The Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic religious text that consists of conversations between Jesus and his disciples, especially Judas Iscariot. The only copy of it known to exist is a Coptic language text that is part of the Codex Tchacos, which has been radiocarbon dated to 220–340 CE. Like the Gnostic texts of the Nag Hammadi library, this version is believed by most biblical scholars to be a translation of an original which was composed by an anonymous author in the Greek language by Gnostic Christians in the 2nd century.
Rejected as heresy by the early Christian church and lost for 1700 years, the document was rediscovered in Egypt in the 1970s. Decades of neglect and poor storage led to the degradation of much of the manuscript, leading to the loss of a few portions of the text. After undergoing extensive restoration and preservation, an English translation of the surviving text was first published in early 2006 by the National Geographic Society.
History
Authorship Like the four canonical gospels, the Gospel of Judas is anonymous.
Date In early January 2005, researchers at the Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory of the University of Arizona completed their radiocarbon dating testing of four samples of papyrus from the codex and one sample of leather from the binding. The mean calendar age for these samples was between 220–340 CE.
In January 2006, ink samples from the codex were examined in another laboratory using polarized light microscopy, infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and x-ray diffraction. The chemical composition of the ink was determined not to match that of any modern ink, and its chemical composition was consistent with what would be expected for a document produced in Egypt during the third century AD.
It is likely, based on textual analysis of the dialect used and the presence of certain Greek loanwords, that the Coptic text contained in the codex is a translation from an older Greek manuscript dating to sometime before 180 AD. Cited in support of this dating is the reference to a "Gospel of Judas" in the work Adversus Haereses. This work was written around 180 AD by the early Christian writer Irenaeus, who described the Gospel of Judas as "fictitious history". However, it is uncertain whether the text mentioned by Irenaeus is the same work as that found in the Codex Tchacos.
Rediscovery
Sometime in the 1970s, an Egyptian farmer discovered a limestone box in an ancient tomb. The tomb was located on the east bank of the Nile River, in a village near Maghagha, Egypt. Inside the box was a leather-bound papyrus codex, written in the Sahidic dialect of the Coptic language. The farmer sold the document in 1978 to an antiquities dealer in Cairo who went by the pseudonym "Hanna Asabil". The document was stolen from Hanna's apartment and smuggled into Geneva in 1980; Hanna subsequently recovered it in 1982.
Stephen Emmel was perhaps the first scholar to inspect the codex when it appeared among a group of ancient manuscripts on the antiquities "grey market" in Geneva in May 1983. At that time, the document consisted of some 30 leaves (60 pages), which were damaged but "still in pretty good condition". From 1984 until 2000, Hanna transported the codex in a cardboard box back and forth between Europe and the United States, but was unable to find a buyer prepared to purchase a manuscript with such questionable provenance. During this period, the fragile codex was folded in half and often handled roughly. It was stored mainly in a narrow safe deposit box in Hicksville, New York, where it was subjected to a humid and unstable climate.
By 1999, the manuscript was in very bad condition: its bindings had disintegrated, its pages had been reshuffled and had disintegrated into over a thousand pieces, and numerous sections were missing. Some passages were only scattered words, while others contained many lines. According to archaeologist and Coptic scholar Rodolphe Kasser, the codex originally contained 31 leaves, each written on both sides. By the time the codex came to the market in 1999, only 13 leaves survived. Individual leaves may have been removed and sold.
Antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos purchased the codex in April 2000 and named it Codex Tchacos in honor of her father, Dimaratos Tchacos. She deposited the manuscript at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where it was examined by experts. Because of its dubious origins (especially the possibility that it had been removed illegally from Egypt), Yale declined to purchase the codex. In September 2000, she sold the codex to Bruce Ferrini, who inexplicably decided to store the codex in a freezer. This dramatically accelerated the degradation of the codex, causing the ink and sap to separate from the fibers of the papyrus, darkening its leaves and making the leaves far more fragile than they already were. Concerned with its rapidly deteriorating condition, Tchacos managed to reacquire most of the codex from Ferrini. In February 2001, she transferred it to the Maecenas Foundation in Basel to oversee its restoration, preservation, translation, and publication.
Restoration and publication The existence of the text was made public in July 2004 by Rodolphe Kasser at the International Congress of Coptic Studies in Paris. In a statement issued 30 March 2005, a spokesman for the Maecenas Foundation announced plans for translations into English, French, German, and Polish once the fragile papyrus had undergone conservation by a team of Coptologists to be led by Kasser, and that their work would be published the following year.
Kasser revealed a few details about the text in 2004, as reported by the Dutch paper . Its language is the same Sahidic dialect of Coptic in which Coptic texts of the Nag Hammadi library are written. The codex has four parts: The Letter of Peter to Philip, already known from the Nag Hammadi library The First Apocalypse of James, also known from the Nag Hammadi library The first few pages of a work related to, but not the same as, the Nag Hammadi work Allogenes The Gospel of Judas
On 6 April 2006, the National Geographic Society announced the completion of the restoration of the codex at a news conference in Washington, D.C. The published manuscript of the first translation of the Gospel of Judas from Coptic to English was unveiled on that day at the National Geographic Society Headquarters. A two-hour documentary entitled The Gospel of Judas – which was aired on the National Geographic Channel – followed on 9 April 2006.
In 2007, the National Geographic Society published the "Critical Edition" of the manuscript, which includes images of all the fragments, the reconstructed Coptic text, and English and French translations.
The initial translation of the Gospel of Judas was widely publicized but simply confirmed the account that was written in Irenaeus and known Gnostic beliefs, leading some scholars to simply summarize the discovery as nothing new. It is also argued that a closer reading of the existing text, as presented in October 2006, shows Christianity in a new light. According to Elaine Pagels, for instance, Judas is portrayed as having a mission to hand Jesus over to the soldiers. She says that Bible translators have mistranslated the Greek word for "handing over" to "betrayal".
Missing pieces For some 17 centuries, the Gospel of Judas was considered to be a lost literary work. As of 2025, only one manuscript of the Gospel of Judas has been identified, contained within the aforementioned Codex Tchacos. This manuscript contains many lacunae, some of which are quite lengthy. Up to a third of the Codex Tchacos is currently illegible, and other pages may yet be loose on the antiquities market.
Parts of the codex turned up in January 2006 in New York City. On 19 April 2006, Ferrini's court-appointed lawyer stated that he possessed several fragments from the codex, but he refused to have the fragments authenticated. Photographs of these fragments were later made available to Marvin Meyer and Gregor Wurst, who presented their preliminary translation at Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in New Orleans in November 2009.
Content The Gospel of Judas consists of 17 chapters, as follows:
Introduction (Incipit): The author tells the reader that this treatise describes the private revelation that Jesus imparted to Judas in the week leading up to Jesus' arrest and crucifixion. The earthly ministry of Jesus: Jesus laughs when he sees his disciples gathered in observance of the Eucharist. He tells them, "<You> are not doing this because of your own will but because it is through this that your god [will be] praised." Then he tells them, "How do you know me? Truly [I] say to you, no generation of the people that are among you will know me." The disciples become angry: Judas Iscariot, the only disciple who is able to stand in front of Jesus, says to Jesus, "I know who you are and where you have come from. You are from the immortal realm of Barbelo. And I am not worthy to utter the name of the one who has sent you." Jesus speaks to Judas privately: Jesus tells Judas, "Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal. ... For someone else will replace you, in order that the twelve [disciples] may again come to completion with their god." The disciples see the temple and discuss it: The disciples tell Jesus about their vision of the Great Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus offers an allegorical interpretation of the vision of the temple: Jesus tells the disciples, "Those you have seen receiving the offerings at the altar—that is who you are. ...The cattle you have seen brought for sacrifice are the many people you lead astray." Judas asks Jesus about that generation and human generations: Jesus tells the disciples, "The souls of every human generation will die. When these people, however, have completed the time of the kingdom and the spirit leaves them, their bodies will die but their souls will be alive, and they will be taken up." Judas asks about his own fate: Jesus tells Judas, "You will become the thirteenth, and you will be cursed by the other generations—and you will come to rule over them." Jesus teaches Judas about cosmology (the spirit and the self-generated): The author writes that God is essentially a "luminous cloud" of light that exists in an imperishable and infinite realm. Adamas and the luminaries: Adamas, the spiritual father of all humanity, was created in God's image and dwelt in the imperishable realm. The cosmos, chaos, and the underworld: At the beginning of time, God willed a group of angels and lower gods into existence to be his assistants and to rule over chaos and the underworld. First came El, then Nebro (aka Yaldabaoth) and Saklas, then others. The rulers and angels: The five angels who ruled over the underworld and over chaos were Seth, Harmathoth, Galila, Yobel, and Adonaios. The creation of humanity: Saklas (the inferior god) and his angels created physical bodies in God's image for Adam and Eve. Judas asks about the destiny of Adam and humanity: Judas asks Jesus, "Does the human spirit die?" Jesus replies, "This is why God ordered Michael to give the spirits of people to them as a loan, so that they might offer service, but the Great One ordered Gabriel to grant spirits to the great generation with no ruler over it—that is, the spirit and the soul." Jesus discusses the destruction of the wicked with Judas and others: Jesus tells Judas, "I am not laughing [at you] but at the error of the stars, because these six stars wander about with these five combatants, and they all will be destroyed along with their creatures."