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A Second-Century Gnostic Text in a Codex Wrecked by the Antiquities Trade

Gospel of Judas

Twenty-six pages of Coptic in which Jesus takes Judas Iscariot aside and tells him he will exceed all the others — announced in 2006 as the discovery that would rewrite the betrayal, and substantially rewritten itself within two years.

Type
Papyrus codex, now fragmentary — one of four texts in what is called Codex Tchacos
Language
Coptic, translated from a Greek original
Contents
Pages 33 to 58 of the codex: a dialogue in which Jesus laughs at the disciples' thanksgiving, tells them they worship a lesser god, and gives Judas Iscariot a private cosmological revelation. Roughly a third of the codex as a whole is now illegible, including the top of pages 55 to 58, so the end of the story between Jesus and Judas is damaged. The other three texts in the codex are a Letter of Peter to Philip (pp. 1-9), a First Apocalypse of James (pp. 10-32) and a Book of Allogenes (pp. 59-66)
Written
The codex is fourth century, or a little earlier. The familiar AD 220-340 figure comes from an averaging procedure P. M. Head criticised in detail; C. Askeland, working from the laboratory's own reports, gives the late third through the end of the fourth century. Palaeographers have proposed the fourth century (S. Emmel; G. Wurst) and the fourth to fifth (H. Attridge; R. Kasser). The text itself is second century Disputed dating
Origin
Composed in Greek, second century, in a Sethian or related Gnostic setting; this copy was made in Egypt
Found at
Reported as the Jebel Qarara hills near Maghagha, in the El Minya region of Middle Egypt, in a limestone box in a tomb. This is not an excavation: there is no dig report and no recorded context. The codex's documented history begins with a Cairo dealer
Found in
The 1970s. No firmer date is recoverable
Found by
Unknown. The account of local farmers finding it comes from the antiquities trade, decades after the fact, and cannot be checked
Now held at
Coptic Museum, Cairo. The codex was announced in 2006 for permanent deposit there, and McCrone Associates, one of the teams that worked on it, records that after conservation the manuscript "was determined to be authentic and delivered to Egypt" and is now on display in the Coptic Museum. Two qualifications this article cannot resolve: fragments are reported to have reached Egypt only in April 2010, and leaves from the same group of books are documented in private hands in the United States, so how complete the repatriation is remains unclear
Shelfmark
None published. The codex is known by the name Codex Tchacos, after the dealer who bought it

A Book Destroyed on Its Way to Us

This is the worst-treated important manuscript of the modern era, and the damage is part of the evidence. A papyrus codex surfaced in Middle Egypt in the 1970s, said to have come from the Jebel Qarara hills near Maghagha, in a limestone box in a tomb. There is no excavation, no report, no context. It passed to a Cairo dealer, was stolen and taken to Geneva in 1980 and recovered in 1982, and was shown to the Coptologist S. Emmel in Geneva in 1983. Emmel found roughly thirty leaves still in reasonable condition and reported that proper conservation could preserve some sixty pages of text. Nobody bought it. It then sat in a safe deposit box on Long Island for about sixteen years.

By 2000, when the dealer F. Nussberger-Tchacos bought it, the binding had disintegrated, the pages had been reshuffled, and the book had broken into something like a thousand fragments. Yale's Beinecke Library examined it and declined to buy, the origins being what they were. She sold it on to B. Ferrini, who put it in a freezer — which separated the ink from the papyrus fibres, darkened the leaves and made a bad situation permanent. That sale collapsed into bankruptcy and litigation; she recovered most of it in 2001 and placed it with the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Basel for conservation. Restoration recovered perhaps ninety per cent of what remained, but roughly a third of the codex is now illegible, and leaves from the group are still reported in private hands in the United States.

Four texts were on it, and the page numbers survive: a Letter of Peter to Philip on pages 1 to 9, a First Apocalypse of James on 10 to 32, the Gospel of Judas on 33 to 58, and a previously unknown Book of Allogenes on 59 to 66. The first two are also known from Nag Hammadi; the last two were new. Samples went to the NSF-Arizona accelerator mass spectrometry laboratory at Tucson under A. J. T. Jull in January 2005, and McCrone Associates examined the ink, finding it consistent with inks known from third- and fourth-century Egypt. The object is genuinely ancient. Where it came from, nobody can say.

What Is Actually On It

It is a second-century Gnostic text, and it is about Gnostic cosmology far more than about Judas Iscariot. Jesus laughs at the disciples for giving thanks over bread, tells them they worship a god who is not the highest God, and takes Judas aside for a long revelation about aeons, luminaries and a creator called Saklas. There are only a handful of points of contact with the New Testament, and the clearest of them is a reference to Judas being replaced so that the Twelve might be completed again — which reads like knowledge of the account in Acts.

The one thing nobody on any side of the argument claims is that it tells us anything about the historical Judas. P. M. Head endorses J. M. Robinson's summary as his own conclusion: it "is a second-century apocryphal Gospel that in all probability tells us about the Cainite gnostics of the mid-second century, not about what happened in AD 30!"

Nor was this a suppressed book. Irenaeus of Lyon knew of a Gospel of Judas around AD 180 and wrote about it in a work everybody read, reporting that its users held that Judas, the betrayer, "had got a thorough knowledge of these things; and he alone, knowing the truth above all the others, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal." Whether the book Irenaeus knew is this book is a real question; J. van Oort has argued at length, and in his own words "contrary to most current opinions", that Irenaeus "in all feasibility, had first-hand knowledge of the Gospel and its contents" and "appears to have read the text as we now have it" — against a majority who think he knew it only by report. Either way the pattern is the same one this section of the app keeps meeting: a text named, described and answered in print, not hidden. Head's own reading of what the text does is worth stating because it is the evangelical case made from the evidence rather than around it: the theology here "is against the eucharist, against the Twelve, against seeing Jesus as the Son of God," and as Irenaeus argued, a reaction of that shape presupposes something already established to react against.

The Reading That Was Announced, Then Withdrawn

In April 2006 the National Geographic Society unveiled the text with a translation by R. Kasser, M. Meyer, G. Wurst and F. Gaudard, presenting a Judas who acts at Jesus's own request and is the one disciple who understands. Two readings carried most of that weight. Jesus calls Judas the thirteenth daimon, which the team rendered "spirit"; and a broken passage at the foot of page 46 was reconstructed and translated so that Judas ascends to the holy generation. Within eighteen months both were under sustained attack, and the story of what happened next is a good and rare thing: a public claim, publicly corrected, by the people who made it.

A. D. DeConick argued that the Coptic daimon in a Sethian text means demon, not spirit, that the verb at 46,17 means separated from rather than set apart for, and — the sharpest charge — that an emendation had removed a negative. Her own words: "I think that the emendation of this text was a mistake, that consequently the altered reading of this text has led the public and other scholars to believe that Judas ascends to the holy generation when he does not." Her structural complaint was that National Geographic had held the text under non-disclosure agreements and published without peer review: "this is what happens when our work is not vetted through the normal channels of blind peer review before publication."

Meyer's reply is the part usually left out, and leaving it out would misrepresent both of them. He rejected the word "mistranslations" — these "are not 'mistranslations' at all, but rather they represent alternative ways of understanding a difficult text" — and he rejected, in strong terms, any suggestion that the team had altered the Coptic to suit itself. That last exchange needs care, because DeConick had already disclaimed the charge he was answering: "I have not made any statement of intentionality. I have left this as an open question." What she asserted was that the text was altered, not why. He also gave ground on the substance, in print: "While I have indicated elsewhere that I also am increasingly inclined to translate this difficult Coptic phrase as 'set apart from,' the fact remains that either translation is possible." DeConick, for her part, recorded the concession and welcomed it. And the reading at the bottom of page 46 did change: the 2007 critical edition prints it as a scribal error and translates "you will not ascend on high to the holy [generation]" — a reversal, arrived at partly through the input of W.-P. Funk and P. Nagel, and one Meyer himself calls "a solution of desperation." Meyer's own final position was neither the 2006 headline nor DeConick's: he proposed reading Judas as a figure like Sophia, "neither a completely positive character nor a totally demonic being."

One more correction belongs here because it is still repeated. The familiar radiocarbon figure of AD 220 to 340 came from discarding the one sample that dated later and averaging the rest. Head listed six objections to that procedure in 2007 and concluded for "a fourth-century date, or perhaps a little earlier"; Jull himself told Head by email that "our position is that the radiocarbon dates support the palaeographic interpretations (similar to the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example), not that they are superior to them or supplant them." C. Askeland, who obtained the actual laboratory reports, found that the popular account had also mishandled calibration, and put the properly calibrated result in "the late third through the end of the fourth century." The manuscript is a little younger than the number everyone quotes.

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