the formation of catholicism was for roman control over the peoples, taking esisting sun god pagan worship and merging it with judaism. book burning was the norm, erasing the evidence, killing so called heritics and then later proclaiming them as saints.
the catholic church and mainstream christianity are evil. yet the minions who are encapsulated in the cult are not even aware or care that they have been mislead for 2000 years.

http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/manuscripts/gospel_of_judas/index.htm

The complete Coptic text and English text are available for download from here:

http://www9.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel/about_coptic_text.html

The English text is published as: The Gospel of Judas. Edited by Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst with Additional Commentary by Bart D. Ehrman. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2006. (ISBN 1-4262-0042-0, U.S.$22). In view of the
generosity with which NG have placed the text and translation online, may I suggest that we repay them by buying their book?

Excerpts of the English translation are online at the NY Times site in PDF

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/06/science/06cnd-judas.html

and I have also placed it here in HTML form, for those who (like myself)hate PDF’s.

http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/manuscripts/gospel_of_judas/index.htm

Further details summarised from the site:

* Codex Tchacos is named after Dimaratos Tchacos, father of Zürich-based antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos, who bought the document in September 2000. The codex contains not only the Gospel of Judas, but also a text titled James(otherwise known as the First Apocalypse of James), the Letter of Peter to Philip, and a fragment of a text that scholars are provisionally calling Book of Allogenes.

* The codex, containing the Gospel of Judas, was discovered in the 1970s near El Minya, Egypt, and moved from Egypt to Europe to the United States. Once in the United States, it was kept n a safe-deposit box for 16 years on Long Island, New York, until antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos bought it in April 2000. After two unsuccessful resale attempts, Nussberger-Tchacos-alarmed by the codex’s rapidly deteriorating state-transferred it to the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Basel, Switzerland, in February 2001, for restoration and translation. The manuscript will be delivered to Egypt and housed in Cairo’s Coptic Museum.

* Several pages of the Gospel of Judas as well as pages from the other three texts in the codex will be on exhibit at National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, D.C., beginning Friday, April 7, 2006, for a limited engagement. After Kasser and his team complete conserving and translating the manuscript, the codex will be given to Egypt, where it will be housed in Cairo’s Coptic Museum.

Details of scientific examination — radio carbon dating the papyri, multi-spectral imaging, paleography and ink analysis are here, with images. Key-points:

* The National Geographic Society submitted five tiny samples of the Gospel of Judas for AMS testing at the University of Arizona’s radiocarbon dating lab in Tucson-the same lab that dated the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Judas fragments included four minute pieces of papyrus and a small bit of the book’s leather binding with a piece of attached papyrus page. No part of the ancient script was altered or damaged during this process. The results allowed lab experts to confidently date the papyruses to between A.D. 220 and 340. “The calibrated ages of the papyrus and leather samples are tightly clustered and place the age of the Codices within the third or fourth centuries A.D.,” reported Tim Jull, director of Arizona’s AMS facility, and research scientist Greg Hodgins.

* Stephen Emmel, professor of Coptic studies at Germany’s University of Munster, analyzed the Gospel of Judas … “The kind of writing reminds me very much of the Nag ‘Hammadi codices,” he wrote, referring to a famed collection of ancient manuscripts. “It’s not identical script with any of them. But it’s a similar type of script, and since we date the Nag ‘Hammadi codices to roughly the second half of the fourth century or the first part of the fifth century, my immediate inclination would be to say that the Gospel of Judas was written by a scribe in that same period, let’s say around the year 400.”

* McCrone Associates, a firm specializing in forensic ink analysis, conducted a transmission electron microscopy (TEM) test on samples of the document’s ink. The procedure uncovered the components used to create the ancient ink and found that they are consistent with ingredients in known inks from the third and fourth centuries A.D. The ink includes a carbon black constituent, in the form of soot, bound with a gum adhesive. An additional procedure, Raman spectroscopy analysis, established that the ink also included a metal-gallic component like those used in third-century iron-gall inks. McCrone Associates reports that the Gospel of Judas may have been penned with an early form of iron-gall ink that included a small amount of carbon black (soot). If so, it could be a previously unknown “missing link” between the ancient world’s carbon-based inks and the iron-gall alternatives that became popular in medieval times.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

The Secrets of Judas
By James Robinson

Judas Iscariot is, if not the most famous, then surely the most infamous, of the inner circle of Jesus’ disciples. He was one of the Twelve Apostles who stuck with Jesus through thick and thin to the bitter end, until the night of the Last Supper when he led the authorities to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Was Judas just fulfilling prophecy, implementing the plan of God for Jesus to die for our sins, doing what Jesus told him to do? Why else would he identify him with a kiss, all for a measly sum of thirty pieces of silver? What do the Gospels inside the New Testament — and then what does The Gospel of Judas outside the New Testament — tell us about all this? . . .

A “Gospel”? By “Judas”?

The Gospel of Judas was composed after the canonical Gospels were written, at about the same time as the Nag Hammadi Gospels were written. No doubt, like them, The Gospel of Judas made use of the title Gospel to accredit itself over against the canonical Gospels that had popularized the title in their own quest for accreditation. As a result, we assume not only that The Gospel of Judas was not written by Judas — after all, he had been dead for over a century — but may not be what the public assumes a Gospel would be — a collection of the stories and/or sayings of Jesus. For the four Gospels among the Nag Hammadi Codices have shown that the honorific title could be ascribed to works which we today would never call Gospels, if that title had not been attached to them in the tradition. The Gospel of Judas will in all probability teach us a lot more about the Gnosticism of the second century, than about the public ministry of Jesus, or sayings of Jesus, or Holy Week, or the like.

How has Judas been understood down through the centuries, after the New Testament presented him as giving Jesus over to the Jewish authorities, and The Gospel of Judas somehow vindicating him?

In antiquity, to fall on one’s sword when one’s leader is slain is considered a noble death. Should not Judas’ suicide after Jesus’ crucifixion be accorded this distinction of being a noble death? Apparently it was first Saint Augustine who decided that Judas’ suicide was in fact a sin.1 Listen to the way Augustine put it: 2

He did not deserve mercy; and that is why no light shone in his heart to make him hurry for pardon from the one he had betrayed.

And so, irrespective of what one might think of Judas giving Jesus over to the Jewish authorities, as implementing God’s plan of salvation, or as a traitor betraying his friend, he cannot be forgiven for his suicide!

The most generous that early Christian monasticism could be to Judas was to suggest that Jesus forgave him, but ordered him to purify himself with “spiritual exercises” in the desert, such as they themselves practiced.

In the seventh century, the Bible commentator Theophylact thought Judas had not expected things to turn bad once he arranged a hearing between Jesus and the Jewish authorities, and in anguish at the outcome killed himself to “get to Hades before Jesus and thus to implore and gain salvation”: 3

Some say that Judas, being covetous, supposed that he would make money by betraying Christ, and that Christ would not be killed but would escape from the Jews as many a time he had escaped. But when he saw him condemned, actually already condemned to death, he repented since the affair had turned out so differently from what he had expected. And so he hanged himself to get to Hades before Jesus and thus to implore and gain salvation. Know well, however, that he put his neck into the halter and hanged himself on a certain tree, but the tree bent down and he continued to live, since it was God’s will that he either be preserved for repentance or for public disgrace and shame. For they say that due to dropsy he could not pass where a wagon passed with ease; then he fell on his face and burst asunder, that is, was rent apart, as Luke says in the Acts.

A Dominican preacher, Vinzenz Ferrer, in a sermon in 1391, had a similar explanation for the suicide, that Judas’ “soul rushed to Christ on Calvary’s mount” to ask and receive forgiveness: 4

Judas who betrayed and sold the Master after the crucifixion was overwhelmed by a genuine and saving sense of remorse and tried with all his might to draw close to Christ in order to apologize for his betrayal and sale. But since Jesus was accompanied by such a large crowd of people on the way to the mount of Calvary, it was impossible for Judas to come to him and so he said to himself: Since I cannot get to the feet of the master, I will approach him in my spirit at least and humbly ask him for forgiveness. He actually did that and as he took the rope and hanged himself his soul rushed to Christ on Calvary’s mount, asked for forgiveness and received it fully from Christ, went up to heaven with him and so his soul enjoys salvation along with all elect.

Yet the all-too-rampant anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages exploited Judas as the arch-betrayer in order to arouse just such sentiments, by painting him as a caricature of a Jew, with exaggerated features, a large hooked nose, red hair, and of course greed for money. . . .

1 A. J. Droge and J. D. Tabor, A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians and Jews in Antiquity (SanFrancisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), cited by Klassen, Judas, 168 and 175.

2 Klassen, Judas, 47, quoting Augustine, City of God, 1.17 and Sermon 352.3.8 (Patrologia Latina, 39:1559-63).

3 The translation, by Morton S. Enslin, “How the Story Grew: Judas in Fact and Fiction,” in Festschrift in Honor of F. W. Ginrich, ed. E. H. Barth and R. Cocroft (Leiden: Brill, 1972), is quoted by Klassen, Judas, 173.

4 Quoted by Klassen, Judas, 7.

Copyright © 2006 James M. Robinson from The Secrets of Judas: The Story of the Misunderstood Disciple and His Lost Gospel by James M. Robinson Harper San Francisco; April 2006;$19.95US; 0-06117-063-1

James M. Robinson is the founding director emeritus of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, and professor emeritus at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Trajectories Through Early Christianity and A New Quest of the Historical Jesus. He is widely known for his pioneering work on the Sayings Gospel Q and the Nag Hammadi codices and was the general editor of The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Robinson’s latest book, The Secrets of Judas is available at all major booksellers.

I have an excerpt from The Secrets of Judas, discussing the changed perceptions of Judas over time. You are welcome to use this article on your website or blog at no charge. I will also be able to provide review copies at a later date. Please let me know how I can work with your site to bring the discussion of this topic to your readers.

Sincerely,

Jeffery Anderson
FSB Associates