The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed

Ehrman sets the Gospel of Judas in two histories: its modern recovery, and the ancient and later traditions about Judas Iscariot. He follows the Coptic manuscript from its reported discovery in Middle Egypt through antiquities dealers to restoration, summarises the Gospel's narrative and Gnostic teaching, and compares portrayals of Judas in the canonical Gospels, other early Christian writings and medieval legends. He then asks what can be inferred about the historical Judas and why he betrayed Jesus. The evidence is the Gospel of Judas and its manuscript history, the canonical Gospels, Acts, Paul's letters, quotations preserved by church writers, and later works such as the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Arabic Infancy Gospel and the Golden Legend.

How it is organised

The eleven chapters begin with the manuscript and a survey of Judas in the earliest Gospels and later traditions. Chapters on earlier knowledge of a Gospel of Judas and on the manuscript's discovery, ownership and restoration lead to chapters on the Gospel's narrative, its Gnostic teachings and its portrayal of Jesus, Judas and the Twelve. Two chapters consider the historical Judas and reconstruct the betrayal and his death, and the last places the text within early Christianity. Notes and an index close the volume.

Collection history

The manuscript is a Coptic codex that holds the Gospel of Judas and other texts. Its reported discovery in Middle Egypt was followed by circulation through antiquities dealers, in Cairo and then in Geneva, where Nicolas Koutoulakis was approached to help find a buyer and later returned the manuscripts. The codex deteriorated in storage and through freezing before Florence Darbre and Rodolphe Kasser restored it, matching pages and fragments by their ink and papyrus fibres. Ehrman also reports the carbon-14 dating and the gaps left by missing portions of the text (pp. 70–83).

The argument

Ehrman treats the Gospel narratives as literary works shaped by their authors' theological concerns, and keeps that comparison apart from historical reconstruction. For him the Gospel of Judas gives no evidence for what the historical Judas thought or did. It is a later Gnostic account in which Judas is the disciple who understands Jesus and carries out his will, and what it shows is the range of belief and disagreement among Christians after Jesus' death. Ehrman tells reported traditions from his own proposals by comparing the differences among accounts, their literary aims and their relation to oral traditions (pp. 141–180).

In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus converses with the disciples, above all Judas, in the days before Passover. The episodes include the disciples' eucharistic meal, their vision of Temple sacrifices, Judas's vision and Jesus' account of creation, and the story ends with Judas handing Jesus over to the authorities, with no crucifixion or resurrection. Ehrman reads the text as Gnostic: the material world is the work of inferior divine beings, and salvation is knowledge that lets the elect leave the bodily world. The other disciples misunderstand Jesus and serve the wrong god, while Judas receives the secret teaching and enables Jesus to leave his mortal body, so that the betrayal is obedience and not hostility (pp. 85–98).

In the historical chapters Ehrman proposes that Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic preacher who expected God's Kingdom soon and that Judas, as one of the Twelve, shared the expectation. He judges the firmest claims to be that Judas was named Judas Iscariot, belonged to the Twelve and handed Jesus over to the authorities. The meaning of Iscariot remains unresolved for him, and he notes conflicting accounts of Judas's death. He argues that Judas may have disclosed private teaching about Jesus' future kingship, which would bear on the charge before Pilate, and offers this as a reconstruction from limited sources, with Judas's motive left uncertain (pp. 149–169).

Dating

Ehrman separates the date of the surviving manuscript from the date of the Gospel's composition. Carbon-14 dating places the papyrus within about sixty years of 280 CE, whereas he argues that the work itself probably dates to around 140–150 CE, after the canonical Gospels and before Irenaeus mentions a Gospel of Judas around 180 CE (pp. 7–8, 102).