such an untraditional text as the Gospel of Judas. The maitre d’ gave me the note, and I read it to the others. The note said, “God wrote a book.” I turned to the maitre d’ and asked him how he knew to give the note to me. The maitre d’ replied that the man on the telephone had said that he should give the note to the guy with the chicken salad.
The title Gospel of Judas derives from the titular subscript (peuaggelion enioudas, 58,27–28), and the incipit or prologue of the gospel provides an overview of its contents: “The hidden revelatory discourse (plogo[s] ethēp entapophasis) that Jesus spoke with Judas Iscariot during a period of eight days, up to three days before he celebrated Passover” (33,1–6). The narrative introduces Jesus calling the twelve disciples and speaking with them about “the mysteries (emmustēri[o]n) that transcend the world and what is going to happen at the end” (33,16–18).
One day, it is said, Jesus happens upon the disciples as they are celebrating a sacred meal reminiscent of the Passover meal or the eucharist, and he laughs. Jesus laughs a great deal in the Gospel of Judas, as he does in other Sethian texts as well as elsewhere in gnostic literature.5 The disciples complain about the laughter, but Jesus insists that he is not laughing at them. He says, “You are not doing this of your own will but because this is how your god [will be] praised” (34,8–11). The disciples respond by confessing, “Master, you . . . are the son of our god” (34,11–13), but Jesus turns away from this statement of confession. They are talking about the creator of the world, the demiurge, and Jesus is not the son of the demiurge. At this the disciples are furious, and Jesus invites them to step up to him and face him, but none has the strength to do so—except Judas Iscariot. He stands before Jesus, averts his eyes, apparently in a respectful manner, and offers a profession, from a Sethian gnostic point of view, of who Jesus really is. Judas states before Jesus, “I know who you are and where you have come from. You have come from the immortal aeon of Barbelo, and I am not worthy to utter the name of the one who has sent you” (35,15–21). With a term from Hebrew, Barbelo, perhaps meaning something like “God in four” (that is, God in the tetragrammaton, the four-letter ineffable name of the divine), this profession declares that Jesus is from a transcendent realm far beyond this mortal world, and that the name of the one sending Jesus to this world is too holy to utter.6
In the Gospel of Judas the profession of Judas Iscariot is exactly right. Jesus, it is said, recognizes that Judas “was contemplating even more of the things that are lofty” (35,22–23), and so he takes him aside and begins to speak about “the mysteries of the kingdom” (emmustērion entmentero, 35,25). In fact, Jesus speaks with the disciples as a group and with Judas privately, and much of what he has to say is highly critical of sacrifice and a sacrificial cult. The Gospel of Judas is opposed to the practice of sacrifice and those who oversee sacrifice, and such criticism is directed toward sacrifice in the Jewish temple and, it appears, sacrificial themes in the Christian church, specifically in the emerging orthodox church. There is no place in the Gospel of Judas for a traditional sacrificial view of atonement. Jesus does not die for anyone’s sins in the Gospel of Judas, but rather he offers insight and knowledge through his wisdom and teaching. Still, what the “sacrifice” of the mortal body of Jesus does in the Gospel of Judas is bring about an apocalyptic conclusion to the affairs of the world.
For Judas, however, the message of Jesus is not altogether positive: he will be opposed by the others, and replaced in the circle of the twelve. He will be detained below, and Jesus laughs and calls him the “thirteenth spirit” (or daimon, daimōn, 44,21). (A couple of other passages under discussion in the Gospel of Judas, passages with faint ink traces and difficult syntactical challenges, may also add to the description of the detainment of Judas.7) The reference to Judas as spirit or daimon could be positive or negative. A daimon can be an evil demon in Judeo-Christian sources, to be sure, but it can also simply be an intermediate being between the human and divine realms, or it can be a spiritual alter ego, in the Platonic sense, of the sort that accompanied and guided Socrates. Elsewhere in the Gospel of Judas there are clear Platonic motifs, such as the observation by Jesus that each person has a star assigned to him or her, and the Gospel of Judas builds considerably on this theme of the importance of the stars and the place of the stars in human affairs.8
Judas will be the thirteenth, and he will be cursed, but eventually he will rule over the others. His star, Jesus announces, will rule over the thirteenth aeon (55,10–11). The concept of twelve aeons and thirteen aeons is used in Sethian literature, variously, but the closest and most exact parallels to the phrase “thirteenth aeon” are to be found in the Pistis Sophia and the Books of Jeu. There it is proclaimed that Sophia, the wisdom of God fallen into this world below, is persecuted by the archons of the twelve aeons, and although she is separated from the thirteenth aeon, she will return there, to her dwelling place in “the thirteenth aeon, the place of righteousness” (1.50). The thirteenth aeon retains a degree of ambiguity in the Pistis Sophia, to be sure, yet it remains the blissful goal of salvation and restoration for divine wisdom in the text. Further, like Judas, Sophia is referred to as a daimon, in two languages (Greek daimōn, Coptic refšoor), in the Pistis Sophia (1.39; 1.55). A similar situation is to be noted in Pseudo-Tertullian, in Adversus omnes haereses (“Against All Heresies”), where the wisdom (sapientia) of God is called an erring demon or spirit (daemon, 1.2). The fact that Irenaeus also reports that in the second century, around the time that the Gospel of Judas was being composed, certain gnostics (apparently Valentinians) compared Sophia and her sufferings in this world with Judas and his sufferings brings Judas even closer to the figure of divine wisdom. Irenaeus says these gnostics affirmed that Judas is “the type and image of that aeon (Sophia) who suffered” (2.20).9 The very limited presence of Sophia or wisdom on the existing pages of Gospel of Judas, a text without a mythic account of the fall of Sophia from glory, could in fact be balanced by the prominence of Judas in the gospel, as one who is opposed here below but is on his way to the thirteenth aeon. Perhaps Judas, with his apparent connections to Sophia, assumes the place of Sophia in the Gospel of Judas.10
The central section of the Gospel of Judas is a cosmological or cosmogonic revelation in which Jesus reveals to Judas the source and destiny of the light and life of God in the universe. The revelatory cosmogony is put on the lips of Jesus, but except for a single Christian intrusion into the account—an interpolation, it seems, done earlier or later, that unites the familiar Sethian angels Harmas and Athoth into the peculiar composite figure Harmathoth, apparently to make room for the surprising reference to “[S]eth, who is called Christ” (52,5–6)11—the entire cosmogony is a Hellenistic Jewish revelation, an example of a mythical or Sethian Jewish vision of the universe. The cosmogony builds on materials also found in such gnostic (and, in some cases, Sethian) texts as the Secret Book (or, Apocryphon) of John, the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, Eugnostos the Blessed, and the Wisdom of Jesus Christ. The revelatory section opens with words, attributed to Jesus, that employ the Sethian name of the divine—the great invisible Spirit—and a well-attested comment on transcendence. Jesus says to Judas, “[Come], that I may teach you about the things . . . that the human . . . will see. For there is a great and infinite aeon, whose dimensions no angelic generation could see. [In] it is the great invisible [Spirit] (p[n]oc emp[n(eum)a] nahora[t]on), which no eye of an [angel] has seen, no thought of the mind has grasped, nor was it called by any name” (47,2–13). The great invisible Spirit, taking its place in this infinite aeon, extends itself in a series of creations and emanations. Initially a luminous cloud becomes visible, and from the cloud comes Autogenes the Self-Conceived. Next four attendants appear,12 and Adamas, the generation of Seth, along with other aeons, luminaries, angels, heavens, and firmaments, beings of glory that emerge with myriads of angelic powers and in numbers with multiples of 5, 12, and 72, leading to 360 firmaments. There is, as it were, an evolution or devolution of light, with the light of the divine world shining downward. There does not seem to be room in the remaining lacunae or gaps in the text for a narrative account of the fall of Sophia or some other divine jolt in the progress of the light downward. The use of the numbers 5, 12, and 72 in passages on the heavenly aeons closely follows portions of the gnostic text Eugnostos the Blessed, which like the Gospel of Judas—and the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit—lacks an explicit account of the fall of Sophia.13
Eventually,
