The Gospel of Judas

On a Night with Judas Iscariot

Marvin W. Meyer

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781610973717
  9781498213929
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621891192
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The Gospel of Judas: On a Night with Judas Iscariot presents a fresh translation of the Gospel of Judas, with introduction, commentary, and notes. Originally published with considerable international fanfare in 2006, the Gospel of Judas has prompted a vibrant discussion among scholars and other interested readers about the meaning of the text and the place of Judas Iscariot in the story of Jesus and the history of the church. Meyer, a member of the original research team assembled by the National Geographic Society to edit, translate, and publish the Gospel of Judas and the remaining texts in what is now called Codex Tchacos, here offers an up-to-date and thoroughly accessible translation of the Gospel of Judas, expanded with new fragments of the text and informed by the latest scholarship. He adds reminiscences of the work on the Coptic text when it first was coming to light in 2005 and 2006. This book also includes reflections on the extensive literature, beyond the Gospel of Judas, on the figure of Judas Iscariot, with suggestions for a literary interpretation of Judas--an interpretation that may have a dramatic impact upon our understanding of the role of Judas Iscariot in the story of Jesus's passion.

introduction

Discovery

The first night I spent communing with Judas Iscariot and the Gospel of Judas was in the autumn of 2005, in Washington DC, in an office I was occupying at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society. The office, I was told, was used by a photographer associated with the image of the young woman from Afghanistan, with piercing green eyes, who graced the cover of the National Geographic Magazine some years ago. Now she gazed down off the wall at me as I in turn looked at the text of the Gospel of Judas. Maybe she was looking over my shoulder at the text. I had been invited to join the National Geographic research team, with Coptological colleagues Rodolphe Kasser, Gregor Wurst, and François Gaudard, and our scholarly assignment was to produce an edition of Codex Tchacos, which includes the Gospel of Judas. When that night I cast my eyes upon the Coptic text of the Gospel of Judas for the first time, I was astonished to see names that were familiar from my work on Sethian gnosis: Barbelo, Autogenes (Self-Conceived), Seth, Yaldabaoth, Sakla, Nebro. And there was the startling title of the text: the Gospel of Judas—that is, Judas Iscariot, the disciple of Jesus damned by the Christian church as the betrayer of his master. Here, for the first time in over fifteen hundred years, the Gospel of Judas, attacked by Irenaeus of Lyon and other heresy hunters as the quintessential heretical gospel, could be read and studied once again.

The tale of the discovery, publication, and interpretation of the Gospel of Judas is one of the truly fascinating stories of literary remains uncovered in the sands of Egypt.1 The early stages of the story remain shrouded in the mystery and uncertainty characteristic of many such tales of discovery. It has been suggested that the Gospel of Judas, preserved in Coptic in what is now called Codex Tchacos, was found near al-Minya in the 1970s, along with a codex of Coptic translations of letters of Paul, a Greek text of the book of Exodus, and a Greek mathematical treatise. Herbert Krosney, the author and journalist who pieced together the story of the discovery, describes the circumstances of the find. According to Krosney, Codex Tchacos and the other texts were found by local fellahin in a cave that was located at the Jabal Qarara and had been used for a Coptic burial. The cave contained, among other things, Roman glassware in baskets or papyrus or straw wrappings. Krosney writes, “The fellahin stumbled upon the cave hidden down in the rocks. Climbing down to it, they found the skeleton of a wealthy man in a shroud. Other human remains, probably members of the dead man’s family, were with him in the cave. His precious books were beside him, encased in a white limestone box.”2

As the story continues, thereafter Codex Tchacos, with the Gospel of Judas as one of its texts, was brought to Cairo, put on display, stolen, recovered, and shown to scholars in Europe. Eventually the codex found its way to the United States, where it was stored in a safe-deposit box in Hicksville, New York, for sixteen years, then obtained for purchase by an American collector, Bruce Ferrini, who put the papyrus in a freezer in a misguided effort, it seems, to separate the papyrus pages. Such inappropriate handling of the codex clearly caused considerable damage to the papyrus. Nonetheless, the papyrus pages of Codex Tchacos have been painstakingly reassembled, and the text has undergone radiocarbon tests for samples of the papyrus and leather binding and a transmission electron microscopy (TEM) test for the ink in order to establish an ancient date for the codex. Such an ancient date, in the late third or early fourth century, has been confirmed by the scientific tests. In 2006 a Coptic transcription of the Gospel of Judas was made available online, and a popular book was published by the National Geographic Society. In 2007 a critical edition of the Gospel of Judas and Codex Tchacos was published; and following that, in 2008, a second, slightly updated translation of the Gospel of Judas was produced.

The conclusion of Codex Tchacos is not currently available, and it may either have fallen into the hands of some person or organization or have been damaged and destroyed. The codex as now known from the papyrus that is available must have contained at least five texts:

1. the Letter of Peter to Philip (1,1—9,15), a text also known in a slightly different version as the second tractate of Nag Hammadi Codex VIII;

2. a text called James (10,1—30,27), a version of a tractate titled the Revelation (or, Apocalypse) of James (and given the title First Revelation of James by scholars to distinguish it from the so-called Second Revelation of James), preserved as the third tractate in Nag Hammadi Codex V;

3. the Gospel of Judas (33,1—58,28);

4. a fragmentary text provisionally called a Book of Allogenes (59,1—66,25ff.), which is missing a significant amount of its contents, and is given its current title on the basis of ink traces and the name of the central revelatory figure in the work; and

5. a Coptic version of Corpus Hermeticum XIII, here known from words and phrases in fragments identified by Jean-Pierre Mahé and Gregor Wurst.3

There may have been more texts in the collection. As it currently is known, Codex Tchacos is a collection of revelatory texts about the nature of gnosis and the true meaning of life and death, including the life and death of Jesus.

Judas and Irenaeus

Rodolphe Kasser, the distinguished Swiss Coptologist and papyrologist who was the senior member of the National Geographic research team, recalls that when he first saw the text of Codex Tchacos in 2001, he let out a cry of astonishment. What once had been an intact papyrus codex with a leather cover had deteriorated into a heap of fragments piled in a cardboard box. Years earlier, in 1983, several scholars, including Stephen Emmel, currently of the University of Münster, were invited to Geneva to view a collection of codices, one of which was what is now named Codex Tchacos, and at that time, it has been noted, the codex and its papyrus pages were in much better shape. Time and unkind hands took their toll on the codex, and by 2001 the ancient book was in shambles. The story of what happened thereafter is something of a papyrological miracle. Through the skill and devotion of Rodolphe Kasser, who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, the expertise and experience of Florence Darbre of the Bodmer Foundation, and the tenacity and computer skills of Gregor Wurst of the University of Augsburg, the boxful of fragments became a book again. The Gospel of Judas was emerging from the mist—and the papyrus dust—of antiquity.

The Gospel of Judas was known by title, prior to the discovery of Codex Tchacos, from comments in the writings of such heresiologists as Irenaeus of Lyon, Pseudo-Tertullian, and Epiphanius of Salamis. The comments of Irenaeus, writing in his tract Adversus haereses (“Against Heresies”) around 180 CE are most helpful. The time of his writing suggests a date of composition for the Gospel of Judas around the middle of the second century. (It almost certainly was composed in Greek and translated into Coptic later.) Irenaeus observes (1.31.1) that some gnostics, in a revisionist reading of the documents of the Jewish Scriptures, revere figures like Cain, Esau, Korah, and the Sodomites, precisely because “such persons are of the same people as themselves,”4 that is, they, like the gnostics, have been oppressed by the demiurge and defamed in the holy book of the demiurge, since they are of the order of the realm above. Irenaeus moves directly to a discussion of Judas and the Gospel of Judas, and by clear implication he places Judas in the same camp as those who are in the know but are opposed by the demiurge and are evaluated in a negative way in biblical traditions. (This may account for the fact that in the Gospel of Judas, “Judas the betrayer” is the recipient of revelation from Jesus but is also opposed, oppressed, and presented as the one who sacrifices the mortal body Jesus has been using.) “Judas the betrayer,” Irenaeus writes, “was thoroughly acquainted with these things, they say,” and in the Gospel of Judas—“a fabricated work,” according to the heresiologist—his story is told in a gnostic version. Irenaeus considers this gospel to be the creation of those who call themselves “gnostics,” thinkers that scholars now commonly term Sethians, and he summarizes the contents of the Gospel of Judas by focusing upon the knowledge possessed by Judas Iscariot: “he alone was acquainted with the truth as no others were, and so accomplished the mystery of the betrayal. By him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thrown into dissolution.”

While it is unlikely that Irenaeus had read the actual Gospel of Judas, he seems to have gotten several things right about the character of the gospel. Judas is the most prominent and the most enlightened of the disciples of Jesus in the gospel; the significance of the handing over of Jesus by Judas is something of a mystery in the Gospel of Judas, and it merits being depicted by Irenaeus as the mustērion prodosias (in Greek), proditionis mysterium (in Latin), the “mystery of the betrayal”; the events subsequent to the betrayal in the gospel are presented in apocalyptic terms, as the eradication of evil and the destruction of heaven and earth. Irenaeus not only describes portions of the Gospel of Judas correctly; he even gets the sequence of events straight in the concluding portion of the Gospel of Judas, as is clear from the Coptic text and now even more so from newly recovered papyrus fragments of the gospel.

Contents

By the time the contents of the Gospel of Judas were coming to expression in the work going on in Washington D.C. in 2005, we began to discuss together the obvious significance of this remarkable text. One day several of us gathered for lunch at a restaurant a few steps from the National Geographic buildings. Around the table were, among others, the National Geographic photographer who would do much of the photographic work in Egypt and Europe and the author who would write the article on the Gospel of Judas for National Geographic Magazine. The plans for publication and presentation were ambitious—two or three books, a major magazine article, a television documentary, a museum exhibit. I ordered a chicken salad for lunch. While we chewed our food, we engaged in an animated conversation about the Gospel of Judas and its implications for the history of t...

Table of contents

• The Gospel of Judas
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Translation
• Epilogue: A Night with Judas Iscariot: A Script for Readers’ Theater
• Bibliography