Quick Answer
A second-century Gnostic text, lost for eighteen hundred years, in which Jesus laughs at his disciples and speaks alone with Judas, published in 2006 with a translation that made Judas the hero and a marketing campaign to match. The Coptic edition by Kasser, Meyer and Wurst is solid and the essays are good. The English translation made choices that the next wave of scholars, led by April DeConick, argued were exactly backwards: Judas as demon rather than favourite, the thirteenth as the archon's sphere rather than the aeon's. The text is Sethian Gnosticism's sharpest attack on the apostolic church, and the story of how it reached print is as instructive as anything in it.
Key Takeaways
- Irenaeus named it in 180 CE; the codex surfaced in Egypt around 1978.
- Sixteen years in a safe-deposit box, then a freezer, then restoration.
- The 2006 reading: Judas the enlightened one who frees Jesus.
- The 2007 reading: Judas the demon who serves the archons.
- Sethian to the core: Barbelo, Saklas, the race of Seth.
17 min read
What This Edition Is
The Gospel of Judas from Codex Tchacos was published by the National Geographic Society in April 2006, edited by Rodolphe Kasser, the Swiss Coptologist who led the restoration, Marvin Meyer, the American scholar of Gnosticism who did much of the translation, and Gregor Wurst, the German specialist in Coptic manuscripts. It contains an introduction, the English translation with notes, and four essays: Kasser on the codex's story, Ehrman on Christianity turned on its head, Wurst on Irenaeus, and Meyer on Judas and the Gnostic connection.
It is a short book, under two hundred pages, and the text itself occupies about twenty of them. A second edition in 2008 added a preface, newly recovered fragments, a revised translation, and additional essays. The Coptic edition proper, with facing translation, appeared separately in 2007 as The Gospel of Judas: Critical Edition.
This review is of the popular edition, which is the one most readers will hold, and of the argument that has surrounded it since the day it appeared.
What the book is not. It is not a gospel in the sense of the four canonical ones, since it contains no narrative of Jesus's ministry, and it is not by Judas or by anyone who knew him. It is a Gnostic revelation dialogue, composed in Greek in the mid-second century, preserved in a Coptic translation of the late third or fourth, and it tells us what one Gnostic community thought about the apostolic church and its God.
Irenaeus and the Lost Gospel
The reason the discovery was news.
Around 180 CE, Irenaeus of Lyons, in the first book of his Against Heresies, described a sect that honoured Cain, Esau, Korah and the Sodomites, held that Judas alone among the disciples knew the truth and accomplished the mystery of the betrayal, and produced a fabricated work which they call the Gospel of Judas. That was all anyone knew for eighteen centuries. The text was assumed lost, like most of what the Fathers attacked.
Wurst's essay in this edition establishes that the text found in Codex Tchacos is either the work Irenaeus meant or a close relative of it. The match is not perfect, since the Coptic text does not mention Cain or the Sodomites, and Irenaeus's report is polemical and second-hand. But the central claim, that Judas alone understood and that the handing-over was a mystery accomplished rather than a crime committed, is there in the manuscript, and the identification has held.
The Codex and Its Travels
Kasser's essay tells the story, and it is a cautionary tale about how ancient texts reach us.
Codex Tchacos, a papyrus book of sixty-six pages containing four texts, was found near El Minya in Middle Egypt, probably in a tomb, around 1978. It passed to a Cairo dealer, was offered to scholars in 1983 at a price they could not pay, was carried to the United States, and was placed in a safe-deposit box in Hicksville, New York, in 1984, where it remained for sixteen years while the papyrus dried, cracked and disintegrated. At some point a subsequent owner froze it, which did further damage. In 2000 a Zurich dealer, Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos, acquired it, and in 2001 the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art took it on for restoration, with National Geographic funding the work and securing the publication rights.
By then the codex was, in Kasser's words, in pieces: a top layer of pages roughly intact, below it a mass of fragments. Fragments had been removed and sold separately, and some of them surfaced only after the 2006 publication. The story is not unusual for papyri from the antiquities trade, but it is rarely told this frankly, and Kasser tells it.
The Restoration
Five years of work, led by Kasser with the conservator Florence Darbre, reassembling a text from nearly a thousand fragments.
The method was the one used for the Nag Hammadi library and other Coptic manuscripts: fragments placed under glass, matched by fibre pattern, ink and letter shape, and positioned using the page numbers that survived and the sense of the text. Wurst and Meyer worked on the text as it emerged. Around eighty-five percent of the Gospel of Judas was recovered by 2006, with some pages nearly complete and others reduced to a few words per line.
The translation therefore has gaps, marked with brackets and ellipses, and some passages that were reconstructed from a few letters. Readers should notice how much of the argument about the text's meaning turns on reconstructed or damaged lines. That is not a criticism of the editors; it is the condition of the evidence.
What the Text Says
An outline, since the book is short and the shape matters.
The opening announces the secret account of the revelation Jesus spoke with Judas Iscariot during eight days, three days before he celebrated Passover. Jesus appears to the disciples as they offer a prayer of thanksgiving over bread, and laughs. They are offended. He tells them that no generation of the people among them will know him. They grow angry, and he challenges any of them to stand before him. Only Judas can, and he says: I know who you are and where you have come from. You are from the immortal aeon of Barbelo.
Jesus takes Judas aside and reveals the mysteries of the kingdom. The disciples report a vision of the temple, twelve priests offering sacrifice on an altar, committing sins; Jesus tells them they are the priests and the cattle they sacrifice are the people they lead astray. Judas reports a vision of being stoned by the twelve and of a great house he cannot enter. Jesus tells him he will be cursed by the generations and will come to rule over them, and that he will be replaced among the twelve.
The long central section is a Sethian cosmogony: the great invisible Spirit, the self-generated one, the luminaries and aeons, Adamas and the incorruptible race of Seth, then the fall into the lower cosmos ruled by Nebro, also called Yaldabaoth, and Saklas, who make Adam and Eve. Jesus explains that the disciples' god is Saklas, that those who sacrifice to him are lost, and that Judas will exceed them all, for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me. Judas looks up at a luminous cloud and enters it. The text ends with the handing-over: the scribes approach Judas, he answers them as they wish, and he receives money and hands him over. The title follows.
The Laughing Jesus
Four times Jesus laughs, and each time at the disciples.
He laughs at their thanksgiving prayer, because they offer it to their god, not his Father. He laughs when they ask about the generation that will know him. He laughs at Judas's question about the fate of the generations of humanity, telling him the stars bring things to completion. He laughs at the disciples' zeal in one damaged passage. The laughing Saviour appears elsewhere in Gnostic literature, in the Second Treatise of the Great Seth and the Apocalypse of Peter, where he laughs from above the cross at those who think they are crucifying him.
The laughter is the text's tone. The apostolic church, with its eucharist, its priesthood and its God, is wrong and, beyond that, ridiculous, and the Saviour finds it so. Whatever else the text says about Judas, its attitude to the twelve is contempt, and it is the contempt of a community that had been excluded by them.
The Sethian Cosmology
The section that places the text within a known school.
The mythology Jesus reveals to Judas is Sethian: the same system found in the Apocryphon of John, the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, and other Nag Hammadi texts. The great invisible Spirit is the ultimate God. From him comes the self-generated one, Autogenes, and the aeons and luminaries. Adamas, the heavenly Adam, and Seth, whose incorruptible generation are the Gnostics themselves. Below, through a fall the damaged text does not fully preserve, a lower creator arises, named Nebro, rebel, whose face flashes with fire and who is also Yaldabaoth, with his assistant Saklas, the fool. They make Adam and Eve after the image above. This is the demiurge of the Sethian texts, and the disciples' god is he.
Meyer's essay sets this out clearly and it is the book's most useful scholarly contribution, since it settles the text's affiliation. The Gospel of Judas is not Valentinian, not Marcionite, and not a stray oddity. It belongs to the Sethian corpus and reads with it.
The Thirteenth
The crux of the whole interpretation, and the point at which the 2006 edition and its critics part.
Jesus says to Judas: you will become the thirteenth, and you will be cursed by the other generations, and you will come to rule over them. Elsewhere he addresses him as the thirteenth spirit, in Coptic daimon. In the 2006 translation, the thirteenth is an exaltation: Judas rises above the twelve to a thirteenth position, and the thirteenth spirit is rendered as spirit in a neutral or positive sense. Judas looks up into the luminous cloud and enters it, which the editors read as his transfiguration.
The counter-reading, set out by April DeConick in The Thirteenth Apostle in 2007, argues that in Sethian texts the thirteenth sphere belongs to Yaldabaoth, the archon, above the twelve lower heavens; that daimon in Coptic Gnostic texts means demon, not spirit; that Judas being cursed and ruling over the generations means ruling as an archon rules; and that the one who enters the cloud in the damaged passage is Jesus, not Judas. On this reading Judas is not exalted above the twelve but demonised beyond them: he is the disciple who serves the archons by handing over the Saviour's body, which is exactly what the archons want, and the text is a savage parody of the apostolic church, whose founder-apostles are priests of Saklas and whose betrayer is a demon.
The Sacrifice
The line the 2006 edition made famous and the disputed reading of it.
Jesus tells Judas: you will exceed all of them, for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me. In 2006 this was read as praise: Judas, by handing Jesus over to death, releases him from the body and enables his return to the world of light, a service greater than any other disciple's. The book's cover and its publicity ran on this reading.
DeConick and others read exceed as exceed in evil: Judas will do worse than all the sacrificing priests, since they sacrifice cattle to Saklas and he will sacrifice the human body of the Saviour. The text's whole treatment of sacrifice is hostile; the disciples' sacrifices are sins; and there is no reason, on this reading, for Judas's sacrifice to be the one exception. The Gnostic Jesus does not need to be killed to be freed, since his spirit was never bound, and the handing-over is what the archons wanted, not what he did.
The two readings cannot both be right and the manuscript does not settle it, since the disputed lines are grammatically ambiguous and the passage that would decide who enters the cloud is damaged. Readers should know that they are holding one side of a live argument.
The 2006 Reading: Judas the Hero
The interpretation the book presents, stated fairly.
Judas is the only disciple who can stand before Jesus and name his origin. He alone receives the private revelation. Jesus tells him to step away from the others and he will be told the mysteries of the kingdom. He is told he will be cursed but will rule. He sees the great house that is for the holy and is told he will be replaced among the twelve. He enters the luminous cloud. And he does what Jesus tells him: he sacrifices the body that clothes the Saviour, and so accomplishes the mystery that Irenaeus said the Cainites attributed to him.
Ehrman's essay develops this into a reading of the text as Christianity turned on its head, in which the villain of the canonical story becomes the hero and the heroes become priests of a false god. It is a coherent reading of the translated text, and it was the natural first reading of a text that Irenaeus had reported as honouring Judas. Its weakness is that it depends on translation choices that the Sethian parallels do not support.
The 2007 Reading: Judas the Demon
The counter-interpretation, stated with equal fairness.
The text calls Judas a daimon, and Sethian texts use the word for the archons' servants. The thirteenth is the archon's number in Sethian cosmology. Judas's vision of being stoned and of a house he cannot enter is not a vision of glory but of exclusion: Jesus tells him no one born of mortal flesh may enter that house. He will be cursed. He will rule over the generations, as the archons rule. He will exceed the sacrificing priests by sacrificing the Saviour's human vessel, which is what the archons want and what the true Gnostic would never do. And the one who enters the cloud, on a plausible reconstruction, is Jesus, ascending and leaving Judas below to take his money.
On this reading the text's point is not that Judas was secretly good but that the apostolic church is founded on a betrayal engineered by the archons and carried out by their servant, and that its sacrifice theology, in which Jesus's death is an offering to God, is worship of Saklas. That is a much fiercer polemic than the 2006 reading, and it fits the laughter better. DeConick's argument has persuaded most, though not all, of the specialists who have written since; Meyer continued to defend a version of the 2006 reading until his death in 2012.
The dispute is a lesson in how a text's meaning can flip on a few words. Spirit or demon for daimon. Thirteenth aeon or thirteenth archon. Set apart for the holy generation or set apart from it, where the Coptic preposition is ambiguous. Exceed all of them in honour or in wickedness. Judas enters the cloud or Jesus does, where the papyrus is broken. None of these is a matter of Coptic competence; the editors were expert. They are matters of the frame a translator brings, and the 2006 team, working under a publication deadline and a story that Irenaeus had already suggested, brought the frame of Judas the misunderstood. The lesson holds for every ancient text you will ever read in translation.
The Translation Problems
Beyond the interpretive choices, the 2006 translation had mechanical faults that the second edition corrected.
Some restorations of damaged lines went beyond what the papyrus supports. A negative was dropped in one place, turning could not into could. A line rendered as set apart for the holy generation was revised to set apart from it. The passage in which Judas asks whether the human spirit dies was retranslated. Working from the Coptic edition, which the popular volume did not print, was impossible for most readers, and the 2006 translation stood alone for a year during which the hero reading became the public understanding of the text.
None of this makes the edition worthless. The Coptic transcription by Kasser and Wurst is a scholarly achievement and the 2007 critical edition is the standard text. But the English of 2006 should be read as a first attempt, and readers should have DeConick's translation or Meyer's later one beside it.
The Essays
The four essays are the book's most durable content.
Kasser's on the codex's history is candid and painful, and is the best short account of how the antiquities trade treats papyri. Ehrman's on the text's inversion of Christianity is lucid and, whatever one makes of the hero reading, a fine introduction to how Gnostic Christians differed from proto-orthodox ones. Wurst's on Irenaeus is careful and settles the identification. Meyer's on the Sethian connection is the scholarly core and situates the text properly.
Together they take a reader from the tomb near El Minya through the safe-deposit box to the second century, and that arc is the reason to own the book rather than to read the text online.
The Second Edition and After
The 2008 edition added a preface acknowledging the debate, a revised translation that softened several of the contested renderings, newly recovered fragments, and an essay on the text's Sethian setting. Since then further fragments have been identified in private hands and published, and Wurst and others have continued to refine the reading of damaged pages. The codex's other three texts, the Letter of Peter to Philip, the First Apocalypse of James, and a fragmentary work called Allogenes, have also been published, and the Letter of Peter to Philip and James are versions of Nag Hammadi texts.
The Gospel of Judas itself, in a corrected form, now appears in Meyer's The Nag Hammadi Scriptures and in most subsequent collections, and DeConick's translation is available in her book. A reader who wants the text alone has better options than the 2006 edition; a reader who wants the story and the essays does not.
The Publicity
A word on the circumstances, because they affected the book.
National Geographic timed the release for the week before Easter 2006, with a television documentary, a cover story and worldwide press. The hero reading was the headline: the betrayer rehabilitated, the church's story overturned. The scholarly reaction, which began within months and became decisive by 2007, did not get the same coverage, and the public understanding of the text remains the 2006 one. The society was criticised for restricting access to the manuscript to its own team until publication and for the way it handled a text that had been illegally exported. Kasser's essay, to its credit, does not hide the export.
The episode is a case study in how a discovery's meaning can be set by its first press release, and it is worth reading the book with that in mind.
What It Tells Us About Judas
Nothing. This deserves to be said plainly, since the publicity implied otherwise.
The text was written a century or more after Judas's death by people with no access to any tradition about him beyond the canonical gospels and the Cainite speculation Irenaeus reported. It does not preserve a lost memory of what happened; it tells a Gnostic story about what the handing-over must have meant if the Gnostic view of the world is true. Its Judas is a theological figure, as is the Judas of Matthew, and the historian learns from it only what second-century Gnostics believed. That is worth learning. It is not the same as learning who Judas was.
Its Place in the Gnostic Corpus
Where it sits, for readers who know the field.
It is the one major Gnostic text found outside the Nag Hammadi library since 1945, and it is the only surviving text named by a Church Father as a Gnostic gospel that has come back. It is Sethian, so it belongs with the Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of the Egyptians rather than with the Valentinian Thomas-adjacent literature or the Pistis Sophia. Its polemic against the eucharist and the apostolic priesthood is the sharpest in the corpus, sharper than Mary, and it is the clearest evidence we have that some Gnostic communities regarded the developing church not as a rival but as the archons' instrument.
It also confirms, against those who think Gnosticism a modern construct, that Irenaeus was describing something real. He said there was a Gospel of Judas that made Judas the one who knew. There was.
The Objections
Three, and the first two are fatal to the 2006 edition as a translation, though not as a book.
The translation was framed before it was made. The hero reading was the story National Geographic had bought, and the disputed renderings all lean toward it.
Access was restricted. Other scholars could not check the Coptic until the 2007 edition appeared, so the errors went uncorrected for a year of headlines.
The text is thin. Twenty pages, a fifth of them gaps. A reader expecting a lost gospel comparable to Thomas will find a revelation dialogue with a long cosmogony and a short frame.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you know the Nag Hammadi texts and want the one major addition to them.
Read it for Kasser's essay if you want to understand what happens to a papyrus between the tomb and the library.
Read it against DeConick, and decide for yourself whether Judas is the thirteenth aeon or the thirteenth archon. That exercise teaches more about reading Gnostic texts than any introduction.
Read it if you saw the 2006 headlines and have wondered since what the text actually says. It does not say what the headlines said, and finding that out is the point.
The deepest thing in the Gospel of Judas is not its view of Judas but its view of worship. The disciples pray over bread, and the Saviour laughs, because they are praying to the wrong god without knowing it. The text's charge against the church is not that it is wicked but that it is mistaken about whom it addresses, and that its most sacred act is offered upward into a system that receives it gladly and gives nothing back. Whether or not one accepts the Sethian answer, the question the text puts is one every tradition has to face: how do you know that the one you worship is the one you think? The Gnostics answered it with a cosmology. The text's value, once the Judas debate is set aside, is that it makes a reader ask.
The lost gospel Irenaeus named, recovered from a thousand fragments, with the editors' essays and the translation that started the argument.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the translation's disputed readings and the DeConick counter-argument is given in full above and was not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Gospel of Judas?
A Gnostic text from the second century, surviving in a fourth-century Coptic copy, in which Jesus speaks privately with Judas Iscariot, laughs at the other disciples' worship, reveals the true God above the creator, and tells Judas he will hand him over. Irenaeus mentioned it around 180 CE; it was lost until the twentieth century.
What is this edition?
The National Geographic Society's 2006 publication, edited by Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer and Gregor Wurst, giving the first English translation with introduction, notes and essays by the editors and by Bart Ehrman. A second edition in 2008 added newly recovered fragments and a revised translation.
Does it say Judas was a hero?
The 2006 translation did: Judas is the one disciple who understands Jesus, and the handing-over frees Jesus from his body at Jesus's own request. Scholars led by April DeConick argued in 2007 that key passages were mistranslated and that Judas is a demon who does the archons' work. The debate continues.
Where did the manuscript come from?
Codex Tchacos was found near El Minya in Egypt around 1978, passed through dealers, sat in a Long Island safe-deposit box for sixteen years, was frozen at one point, and was finally bought and restored by the Maecenas Foundation in 2001. Pages had crumbled to fragments by then.
Is it a real gospel of Judas?
It is the text Irenaeus named, or one very like it, so it is a real second-century Gnostic work. It is not by Judas and contains no historical information about him or about Jesus. It tells us what one Gnostic community thought of the apostolic church.
Which Gnostic school produced it?
The Sethian school, whose mythology of the great invisible Spirit, Barbelo, the aeons, Seth's incorruptible race and the ignorant creator Saklas or Yaldabaoth the text shares with the Apocryphon of John and other Nag Hammadi works.
Why does Jesus laugh?
Four times, always at the disciples: at their eucharist offered to the wrong god, at their zeal, at their star-bound fate. Laughing Jesus is a Gnostic figure found in other texts too, and here it marks the distance between the Saviour and the church that thinks it worships him.
What is the thirteenth?
Jesus calls Judas the thirteenth spirit or daimon and says he will be cursed by the twelve but rule over them. In 2006 this was read as exaltation to a thirteenth aeon; DeConick read it as identification with the thirteenth level ruled by the archon Yaldabaoth. The whole interpretation turns on it.
How much of the text survives?
Roughly eighty-five percent after the 2006 restoration, with gaps throughout and several damaged pages. The 2008 second edition added fragments that had been separated from the codex and sold, and further pieces have surfaced since.
Is the translation reliable?
The Coptic edition by Kasser and Wurst is respected. The English translation of 2006 made choices at several disputed points that most later scholars have rejected, and the 2008 revision softened some. Read it alongside DeConick's or Meyer's later translation.
What did the discovery change?
It confirmed Irenaeus's report, added a complete Sethian text to the corpus, and gave scholars a Gnostic critique of the developing church's sacrifice theology. It changed nothing about the historical Judas. Its public effect was far larger than its scholarly one.
Who should read it?
Readers of the Nag Hammadi library who want the one major Gnostic text found outside it, anyone interested in how an ancient manuscript becomes a modern book, and anyone who saw the 2006 headlines and wants to know what the text actually says.
Read one passage both ways
Take the line about the thirteenth and read it twice: once as the 2006 editors did, as Judas raised above the twelve, and once as DeConick did, as Judas assigned to the archon's sphere. Notice how the same Coptic words support both, and notice which reading you wanted before you checked the parallels. That preference is the thing to learn about. Every ancient text arrives with a story already attached, by a Church Father, a publisher or a documentary, and the discipline is to read the words before the story. The Gospel of Judas, whatever it says about Judas, is a good place to practise, because for once the two stories are laid side by side and the papyrus between them is visibly broken.
Sources & References
- Kasser, Rodolphe, Marvin Meyer and Gregor Wurst, eds. The Gospel of Judas from Codex Tchacos, 2nd ed., National Geographic Society, 2008.
- Kasser, Rodolphe and Gregor Wurst, eds. The Gospel of Judas, Together with the Letter of Peter to Philip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos: Critical Edition, 2007.
- DeConick, April D. The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says, rev. ed., 2009.
- Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 1.31.1.
- Meyer, Marvin, ed. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, for the revised translation.
- Krosney, Herbert. The Lost Gospel: The Quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot, for the codex's history.