Gospel of Judas

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The Gospel of Judas is a second-century Christian text, written from within the broad current later called Gnostic, that retells the relationship between Jesus and Judas Iscariot against the grain of the canonical Gospels. In place of the betrayer of the New Testament, it presents Judas as the one disciple who grasps who Jesus really is — and the handing-over not as treachery but as a task assigned by Jesus himself.

The work was known for centuries only by report. Around 180 CE the heresiologist Irenaeus named a “Gospel of Judas” among the writings of a sect he set out to refute, and the title then vanished from the record. It reappeared as an actual manuscript only in the late twentieth century: a single Coptic copy bound into a papyrus codex now called Codex Tchacos, which surfaced on the antiquities market and passed through years of mishandling — frozen, partly decayed, fragmented — before conservation and translation could begin. The National Geographic Society announced the restored text in 2006. The surviving copy is generally dated to the third or fourth century; the Greek work behind it is placed by most scholars in the mid-to-late second.

What the text says is stark. The other disciples are shown worshipping a lesser god and misunderstanding their teacher; Jesus laughs at their devotions. He draws Judas aside and discloses to him alone the higher mysteries — the true God beyond the visible heavens, the luminous realm above, the ignorant powers who made the lower world. The act of handing Jesus over is framed as a release: “you will sacrifice the man that clothes me,” in the words the text gives Jesus, freeing the inner self from the body. This is recognisably the Sethian picture of a divine spark trapped in flesh and a knowledge that liberates it.

Whether the text means Judas as a hero remains genuinely contested. The first edition read him as the favoured disciple, raised above the rest. A sharp counter-reading soon followed, arguing that key terms had been mistranslated and that the Judas of this gospel is a tragic or even demonic figure — a being tied to the lower world, doing a necessary thing without being saved by it. The debate turns on a few damaged and ambiguous lines, and it has not closed.

What the recovery established beyond dispute is narrower and still significant. A title that the early church had condemned and the centuries had erased proved to be a real document, and one more witness to how unsettled the figure of Judas was while the boundaries of Christian scripture were still forming. The man the later tradition fixed as the archetype of betrayal could be read, by some second-century Christians, as the only one who understood.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906)

→ Related: Judas Iscariot · Gnosticism · Gnosis · Nag Hammadi Library · Gospel Of Thomas · Seth