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[First posted in 2015, one of our resurrected posts discussing Christianity’s “Easter” Story which includes a betrayal of the Savior by one of the 12. Here’s the original introduction:
“What could possibly be ‘good news’ coming from ‘bad news’ Judas, the infamous betrayer of the Christian Savior who ‘ID-d’ his Master with a kiss? This Foreword by author Bart D. Ehrman is copy-pasted from the preview of the book available at amazon.com.” —Admin1]
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FOREWORD
BART D. EHRMAN
In fall 2004 I received several unexpected and rather mysterious phone calls. The first was from a professional friend of mine, Sheila, who has for years worked on biblical archaeology in Israel. After a brief chat about her next dig, she raised the question that had prompted her call: Had I ever heard of a Gospel of Judas?
I had only a vague recollection of the book: It was one of the gospels that was mentioned by some of the early church fathers, but that had evidently been destroyed, or at least lost, many centuries ago. It is included in none of the standard reference works of the early Christian “apocrypha”—that is, the surviving gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses that were not included in the New Testament. I wasn’t able to tell Sheila much more about it.
Her question struck me as odd—why would she be asking me about a gospel that hardly anyone had ever heard of, and that no one had ever seen? I decided to reread the ancient discussions of the Gospel of Judas, just to refresh my memory. It did not take long, as the gospel is mentioned in only a couple of ancient sources.
The earliest is the church father Irenaeus, who in 180 CE wrote a five-volume refutation of different Christian “heretics” (that is, those who held to the “wrong beliefs”), especially groups of gnostics. The gnostics believed that the way to salvation was not through belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus, but through the secret knowledge (gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge) that Jesus delivered, not to the crowds but to his inner circle. This secret knowledge revealed how people can escape the prisons of their material bodies to return to the spiritual realm whence they came. Some gnostic groups had highly esoteric and mysterious views of the world. In one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century, a collection of gnostic writings was uncovered in 1945 near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. These Nag Hammadi documents included a number of previously lost gospels—including the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip—but they did not contain a copy of the Gospel of Judas.
In any event, Irenaeus does indicate that the Gospel of Judas was used by a group of gnostics called the Cainites. These people believed that the world had been created not by the One True God, but by a lesser, ignorant deity—the God of the Old Testament, who was not to be trusted or followed. The true God was above the inferior God of the Jews. And so, according to the Cainites, anyone who opposed the God of the Jews by breaking his law—as done, for example, by Cain, the first fratricide, and the men of Sodom and Gomorrah—was actually standing for the truth. The Cainites allegedly had a gospel that supported their rather peculiar theology. This gospel was written in the name of Judas Iscariot, known throughout Christian history as the traitor, the one disciple of Jesus who had turned evil and betrayed his master. According to the Cainites, however, what Judas had done was not evil. He alone was the one who understood the mysteries of Jesus and did Jesus’ will. All the other disciples, who worshiped the false Jewish God, failed to understand the truth of Jesus.
After doing this research on the lost Gospel of Judas, I received a second phone call. This one was from a woman who worked for the National Geographic Society. She too wanted to know about the Gospel of Judas. This time I was better prepared and could tell her all that we knew—or that I thought we knew—about the gospel. After a brief discussion, she wanted to know if I thought it would be a significant discovery if the Gospel of Judas were to turn up. I wondered, of course, why she was asking. Rarely does anyone call a scholar to pose a purely hypothetical question about an unlikely discovery. Had the book been found?
I was cautious in my response. In my opinion, if the Gospel of Judas turned up, it would undoubtedly be very interesting for scholars of ancient Christianity. But would it be headline news? It depended entirely on what was in the gospel. If, for example, the gospel was like most of the writings discovered near Nag Hammadi, a book that explained how the world came into existence and how people might escape their entrapment in matter, that would further our knowledge about early Christian gnosticism—obviously a very good thing, but not earth-shattering. If, on the other hand, this gospel included an ancient version of the story of Jesus from the perspective of Judas himself and embraced a view at odds with the one that became “orthodox” throughout the history of the Christian church—a discovery of that kind would be absolutely phenomenal. It would be one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of modern times, certainly the most important of the past sixty years.
She thanked me for the information and we ended the call.
A few days later, she called back with stunning information. As it turns out, the Gospel of Judas had turned up in Egypt, in a manuscript written in Coptic (the ancient Egyptian language that the Nag Hammadi documents were also written in). It was in the possession of a group in Switzerland called the Maecenas Foundation, which was interested in involving National Geographic in the publication and dissemination of the text. In response, the Society was concerned, first off, to learn if this was the real thing or a later forgery.
There was a range of interrelated questions: Was this new discovery the gospel that Irenaeus and other church fathers had castigated as a gnostic creation, telling the story of Jesus from Judas’s perspective? How old was the manuscript that contained the gospel? And when was the gospel itself originally composed? National Geographic needed an expert to verify the discovered text and wanted to know if I could help.
To say I was thrilled would be a profound understatement. Few scholars have the chance to be on the ground floor of a significant discovery. And this might be just that. Of course, it might also be a hoax. Hence the need to verify the facts.
I agreed to help. What the Society wanted was my expertise on early Christianity, to help them see the broad historical significance of a text like this. They were also planning to secure the services of a scientist who could provide a carbon-14 dating of the manuscript. I told them that they would also need a Coptologist—someone whose expertise was in ancient Coptic (my own research specialty is ancient Greek manuscripts). A good Coptologist could examine the text and give an estimate of its date simply based on the style of handwriting. And so, a three-person team was assembled: Tim Jull, director of the National Science Foundation–Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Facility in Tucson, the expert in carbon-14 dating; Stephen Emmel, an American-born professor of Coptic at the University of Münster in Germany; and myself, historian of early Christianity.
We flew to Geneva in December 2004 and under secretive conditions were shown the documents. They surpassed even our most sanguine expectations. There was no doubt in my mind that this was the real thing. Even though my expertise is Greek rather than Coptic, I have read enough ancient manuscripts to know one when I see one. The form of the manuscript and the style of writing looked very similar to what you can find in Greek manuscripts of the fourth century. My best guess at first glance was that this was from that period. Could it be a modern forgery? Not a chance.
Everyone on the team had lots of questions. Foremost for me was the content of the document. Turning to the final page, I could see the title (titles come at the end of documents in ancient texts):Peuaggelion Nioudas, Coptic for “The Gospel of Judas.” And I could make out a bit of the Coptic at the conclusion where the text indicates that “he handed him over to them.” But what was the rest of it about? Was it a gospel that took Judas’s side in the story of the betrayal, answering why he had done it? Or was it another gnostic text filled almost entirely with mystical reflections about the divine realm and about how this world came to be, with Judas playing at best a minor role? The significance of the document hung on these questions.
There were yet other pressing questions. Where was the text found? Who discovered it? When? Where had it been in all the years since its discovery? Why had none of us heard about it? Who so far had seen it? How did it come to be in the possession of the Maecenas Foundation, the group that evidently owned it? Could they be trusted to make the text available to the rest of the world, scholars and nonscholars alike? How would they publish it? Who would translate it? And so on.
These questions are answered in the present book—a riveting account by Herb Krosney, who first alerted the National Geographic Society to the existence of the document and convinced the Society to consider seriously its possible publication. More than anyone else, Herb has pursued the question of the document’s discovery some three decades ago and its very peculiar pilgrimage in the intervening years. With the tenacity of a top-flight investigative reporter, he pursued every facet of the discovery and reclamation of the text. With an uncanny knack for piecing together isolated data, Herb has provided us with scores of details that, were it not for his efforts, would have been lost forever. This book provides far more information about the discovery, fate, and ultimate publication of the Gospel of Judas than we have for any other archaeological discovery of modern times—including such significant finds as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library.
The most significant factor, of course, is the content of the newly discovered document. As it turns out, my highest hopes have been realized. For this is a gospel that tells the tale of Jesus from the viewpoint of Judas Iscariot himself, the one who allegedly betrayed him. As one might expect, this perspective is completely different from what one finds in the canonical accounts of the New Testament Gospels. In the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Judas is the villain. In this newly discovered gospel, he is the hero.
It is worth noting that even though the Gospels of the New Testament agree in vilifying Judas, they do not agree on many of the details of his betrayal. The first Gospel to be written was that of Mark, from about 65 or 70 CE (35–40 years after the death of Jesus), and in that account, there is no clue given as to why Judas decided to turn Jesus over to the authorities, leading to his trial and crucifixion. Written somewhat later (80–85 CE), the Gospel of Matthew indicates that Judas did it for money: He was paid thirty pieces of silver for his foul deed. But when he saw that Jesus was condemned, Judas repented and hanged himself out of remorse. Written at about the same time as Matthew, the Gospel of Luke suggests that Judas was inspired by the Devil, so the betrayal was a Satanic act against the Son of God. The final Gospel to be written was John’s, in which Judas himself is said to have been “a devil.”
In all these accounts, Judas is the fallen disciple, the one betrayer of the cause, the traitor. Yet there are details within these accounts that are difficult—well nigh impossible, in fact—to reconcile with one another. For example, among the Gospels, only Matthew indicates that Judas killed himself. The author of the Gospel of Luke, however, also wrote the Book of Acts, and there we have a different version of Judas’s death—we are told that he fell headlong and his “bowels burst open.” Moreover, in Matthew’s gospel the “blood money” that Judas had returned to the priests out of remorse was used to buy a field to bury strangers in—hence it was called the “Field of Blood” (having come from blood money); in the account in Acts, it is Judas himself who bought the field, which was given its name because he poured out his blood on it.
My point is that each of the individual authors of the New Testament had his own perspective on Judas and told the stories about him in light of that perspective. That continued to be true after the time of the New Testament, as legends about Judas circulated widely. Among the most nefarious of these legends are the ones that paid close attention to the name “Judas,” a name etymologically related to the word Jew. Judas, by the Middle Ages, became synonymous with the “faithless Jew”—the one who was a greedy, money-hungry, thieving, deceitful, treacherous “Christ-killer.”
Some modern scholars have tried to resuscitate the reputation of Judas, but on rather unconvincing textual evidence. Our early records all portray him as the villain in the story of Jesus. But what if there were other portrayals of Judas available that cast him in a more positive light, that interpret his actions differently from the way they are portrayed in the four Gospels that happened to make it into the New Testament?
Now we do have a different depiction.
The Gospel of Judas is a gnostic document, and as such explains in some detail how our evil material world came into being and how we came to be entrapped here. This explanation is understood to be mysterious and secret—it is not for everyone to hear, only the insiders. But the Gospel of Judas is more than simply an additional gnostic text. It is an early gospel that provides an alternative understanding of Jesus, told from the point of view of his betrayer. In this account, Judas is the consummate insider, the one to whom Jesus delivers his secret revelation. Judas is the one faithful disciple, the one who understands Jesus, the one who receives salvation. The other disciples, and the religion they represent, are rooted in ignorance.
As these brief remarks should make clear, this gospel does not conform to traditional Christianity as it emerged in the early centuries to become the most important religious movement in the history of Western civilization. It is an alternative vision of what it means to follow Christ and to be faithful to his teachings.
In this book we learn about how, when, and where this vision was discovered, how it came into the hands of antiquities dealers and how it finally ended up with competent experts who have spent years piecing together the fragmentary text and making it available to us in a modern translation. All of us should be grateful not only for the superb efforts of the translator of this text—the Swiss Coptic scholar Rodolphe Kasser—and the work of the National Geographic Society for putting in the time and expense to make it widely available, but also to Herb Krosney, who has made the story of the Gospel’s discovery and history now accessible to everyone.
WHO’S WHO IN THE LOST GOSPEL
ANCIENT
Jesus
Judas Iscariot
St. Irenaeus, early church father and author ofAgainst Heresies
St. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria
MODERN
Am Samiah (pseudonym), Egyptian villager
Hanna Asabil (pseudonym), antiquities dealer, Egypt
Ludwig Koenen, papyrologist, U.S.
Nicolas Koutoulakis, antiquities dealer, Switzerland
Yannis Perdios, antiquities collector, Greece
James M. Robinson, early Christianity scholar, U.S.
Stephen Emmel, Coptic scholar, Germany
Boutros (pseudonym), Egyptian villager
Frieda Tchacos Nussberger, antiquities dealer, Switzerland
Father Gabriel Abdel Sayed, Coptic priest, U.S.
Hans P. Kraus, rare book dealer, U.S.
Joanna Landis (pseudonym), Alexandria resident, Egypt
Roger Bagnall, classics scholar, U.S.
Martin Schoyen, antiquities collector, Norway
Bruce Ferrini, antiquities dealer, U.S.
William Veres, antiquities dealer, U.K.
James Ferrell, antiquities collector, U.S.
Mario J. Roberty, lawyer, Switzerland
Michel van Rijn, antiquities blogger, U.K.
Rodolphe Kasser, Coptic scholar, Switzerland
Florence Darbre, manuscript restorer, Switzerland
Charles Hedrick, Coptic scholar, U.S.
Bart D. Ehrman, early Christianity scholar, U.S.
A. J. Timothy Jull, radiocarbon-dating scientist, U.S.
PROLOGUE
Truly, truly I say to you, the man who betrays the Son of God, it is better that he had never been born.
—THE BOOK OF MATTHEW
He’s one of the most hated men in history—the apostle who betrayed Jesus Christ. Judas Iscariot. For centuries, his name has been synonymous with treachery and deceit.
In the mid- to late 1970s, hidden for more than fifteen hundred years, an ancient text emerged from the sands of Egypt. Near the banks of the Nile River, some Egyptian peasants, fellahin, stumbled upon a cavern. In biblical times, such chambers had been used to bury the dead. The peasants entered the cave, seeking ancient gold or jewelry, anything of value that they could sell. Instead, among a pile of human bones, they discovered a crumbling limestone box. Inside it, they came upon an unexpected find—a mysterious leather-bound book, a codex. The illiterate peasants couldn’t decipher the ancient text, but they knew that old books fetched a good price in Cairo’s antiquities markets. This one was made of papyrus, ancient Egypt’s form of paper.
The fellahin had no idea that what they were holding was one of the greatest prizes of biblical archaeology: A document stained by the label “heresy” and condemned eighteen hundred years ago.
In April 2000, approximately twenty-two years later, antiquities dealer Frieda Tchacos Nussberger was headed to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York when she received some stunning news. She’d recently bought the ancient codex from an Egyptian dealer and had taken it to Yale University to have it examined. Now, on her cell phone, a manuscripts expert at Yale dropped a bombshell. “Frieda, it’s fantastic!” he said in an extremely emotional voice. “This is a very important document. I think it’s the Gospel of Judas!”
For Nussberger, it was the payoff for years of pursuit. She had become obsessed with the mysterious codex without ever knowing what it contained. Could there really be a Gospel of Judas?
Oddly, for someone so notorious, we know very few facts about Judas Iscariot. He was one of the Twelve Apostles. He most likely came from Judea, not Galilee like Jesus and the others. Judas was the apostles’ treasurer and, by some gospel accounts, Jesus’ most trusted ally, making his betrayal all the more contemptible.
But if the details of his life are murky, there’s no question about Judas’s place in history. “He’s the one who handed over his friend,” Marvin Meyer, one of the translators of the newly discovered gospel, explained. “He’s the one who brought about the Crucifixion, and he’s the one who’s damned for all time.” In Dante’s Inferno, Judas is condemned to the lowest pits of hell, where he is eaten, head first, by a giant raptor belonging to Lucifer himself.
“Generally today people think of Judas principally as the betrayer of Jesus, somebody who was a traitor to the cause,” scholar Bart Ehrman, noted for his studies of early Christianity, remarked recently. “Often they think of him as somebody who was greedy, avaricious, and who was more interested in making money than in being faithful to his master.”
“The word itself is despised,” Dr. William Klassen added. “I think virtually throughout the Western world, you wouldn’t even call your dog that. And in Germany, of course, it is illegal to name your child Judas.”
Christ and his apostles were all observant Jews, Orthodox by today’s standards. But in time Judas’s dark deed came to represent the supposed villainy of their entire faith. “Traditionally in Christian circles, Judas in fact has been associated with Jews,” Ehrman notes. “Not just because of his name, but also because of these characteristics that became stereotypes for Jews in the Middle Ages—this stereotype of being traitors, avaricious, who betray Jesus. And this portrayal of Judas, of course, also leads then to horrendous acts of anti-Semitism through the centuries.”
The stain that marks him is based on just twenty-four lines in the Gospels. As C. Stephen Evans, professor of philosophy at Baylor University, said: “Judas Iscariot in the New Testament doesn’t appear much, and I think it’s because he’s an embarrassment. What little is said about him is very sinister, so he’s portrayed in increasingly villainous terms as a thief who steals from the money box. Indeed, even as a person who was influenced by Satan.”
History, however, records that there was once another written source of information about Judas Iscariot. Around 180 CE, Irenaeus, a church father in what is now France, wrote a scathing attack against a Greek text entitled the Gospel of Judas. “This gospel was about the relationship between Jesus and Judas, and indicated that Judas didn’t actually betray Jesus, but did what Jesus wanted him to do, because Judas was the one who really knew the truth, as Jesus wanted it communicated,” Ehrman said.
This version of Judas’s story was too controversial for early Church leaders like Irenaeus. By condemning it, they erased it from history, never to be seen again.
But never is a long time, and the gospel was suppressed only until it could be found again. At least one copy of it had survived, laying dormant in a lightless vault in the arid Egyptian desert for most of two millennia until it was suddenly brought forth again, eventually finding its way decades later into Frieda Nussberger’s custody.
This codex—one of the greatest discoveries in Judeo-Christian archaeology—did not head straight to a museum, nor even to the library of a rich collector. The gospel’s removal from its burial place was just the beginning of a bizarre cloak-and-dagger journey. The Gospel of Judas, treated like a piece of merchandise, would be shopped around on three continents over the course of the next twenty-five years, its contents glimpsed only a few times between long periods of inactivity in far from ideal storage conditions. Every step of the way the precious document would deteriorate, until much of it was reduced to fragments of papyrus fibers.
The people who discovered it, bound together with three other texts, knew only that it was very old and would be worth good money. They sold it to a dealer in Cairo, who couldn’t read the ancient Coptic either, but knew that it was extremely valuable if only he could find the right buyer.
The humid air of Egypt’s capital city contrasts sharply with the arid climate of the desert where the codex was found, and humidity, combined with heat, is a factor that contributes greatly to the deterioration of perishable matter. The papyrus documents would languish while the dealer demanded millions of dollars for their purchase.
The manuscripts were then stolen and landed in Europe—more precisely, Switzerland—where, exposed to the Alpine air, the process of deterioration would continue. Not for the last time, the texts were left to molder in a bank vault. They were subsequently examined by experts who flew in from the United States to determine their authenticity. Already at that stage, warnings were raised about their state of deterioration. The scholars wanted the damage brought under control through careful management and the provision of proper environmental conditions, but that would be years in coming.
The codex next journeyed to the United States for a possible sale. A famous manuscript dealer in New York examined the text yet again but, uncomfortable with the Egyptian seller’s price and the cost of restoration, decided against buying them. Despairing, the Cairo dealer finally put the documents in a bank vault on suburban Long Island, where no one had any idea of their condition or even their existence. There they would deteriorate for sixteen long years.
At last, Nussberger rescued them from the bank vault and turned them over to Yale University to be translated. There, a scholar identified the subject of the texts and some of what they said. For a brief period it seemed the codex—its importance discovered—had found a home at last. Yet Nussberger has spoken of the text as “a curse,” and it did seem that way. The stigma of the great betrayer would linger on long after the discovery of the manuscript. It was almost as though the text didn’t want to be read.
Despite the fact that they contained the fabled Gospel of Judas, Yale was worried about possible legal issues and declined to buy them. Instead they were sold to an antiquities dealer in Ohio. They disintegrated further when they were briefly stored in the freezer compartment of a refrigerator.
A botched sale led to the manuscript’s return to Nussberger and Switzerland, where they would finally find a home where ambient conditions would be adjusted to ensure their future preservation. By this time the fragile papyrus had deteriorated dramatically, with fragments dropping off at the touch. Not only that, but scholars found that pages of the priceless texts were missing, ripped out, possibly to be sold separately.
Each stage of this journey had brought additional damage. Each stage caused the increasingly frail strands of papyrus to deteriorate further, threatening the loss of additional letters, words, and sentences of the ancient texts. Each stage of the journey might cause the voice of Judas Iscariot, now arisen from its centuries-old tomb, to be degraded to the point where it might never be heard.
From the moment Frieda Tchacos Nussberger had learned from the Yale experts what was contained in the mysterious codex, she had been in a race against time to find a buyer who would be able to preserve its pages before they turned to dust. She eventually turned it over to the Maecenas Foundation of Ancient Art in Basel, Switzerland, which specializes in supporting archaeological study projects in ancient cultures or antiquities such as this. Together with Maecenas she engaged Rodolphe Kasser, one of the world’s preeminent translators and scholars of Coptic, the rare and ancient language in which the text is written. Seeing how badly it had deteriorated, he joined forces with a superb document restorer, Florence Darbre.
In 2002, in her studio in Switzerland, Darbre opened the box containing the Gospel of Judas for the very first time. “I had to look at it. I had to open and close the box several times,” she said. “One often needs to have nerves of steel in order to touch certain objects.” In thirty years of work, she had never seen an ancient document in such bad condition. Its fragile papyrus pages had broken into thousands of fragments. “Whatever document you work with, there is always a story. One always wonders who wrote it, where did it go, who had it, and who read it?”
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Book Description
Publication Date: July 4, 2006
Judas Iscariot.
He’s been hated and reviled through the ages as Jesus Christ’s betrayer– the close friend who sells him out for 30 pieces of silver.
But history also records other information about Judas Iscariot. One such reference was written in 180 by an influential Church Father named St. Irenaeus who railed against the Gospel of Judas for depicting the last days of Jesus from the perspective of the disgraced apostle. In its pages, Judas is Christ’s favorite.
It’s a startlingly different story than the one handed down through the ages. Once it was denounced as heresy, the Gospel of Judas faded from sight. It became one of history’s forgotten manuscripts.
Until now.
In this compelling and exhaustively researched account, Herbert Krosney unravels how the Gospel of Judas was found and its meaning painstakingly teased from the ancient Coptic script that had hid its message for centuries. With all the skills of an investigative journalist and master storyteller, Krosney traces the forgotten gospel’s improbable journey across three continents, a trek that would take it through the netherworld of the international antiquities trade, until the crumbling papyrus is finally made to give up its secrets. The race to discover the Gospel of Judas will go down as one of the great detective stories of biblical archaeology.
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P.S. Here’s another book that will either challenge or confirm Rabbi Schmuley Boteach’s thesis, authored by New Testament Professor-turned-atheist Bart D. Ehrman, whose book Forged has been featured among our MUST READ list. Once we get our copy, we will feature excerpted chapters.
