activity of the angel El (or Eleleth), twelve angels appear to rule over chaos. As Lance Jenott suggests in his edition, “The stories told by Judas and the Holy Book present the impetus for creation as an act of divine providence intended to bring primordial chaos under the control of benevolent heavenly powers.” Jenott compares this account with the creation stories of Genesis 1 and the Timaeus of Plato, “in which,” he says, “the creator desires to bring order out of disorder.”14 Unfortunately, rebellious demiurgic beings come to rule in the world below, and their names, derived from Aramaic or Hebrew, are as grim as their megalomaniacal natures: Yaldabaoth (“child of chaos” or “child of (S)abaoth”), Sakla (“fool”), and Nebro (“rebel”).15 The rulers of this world in turn bring forth five angels, and Sakla the fool creates earthly Adam and Eve. Initially, life looks grim and gloomy for Adam, Eve, and their human descendants, but promises are given about salvific knowledge and an enduring image. Jesus says, “God caused knowledge (gnōsis) to be given to Adam and those with him, so that the kings of chaos and the underworld would not lord it over them” (54,8–12). Somewhat later Jesus reiterates the promise, in slightly different terms, with regard to the final resolution of all: “And then the image of the great generation of Adam will be magnified, for prior to heaven, earth, and the angels, that generation from the aeons exists” (57,9–14).
Toward the end of the Gospel of Judas, in a part of the text that has been plagued with lacunae, Jesus turns to Judas and says to him, “But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man who bears me (prōme . . . etrphorei emmoei). Already your horn has been raised, and your anger has flared up, and your star has passed by, and your heart has [grown strong]” (56,17–24). The lines that focus upon the readiness of Judas recall poetic lines from the Psalms and even more so—Tage Petersen has shown—the opening of the song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2, and the prediction that Judas will sacrifice the man who bears Jesus takes the sting out of the infamous deed of Judas. The one whom Judas hands over, or betrays, in the Gospel of Judas is not the spiritual Jesus at all. The spiritual Jesus is the immortal one within. The mortal flesh is what will be handed over, betrayed, and, it is assumed, crucified.16 In the midst of lacunae, the text seems to say—in a passage that was unclear before the recent appearance of additional papyrus fragments—that something fairly dramatic may happen in the world to the ruler of the world. Whatever may be the precise content of this passage, which we shall examine below, after that Jesus says to Judas, “Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and behold the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. And the star that leads the way, that is your star” (57,15–20). Judas looks up, sees the luminous cloud—“And he entered it” (auō affōk ehoun eros, 57,22–23). A revelatory voice comes from the cloud and speaks in a lacuna, and the Gospel of Judas comes to its conclusion with an understated account of Judas handing over Jesus—or, rather, the mortal body of Jesus. By now the spirit of Jesus is gone, having returned to the light above.
Invariably ancient texts are open to a diversity of scholarly interpretations, and so it has been, in the years since 2006, with the Gospel of Judas. On account of the relative obscurity of the Coptic text, the number of lacunae that have remained in the text until the present, the faint and ambiguous character of some of the ink traces, and the mystical gnostic contents of the gospel account, the Gospel of Judas may be open to even more interpretive debate than might be anticipated. In addition to interpretations that see the Gospel of Judas as a more or less typical gnosticizing gospel with a critique of the emerging orthodox church and a proclamation of salvation through gnosis communicated by the savior to and through a disciple or disciples—I offer such an interpretation here in this book—several colleagues have emphasized features in the gospel like the statement of Jesus that designates Judas as a daimon or demon, who may be understood to be in collaboration with the demiurge and who commits an act of wicked sacrifice by betraying Jesus. Thus, April DeConick has proposed that Judas is presented in the Gospel of Judas as an evil demon in league with the ruler of this world in a gospel that functions as a gospel parody.17 Once Louis Painchaud speculated, somewhat tentatively, that the gospel’s negative portrayal of Judas, though he is enlightened with gnosis, would suggest that the gospel means to warn gnostics against the apostasy of returning to the ways of sacrificial atonement and wickedness in the emerging orthodox church (the word ap[os]tatēs, which could be translated as “apostate,” is used in the gospel at 51,14).18 John Turner has seen the text as confusing and perplexing, as being out of synch with Sethian gnosis, and he has concluded that the Coptic version of the Gospel of Judas is a later text with a complex textual history, and that it is essentially pseudo-Sethian.19 Conversely, I interpret the Gospel of Judas as a gospel of Sethian content in which Jesus gives a series of insightful disclosures about sacrificial themes and the meaning of life and death, through a specially selected disciple, none other than Judas Iscariot, who is enlightened with the revelatory knowledge Jesus imparts.
While several passages are crucial for the ongoing debate about the overall interpretation of the Gospel of Judas, four may be highlighted here. Not only are these four central to the arguments raised; they also are addressed, to some considerable extent, in the papyrus fragments that have become available. The four passages deal with 1) the meaning of apophasis in the incipit of the Gospel of Judas; 2) the meaning of Judas as the thirteenth, linked to the thirteenth aeon; 3) the context of the prediction of Judas sacrificing the man who bears Jesus; and 4) the final entry into the cloud of light and what follows.
Fragments
Herb Krosney, the author who uncovered much of the story of the discovery of the Gospel of Judas and Codex Tchacos and published the story in The Lost Gospel: The Quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot, has also pursued the issue of additional fragments of Codex Tchacos. He published his preliminary report of the story of the fragments in 2010 in the European periodical Early Christianity. There had been speculation—and hope—that additional papyrus of the Gospel of Judas and the other texts in Codex Tchacos might be found, so that some of the lacunae in the text might be filled. It was also assumed by many of us that if anyone might have such fragments, it would likely be Bruce Ferrini, who once had possession of Codex Tchacos and then had to surrender the codex. In 2008 Ferrini declared bankruptcy in Ohio, and he confessed that he had in fact retained papyrus pieces that he was to have returned. Krosney writes of Ferrini’s actions, “He also left the court-supervised proceedings at lunchtime, with his lawyer, and returned to the court an hour or so later with something like a lawyer’s briefcase and what appeared to be full page fragments inside.” Photographs were taken of the papyrus fragments, and they were delivered to Gregor Wurst, who sent some of them to me, and it was confirmed that the fragments surrendered by Ferrini were from the Gospel of Judas and Codex Tchacos. In 2009, a lawyer involved in the case was scheduled to deliver these fragments to Europe for conservation, so that they might be joined to the rest of the papyrus codex; but at the airport in Cleveland he was stopped and the fragments were confiscated by federal authorities. Under the auspices of issues of repatriation of antiquities, the fragments were later delivered, not to Europe, but rather to Egypt. In 2010, Bruce Ferrini died.
In the spring of 2009, the court case involving Bruce Ferrini came to a close, and it was publicly announced that among the antiquities he had to surrender were more papyrus fragments of the Gospel of Judas and the texts of Codex Tchacos. Substantial fragments of the Letter of Peter to Philip provide scholars with a very interesting and much more complete second version of that text. A fragment placed at the end of James seems to give a new and fresh understanding of the gnostic interpretation of the theme of martyrdom in that text. And a number of fragments of the Gospel of Judas now allow about 90–95 percent of the gospel to be legible, and new light is being shed on the four key passages cited above.20
1. According to ancient usage, the word apophasis, which is used in the incipit or prologue of the Gospel of Judas, can have a range of meanings, from “declaration” or “revelation” to “judgment” or “verdict.” The term is used elsewhere in literature on the gnostics, most notably in Hippolytus of Rome’s Refutatio omnium haeresium (“Refutation of All Heresies”), where the author makes reference to a work of gnosis attributed to Simon Magus titled Apophasis megale, most likely to be understood in a positive light as “Great Declaration”
