On April 6, 2006, the National Geographic Society announced that a lost gospel had been restored and translated. It was the Gospel of Judas, and the story that ran everywhere that spring was simple enough to fit in a headline. Judas wasn’t the traitor. He was the one disciple who understood Jesus, and he handed him over because Jesus asked him to.
About a year and a half later, a Rice University scholar named April DeConick wrote in the New York Times that the translation had turned the text upside down. In her reading, the Judas of this gospel was a demon.
Both camps were looking at the same battered papyrus. I’ve spent the last few weeks with Marvin Meyer’s translation and its footnotes, and I want to walk you through how one ancient text can support two opposite headlines. Most of it comes down to a single word.
A Gospel Irenaeus Already Knew
The text itself turned up in the 1970s, in a papyrus book now called Codex Tchacos, and sat unpublished for about thirty years. But scholars had known its title for much longer. Irenaeus of Lyon denounced a “Gospel of Judas” around the year 180, in a list of books he blamed on the people he called Gnostics. Meyer says his short summary fits the Coptic text we have now “quite well.”
Our surviving copy dates to the late third or early fourth century. Meyer puts the Greek original around the middle of the second century, which would make it one of the earliest texts in the Sethian tradition, the strand of Gnosticism behind the Secret Book of John.
One detail in the title surprised me. It reads “Gospel of Judas,” not “Gospel According to Judas” the way Matthew and Mark are labeled. Nobody’s pretending Judas wrote it. Meyer suggests it’s better heard as a gospel about Judas, or even for him.
What Happens in the Story
The story covers about a week, ending three days before the passion. Jesus finds the disciples saying a prayer of thanksgiving over bread, and he laughs. They’re hurt, and he tells them, “I’m not laughing at you.” His point is that they’re praising their own god, one of the lesser powers who made this world, which the text later names Nebro (also called Yaldabaoth) and Sakla.
That makes the disciples angry. Jesus dares any of them who is strong enough to stand before him, and only Judas manages it, though he can’t look Jesus in the eye. Then Judas says the thing nobody else in the room seems to know:
I know who you are and from what place you have come. You have come from the immortal realm of Barbelo, and I am not worthy to pronounce the name of the one who has sent you.
Barbelo is the divine Mother in Sethian thought. In this gospel, Judas is the only disciple who gets the theology right. Jesus takes him aside and teaches him the whole cosmology, from the great invisible Spirit down through the luminaries and heavens to the angels who made Adam.
The ending is abrupt. Jesus tells Judas to look up at a cloud of light and says, “The star that leads the way is your star.” Someone enters the cloud. Then the scene cuts to the high priests, and the last line of the gospel is about as flat as a sentence can be: “And Judas received some money and handed him over to them.”
There’s no crucifixion and no resurrection. The book just stops.
The Word That Flips Everything
Partway through, Judas tells Jesus he’s had a vision. Jesus laughs again and answers him like this, in Meyer’s revised translation:
O thirteenth daimon, why are you so excited? Speak your mind, then, and I’ll hear you out.
The first English translation in 2006 rendered daimon as “spirit.” Read that way, the line sounds almost affectionate, like a teacher teasing a favorite student. DeConick argued that in Gnostic literature a daimon is always a demon, and that the word for spirit would have been pneuma. Read her way, Jesus is naming exactly what Judas is.
Then there’s the number. Meyer’s note says Judas is the thirteenth because he was cut out of the circle of the twelve, and because he’s tied to a thirteenth realm. DeConick points out that in Sethian cosmology, the thirteenth realm belongs to the creator god and his rulers. So “thirteenth daimon” could mean a spirit who stands outside the dull twelve, or a demon who belongs to the lower god.
Meyer leaves daimon untranslated in the text and lists “spirit” and “demon” in a footnote as alternatives, without choosing between them. The word will carry either reading.
Two More Small Words
DeConick pointed to other places where she thought the first translation leaned toward the heroic reading. After Jesus tells Judas about the holy generation, Judas asks:
“What advantage is there for me, since you have set me apart from that generation?”
That’s Meyer’s current wording. His footnote on “from” reads, in full, “Or ‘for.’” Set apart for the holy generation means Judas is chosen. Set apart from it means he’s shut out. One preposition, and you’re reading a different gospel.
A few lines later comes a broken passage about whether Judas will rise to that generation. The first translation said he would. DeConick read a negative in the Coptic that changes it to “you may not ascend,” and Meyer’s note now calls it a difficult passage where that reading may be possible.
Even the person who enters the cloud of light is uncertain. Meyer reports that two scholars suggested the “he” who enters might be Jesus, not Judas, which would turn the transfiguration of Judas into the transfiguration of Jesus.
The Line That Holds Both Readings
Near the end, Jesus says to Judas:
But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man who bears me.
On the heroic reading, “the man who bears me” is the body, the flesh that clothes the real Jesus (Meyer notes “clothes” as an alternative translation). Judas frees the spirit by handing over the shell. He exceeds the other disciples because he’s the only one who knows what he’s doing.
At a colloquium in Paris in October 2006, DeConick and John Turner read the same sentence the opposite way. The “all of them” are the people who sacrifice to Sakla, and Judas will exceed them in evil, since he’s the one who sacrifices his own teacher. On that reading, Meyer admits, it’s hard to say what the good news of this gospel would even be.
And there’s a middle position. Ismo Dunderberg noticed that the lines right after this one echo the Psalms (“your horn has been lifted up”) and seem to describe the strength Judas will need to go through with it.
Meyer adds a comparison of his own. In the Pistis Sophia, Wisdom comes from the thirteenth aeon, is likened to a daimon, suffers in this world, and is meant to return. A thirteenth daimon, in that light, might be a fallen figure on the way home.
So Which Is It?
I don’t think the text lets us close the case, and I’ve come to like that. Here’s my honest read after going back and forth.
The gospel is plainly hostile to the other eleven. It turns their vision of the Temple into an attack on the church that would claim them, priests who “call upon my name” while leading the crowd astray. Judas is at least the one who sees through all that. Whether seeing through it saves him is the open question.
Jesus tells him twice that he’ll “go through a great deal of grief,” and once that “your star has deceived you.” He also tells him, “You will be the thirteenth, and you will be cursed by the other generations, but eventually you will rule over them.”
Rule over them how, though? As a liberated soul above the stars, or as one more power in the lower god’s realm? I can read that sentence both ways on different days, and I suspect some of its first readers could too.
What I’m sure of is that the 2006 headline was too tidy and so was the correction. If you’ve already read the Gospel of Mary, you’ve seen another text that hands the inside knowledge to the disciple the others resent. The Gospel of Judas pushes that idea as far as it can go, and then refuses to tell us whether it went too far.
Reading a Disputed Text Without Getting Played
You’ll probably never read Coptic, and neither do I. But this case taught me a few things I now do with any ancient text that arrives with a big headline.
- Read the footnotes first. Any note that begins with “Or” marks a place where the translator made a choice you could have made differently. In the Gospel of Judas, those notes hold most of the story.
- Ask who published it and when. The first edition of this gospel came out as a media event, announced by National Geographic, which also published the popular edition. That doesn’t make it wrong, but it’s worth knowing who had a stake in which reading.
- Try the opposite reading on purpose. Take a passage you think you understand and read it once as if the speaker meant the reverse. If the words hold up both ways, you’ve found a real ambiguity, and it’s better to say so than to pick one and pretend.
- Notice who you’ve already cast as the villain. Judas has been the villain for most of Christian history. A reading that flips that is exciting, and that excitement is exactly why it needs checking.
If you want a primer on the lower powers this gospel keeps referring to, What Are the Archons? covers Yaldabaoth and his rulers.
The papyrus is still missing pieces, and Meyer calls his own translation “somewhat provisional.” Fragments may still be sitting with collectors. Somewhere there might be a scrap that settles the line about ascending, one way or the other. If it turned up tomorrow, which Judas would you be hoping to find?
Quotations from the Gospel of Judas, Meyer’s introduction, and his notes come from The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, ed. Marvin Meyer (HarperOne, 2010), with square brackets in the original removed from short quotations. The date of the National Geographic announcement and April DeConick’s arguments about daimon, “set apart,” and the missing negative are summarized from news coverage of her December 1, 2007 New York Times op-ed and her book The Thirteenth Apostle. The Paris colloquium and Ismo Dunderberg’s reading are summarized from Meyer’s introduction.
