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 the early church and the theological options in the first centuries of the Christian movement. How, we asked, does the Gospel of Judas change the story of the early church, and how does this gospel take its place among other Christian gospels, including the four gospels in the New Testament canon? Obviously the interpretive possibilities are interesting and thought-provoking, and we kept talking until the restaurant was empty. As we were about to leave, the maitre d’ approached our table with a note that had been called in, apparently by someone who had been in the restaurant at an adjoining table and had been
