Taken from: Wikipedia - Gospel of Judas
Introduction
The Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic gospel purported to document conversations between the apostle Judas Iscariot and Jesus Christ. The document is not claimed to have been written by Judas himself, but rather by Gnostic followers of Jesus. It exists in an early fourth-century Coptic text, though it has been proposed, but not proven, that the text is a translation of an earlier Greek version. The Gospel of Judas is probably from no earlier than the second century, since it contains theology that is not represented before the second half of the second century, and since its introduction and epilogue assume the reader is familiar with the canonical Gospels. The original Coptic document has been carbon dated to AD 280, plus or minus 50 years.
According to the canonical Gospels of the New Testament, (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), Judas betrayed Jesus to Jerusalem's Temple authorities, which handed Jesus over to the prefect Pontius Pilate, representative of the occupying Roman Empire, for crucifixion. The Gospel of Judas, on the other hand, portrays Judas in a very different perspective than do the Gospels of the New Testament, according to a preliminary translation made in early 2006 by the National Geographic Society: the Gospel of Judas appears to interpret Judas's act not as betrayal, but rather as an act of obedience to the instructions of Jesus. This assumption is taken on the basis that Jesus required a second agent to set in motion a course of events which he had planned. In that sense Judas acted as a catalyst. The action of Judas, then, was a pivotal point which interconnected a series of simultaneous pre-orchestrated events.
This portrayal seems to conform to a notion current in some forms of Gnosticism, that the human form is a spiritual prison, and that Judas thus served Christ by helping to release Christ's spirit from its physical constraints. The action of Judas allowed him to do that which he could not do directly. The Gospel of Judas does not claim that the other disciples knew gnostic teachings. On the contrary, it asserts that the disciples had not learned the true Gospel, which Jesus taught only
to Judas Iscariot.
Background
During the 1970s, a leather-bound Coptic papyrus was discovered near Beni Masah, Egypt. This has been translated and appears to be a text from the 2nd century A.D. describing the story of Jesus's death from the viewpoint of Judas. The conclusion of the text refers (in Coptic) to the text as "the Gospel of Judas" (Euangelion Ioudas).
According to a 2006 translation of the manuscript of the text, it is apparently a Gnostic account of an arrangement between Jesus and Judas, who in this telling are Gnostic enlightened beings, with Jesus asking Judas to turn him in to the Romans to help Jesus finish his appointed task from God.
During the second and third centuries AD, various Christian sects composed texts which are loosely labeled New Testament Apocrypha; these texts are usually but not always “pseudeponymous”, i.e. falsely attributed to a notable figure, such as an apostle, of an earlier era.
The text is extant in only one manuscript, a fourth-century Coptic manuscript known as the Codex Tchacos, which surfaced in the 1970s, after about sixteen centuries in the desert of Egypt . The existing manuscript was radiocarbon dated "between the third and fourth century", according to Timothy Jull, a carbon-dating expert at the University of Arizona's physics centre. Only sections of papyrus containing no text were carbon-dated, because carbon dating is physically destructive.
Today the manuscript is in over a thousand pieces, possibly due to poor handling and storage, with many sections missing. In some cases, there are only scattered words; in others, many lines. According to Rodolphe Kasser, the codex originally contained 31 pages, with writing on front and back; when it came to the market in 1999, only 13 pages, with writing on front and back, remained. It is speculated that individual pages had been removed and sold.
It has been speculated, on the basis of textual analysis concerning features of dialect and Greek loan words, that the current Coptic fourth century text may be a translation from an older Greek manuscript dating to approximately AD 130–180. Cited in support is the reference to a “Gospel of Judas” by the early Christian writer Irenaeus of Lyons, who, in arguing against Gnosticism, called the text a "fictitious history" (Refutation of Gnosticism, bk. 1 ch. 31). However, it is uncertain whether this text mentioned by Irenaeus is in fact the same text as the Coptic “Gospel of Judas” of the extant fourth century text, and there remains no solid evidence for an early Greek version.
Responses and reactions
Scholarly debates
Professor Kasser revealed a few details about the text in 2004, the Dutch paper Het Parool reported.[11] 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;
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 for Mission Programs 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, James M. Robinson, one of America's leading experts on ancient religious texts, predicted that the new book would
offer no historical insights into the disciple who betrayed Jesus, since the third-century manuscript seems to derive from
an older document. Robinson suggests that the text will provide insights into the religion situation during the second
century rather than into the biblical narrative itself.
One scholar on the National Geographic project believes the document shows that Judas was "fooled" into believing he
was helping Jesus.
Another scholar, April D. DeConick, a professor of Biblical studies at Rice University, reports in the New York Times
that the National Geographic translation was critically faulty in many substantial respects, and that based on a corrected
translation, Judas was actually a demon, truly betraying Jesus, rather than following his orders.
DeConick, after re-translating the text, published The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says to assert
that Judas was not a daimon in the Greek sense, but that "the universally accepted word for “spirit” is “pneuma ” — in
Gnostic literature “daimon” is always taken to mean “demon”, as she wrote in presenting her conclusions in The New York
Times, 1 December 2007. "Judas is not set apart 'for' the holy generation, as the National Geographic translation says",
DeConick asserted, "he is separated 'from' it." A negative that was dropped from a crucial sentence, an error National
Geographic admits, changes the import. "Were they genuine errors or was something more deliberate going on?" DeConick asked
in the Op-Ed page of the Times.
Religious responses
In his 2006 Easter address, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, strongly denied the historical credibility of the gospel, saying: This is a demonstrably late text which simply parallels a large number of quite well-known works from the
more eccentric fringes of the early century Church.
He went on to suggest that the book's publicity derives from an insatiable desire for conspiracy theories: We are instantly
fascinated by the suggestion of conspiracies and cover-ups; this has become so much the stuff of our imagination these days
that it is only natural, it seems, to expect it when we turn to ancient texts, especially biblical texts. We treat them as
if they were unconvincing press releases from some official source, whose intention is to conceal the real story; and that
real story waits for the intrepid investigator to uncover it and share it with the waiting world. Anything that looks like
the official version is automatically suspect.
Later the same year, Biblical scholar Louis Painchaud argued that the text suggests Judas was actually possessed by a
demon.