration is complete, Garcia said.

'No bearing' on the Easter story

The Judas gospel has "no bearing whatsoever on (the Easter) story, much less on the faith of the Christian church," said the Rev. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. He dismissed the gospel of Judas as nothing more than "an ancient manuscript that tells an interesting story."

No scholar has called the gospel a forgery. But one concern, Penn said, is that it was purchased from an antiquities dealer rather than discovered by an archaeological team.

Scholars fear that such purchases will drive further looting of archaeological sites.

Coptic scholar Rodolphe Kasser of the University of Geneva, who headed the restoration team, said the priority for scholars was saving the gospel before it deteriorated completely.

Tests of the gospel included radiocarbon dating conducted at the University of Arizona, and chemical analysis of the papyrus and ink used in the codex as well as its leather binding. Restoration involved computer and hand patching of the document to reassemble its pages.

"The publication team appears to have done everything possible to authenticate the gospel as an ancient work," said religious scholar Mark Chancey of Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

"There seems to be little doubt that it is, indeed, a late third- or early fourth-century work, and not a modern forgery."

Princeton University religious scholar Elaine Pagels, a restoration adviser best known for her work on the Nag Hammadi texts, said, "The gospel of Judas is an astonishing discovery that along with dozens of similar texts have in recent years have transformed our understanding of early Christianity."

She compared it to other gnostic works, such as the gospels of Thomas and of Mary Magdalene, denounced as heretical by the early church but "loved and copied and circulated by people who thought of themselves as Christians."

Many similar "apocryphal" gospels are attributed to important figures in early Christianity, Chancey said, though most scholars doubt that they were actually written by their purported authors.

"It is clear, for example, that Judas did not write this work," Chancey said. The gospel clearly reflects second-century developments, long after Judas, he said.

Experts do see some value in a Bible news flash that prompts modern believers to re-examine the character of Judas.

The Rev. James Martin, associate editor of the Jesuit magazine America, spent months last year as the theological consultant on an off-Broadway play, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. The script had Judas on trial and concluded that he went to hell as much for his suicidal despair as for betraying Jesus.

"He chose damnation rather than accepting God's forgiveness, and that is our fate if we are so proud we think our sins are beyond God's reach," said Martin.

Meyer noted that Judas has often been used by Christians to attack Jews throughout history.

"The view of Judas as this evil Jewish person who turned Jesus in fed the flames of anti-Semitism," he said, so providing a new view of Judas may help counteract such views.

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