The Gospel of Judas: The Betrayer as the Hero

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. A Christian group of the 100s who believed that the god of the other churches was a lesser, false god.

When: Before about AD 180, when a bishop in Gaul named it and condemned it. The one surviving copy is in Coptic, from the 200s or 300s.

Where it fits: The days before my last Passover. I talk with my disciples, laugh at them, and reveal secrets to Judas alone, who then hands me over.

Which Bibles keep it: None.

Where you hear it in your Bible: Judas is in all four gospels and Acts: one of the twelve, who handed me over to the chief priests for money (Mark 14:10–11; Matthew 26:14–16; 27:3–5; Acts 1:16–18).

How close it stays to me: Close in its anger at religion that sacrifices people. Far in contempt for my friends, the body and the many.

If you only read three chapters: It has none. Read the scenes of my laughter, the vision of the temple, and the last page.

Words to Know

Codex Tchacos — the ancient book that holds the only copy of this gospel, named by its owner, the dealer Frieda Tchacos Nussberger, after her father.

Sethian — a name scholars give to one early group that claimed descent from Seth, Adam’s third son, as a holy race.

Saklas — in this gospel, the lesser god who made the world, whose name means fool.

Irenaeus — bishop of Lyon in Gaul, who wrote around AD 180 a long attack on teachings he considered false.

The Book in Brief

This is the secret account of what I said to Judas Iscariot during a week, three days before I celebrated Passover. I find my disciples giving thanks over bread, and laugh. They are angry. I tell them they are not praising my Father but their own god, and no one among them knows me. Only Judas can stand before me, and he says I come from the immortal realm of Barbelo. I take him aside to tell him the mysteries of the kingdom.

The disciples tell me of a vision of a great temple where twelve priests make offerings at an altar: some sacrifice their own children, some their wives, while calling on my name. I tell them they are the priests, and the offerings are the people they lead astray.

To Judas I reveal how the universe began: the great invisible Spirit, many realms of light and angels, and then the lesser rulers who made this world, Nebro and Saklas, who made Adam and Eve. Only a holy generation will be saved. Judas sees a vision of himself stoned by the other disciples. I tell him he will be cursed by the other generations, but will come to rule over them, and he will exceed them all, for he will sacrifice the man that clothes me.

Judas looks up and sees a luminous cloud and enters it. The scribes are watching for me in the guest room. Judas takes their money, and hands me over to them.

It made headlines around the world in April 2006, at Easter. A lost gospel, found after seventeen centuries, telling the story from Judas’s side, in which I ask him to hand me over. Many people heard only that, and were told the church had been wrong about Judas.

The real book is stranger than that, and darker.

The traitor’s gospel

Long before anyone found it, people knew it existed. Around AD 180, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, wrote a long attack on teachings he believed were false. In it he describes a group who honored Cain and the men of Sodom as enemies of the world’s maker, and who said that Judas, knowing the truth as no others did, carried out the mystery of the betrayal. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, he wrote, which they style the Gospel of Judas.¹

So a Gospel of Judas existed before 180. The Coptic copy found in Egypt is probably a translation of that book, or of a later form of it.

Go deeperSixteen years in a safe deposit box

The book was found in the 1970s, probably near the town of Minya in Middle Egypt, in a cave or tomb. It passed into the hands of an antiquities dealer in Cairo, and some of its pages were stolen from him.²

For years he tried to sell it, asking millions of dollars. In 1983 scholars examined it in a Geneva hotel room and recognized it as important, but could not raise the price. In 1984 the dealer put it in a safe deposit box in a bank in Hicksville, on Long Island, New York, where it sat in the damp for sixteen years. By the time it was taken out, the papyrus was crumbling into pieces. A later buyer kept it in a freezer for a time, which did more damage.²

In 2001 it was acquired by a Swiss foundation, and a team of scholars spent five years piecing together nearly a thousand fragments. The National Geographic Society announced the find, with a translation, in April 2006. Radiocarbon tests dated the book to around AD 280, give or take sixty years.²

About one part in seven of the gospel is still missing.

I laughed

In this gospel I laugh a great deal. It is not kind laughter.

The first scene: I come upon my disciples sitting together, giving thanks over bread, and I laugh. They ask why I am laughing at their prayer. I tell them they are not doing it because they want to; they are doing it because their god will be praised.³ They become angry, and I tell them that none of them knows me.

In this book the disciples worship the wrong god. Their god is the maker of this world, a lesser and foolish power. The true God is far above it, and only a few souls, a holy generation, belong to him.

I did not laugh at my friends for giving thanks over bread. I did it with them, on the hillside and at the last supper. Jesus took bread, and when he had blessed, he broke it, and gave to them (Mark 14:22). And the God I thanked, the one who made the world and gives bread, was my Father. I called the lilies and the sparrows his. I never taught that the world was made by a fool.

Priests who sacrifice their own children

But then the disciples tell me a dream, and here the book says something I understand.

They saw a great house with an altar, and twelve priests standing at it, and a crowd waiting. The priests were offering sacrifices: some of their own children, some their wives, while others lay with men, or murdered. And all of it they did in my name.³

I tell them: you are those priests. The cattle you saw brought for sacrifice are the many people you lead astray.

The writer was angry at the leaders of the other churches. Some think he was angry most of all at bishops who told ordinary Christians that dying as martyrs for me was the noblest thing they could do, and sent them into the arenas. Others think he meant the bishops’ whole way of teaching. Either way, his charge is that religious leaders were feeding on the people they claimed to serve, and calling it worship.⁴

I said nearly that, in the Temple. My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations? But you have made it a den of robbers! (Mark 11:17). I said the scribes devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayers (Mark 12:40). Religion that sacrifices people to keep itself going is the oldest kind of idolatry there is.

The difference is that I did not tell my disciples they were the priests in that dream. They were fishermen. The men I was angry at had the Temple, the treasury and Rome behind them.

Go deeperHero or demon?

When the Gospel of Judas was first published in 2006, the team that translated it presented Judas as the hero: the one disciple who understood me, and who handed me over because I asked him to, to free my spirit from my body.

Within a year other scholars challenged that reading. The most prominent was April DeConick, in The Thirteenth Apostle (2007). She argued that in key places the first translation had chosen the kindest meaning of a Coptic word. Where it called Judas the thirteenth spirit, the word was daimon, which in Christian writing almost always means demon. Where it said Judas was set apart for the holy generation, it could as well be read set apart from it. And where it spoke of Judas’s ascent to the holy generation, the Coptic actually says he will not ascend to it; the first translators had corrected away the word not.⁵

On DeConick’s reading, this gospel is a dark joke. Judas understands who I am, but he serves Saklas, the false god. His sacrifice of my body is the worst act of the worst disciple, and it proves that the other churches, which built their worship on my sacrifice, honor the work of a demon.

Scholars still disagree. Later editions of the translation changed several of the disputed readings. What everyone agrees on is that this gospel does not simply tell the old story from Judas’s side.

The man that clothes me

The center of this gospel is one sentence I say to Judas, near the end: you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me (Gospel of Judas, page 56).³

In this book my body is not me. It is a garment, a costume the real spirit wears. To kill it is to set the spirit free. So Judas, by handing me over to die, does what the others could not: he takes the costume off.

I did not wear a body like a costume. I was born of a woman. I ate and drank, and was called a glutton and a drunkard for it. I touched a leper with my hand. In the garden I was so afraid of what would happen to that body that my sweat fell like drops of blood. On the third day I rose in it, and asked my friends for something to eat.

The kingdom I preached was for bodies: bread for the hungry, healing for the sick, a roof for the stranger. A gospel that thinks the body is a garment to be thrown away has no reason to feed anyone.

Where Judas and I part

Your four gospels tell the story of Judas plainly, and it is sadder than this gospel.

He went away to the chief priests, that he might deliver him to them. They, when they heard it, were glad, and promised to give him money (Mark 14:10–11). And when he saw that I was condemned, he felt remorse … saying, ‘I have sinned in that I betrayed innocent blood.’ But they said, ‘What is that to us? You see to it.’ And he went and hanged himself (Matthew 27:3–5).

Judas was not a hero who understood a secret. He was one of my friends, who sold me to the men who served the empire, and then could not bear what he had done. The priests who paid him did not care.

I washed his feet that last night, with the others. When he came with the soldiers to the garden, I said to him, Friend, why are you here? (Matthew 26:50). He was my friend. This gospel makes him the only one worth saving, and the others the servants of a fool. I chose all twelve.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Matthew 27:3–10.

You will find: Judas’s remorse, the thirty pieces of silver thrown back, and the priests’ answer: What is that to us?

Then read John 13:1–5, the washing of feet, with Judas still at the table.

The Short Version

• The Gospel of Judas was known to Irenaeus around AD 180. The only copy, in Coptic, was found in Egypt in the 1970s, rotted for sixteen years in a New York bank, and was published in 2006.
• In it I laugh at my disciples for praying over bread to the wrong god. I gave thanks over bread with them, on the hillside and at the last supper.
• Its vision of priests sacrificing their own families is an angry, fair picture of religion that feeds on people.
• Judas is praised because he will sacrifice the man that clothes me. My body was not a costume.
• Scholars now argue whether this Judas is a hero or a demon. In my story he is a friend who sold me and could not live with it.