The Lost Gospel Of Judas Iscariot - WordPress

2The Lost Gospel of Judas IscariotGospels forged in the names of Jesus’ disciples—Gospels written in the namesof Thomas, Philip, and Mary, for example. This Gospel would be different,however. All the other surviving Gospels told the story from the perspective ofJesus’ friends. This one allegedly was by his enemy. But according to the hintsand rumors circulating in the early church, this lost Gospel named after Jesus’betrayer portrayed Judas Iscariot not as the rotten apple in the apostolic barrelbut as the one disciple who understood Jesus’ teaching and did his will. Wasthis the Gospel that had now been discovered? Did we now have that “otherside” of the story available to us in an ancient manuscript?It took me a while to piece together who was with me on this little expedition. In addition to Terry Garcia, executive vice president for missions at National Geographic, there was Herb Krosney, the investigative reporter whohad first brought news of the potential story to the attention of National Geographic; John Heubusch, head of the investment programs for Gateway Computers and its Waitt Family Foundation, which was considering whether tomake a sizeable contribution to the project; and the other two experts who hadbeen flown in to provide National Geographic with the information it neededto decide if this was an authentically ancient manuscript or instead a modern(or medieval) forgery.The three of us had very different areas of expertise. There was A. J. TimothyJull, director of the National Science Foundation’s Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Facility in Tucson, Arizona, a scientist who specialized in the carbon14 dating of ancient manuscripts. Earlier in his career Jull had helped establishscientific datings for the Dead Sea Scrolls. There was Stephen Emmel, anAmerican-born scholar who held a prestigious chair at the University of Münsterin Germany in the field of Coptology—the study of the ancient Egyptian language Coptic, the language in which the document was allegedly written. Andthere was me, a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity, with aparticular interest in the “lost Gospels,” that is, the Gospels of the early centuries that did not make it into the canon of Christian Scripture.Our charge was to verify that the initial reports about the manuscript couldbe trusted, that this was indeed an ancient Coptic text that told part of theGospel story from the perspective of Jesus’ betrayer, Judas Iscariot.The manuscript was being kept in the studio of one of Europe’s leadingexperts in manuscript restoration and preservation, Florence Darbre, who wasconnected with the renowned Martin Bodmer Foundation in Switzerland. Imust admit that when we arrived, I was a bit taken aback. Given the importance of Darbre’s work, I was expecting a more lavish setting. Darbre’s studiowas in the most inauspicious spot one could imagine, on the second floor of aslightly dilapidated building above a pizza shop in a small, unimpressive Swisstown far removed from the cultural center of Geneva. But outward appearances can be deceptive. For within this studio was one of the world’s treasuresfrom antiquity, which Darbre had spent three years meticulously piecing together. This was a Gospel text that had appeared on the antiquities market

My Introduction to the Gospel of Judas3some twenty-five years earlier but was virtually unknown to the world of scholarship, let alone to the public at large.We filed out of the van, into the building, up the stairs, and into a large roomwith a large picture window overlooking an empty field and the industrial building next to it. Joining us there, along with Darbre, were Frieda TchacosNussberger, the antiquities dealer of Greek origin who owned the manuscript,and her legal counsel, the Swiss lawyer Mario Roberty, internationally knownfor his work with European clients interested in fine art and antiquities.There was excitement in the air as the meeting began. After the introductions, Roberty made some preliminary remarks on the manuscript we wereabout to see. It had been acquired in 2001 by an organization that Robertyhimself had founded some seven years earlier, called the Maecenas Foundation, which was dedicated to the restoration of ancient artifacts and to returning them to their nations of origin. The manuscript had originally beendiscovered in the late 1970s. Its early history was shrouded in mystery, but itswhereabouts from 1983 to the present could be documented with relative certainty. The manuscript consisted of sixty-two pages of text, written on papyrus(the ancient equivalent of paper); it was a small anthology, containing severaldifferent texts from Christian antiquity. Two of these texts were already knownto scholars from earlier manuscript discoveries in Egypt: a book called theLetter of Peter to Philip and another called the First Apocalypse of James, bothof them apocryphal writings. The third was of immediate and enduring interest. It was an ancient Gospel. Like the other texts, this was a Coptic translationof a much earlier document. The manuscript itself, Roberty indicated, wasfrom the fourth century, but the foundation had reason to believe that it was acopy of a document originally written in Greek as early as the mid-secondcentury. It was in fact probably the Gospel referred to around 180 CE by thechurch father and heresy hunter Irenaeus, who mentioned a Gospel in use amonga group of Christian “heretics” known to history as the Gnostics. Irenaeus calledit the Gospel of Judas.Roberty was sophisticated and urbane, and he spoke with authority in impeccable English. He was very interested in getting the experts’ opinions onthe document, although he and his colleagues had no doubt at all about itsauthenticity. For the past three years it had been meticulously studied and translated by one of the world’s very senior Coptic scholars, Rodolphe Kasser, professor emeritus at the University of Geneva. Kasser was an authority ofinternational status, and his word was gold. National Geographic wanted toknow if we would agree with his assessment of the document and his evaluation of its significance.Next to speak was Frieda Tchacos Nussberger, the antiquities dealer, in her latefifties. She had acquired the manuscript some years earlier; we did not know how.She gave us her greetings but kept her comments brief. She obviously was tryingto interest National Geographic in contributing to its restoration and publication.

4The Lost Gospel of Judas IscariotThis was not just an antiquarian interest for her; she had large sums of moneyinvested in the manuscript and was looking for a financial backer.Then it was restoration expert Florence Darbre’s turn. She spoke of themanuscript with special affection and let us know what a miserable state it hadbeen in when it was first brought to her attention three years earlier. The manuscript had not been conserved and protected after it had been discovered andremoved from (smuggled out of?) Egypt. By the time it came into her hands ithad been manhandled; its fragile pages had broken and been senselessly reshuffled. It was literally falling apart. Her first step had been to place all thesurviving pieces—full pages and small fragments—under protective glass, andthen to begin the arduous process of arranging the pages in their original sequence and fitting the hundreds of small fragments together, much like reassembling an enormous jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the final picturemight look like. In this work she had been assisted at every step by RodolpheKasser, who was able not only to help reassemble the manuscript but also toread and translate it.While Darbre was still speaking we could hear the door open in the (closed)pizza parlor below us. Coming slowly up the steps was Kasser himself, whohad made the trip from his home town of Yverdon-les-Bains in order to meetwith us and discuss for the first time this text, into which he had poured threeyears of his life. In my twenty-five years as a scholar, I had never met Kasser,even though we have comparable fields of academic interest. He was principally involved with Coptology—the study of the Coptic language and the ancient texts written in it—and I was an expert in early Greek-speaking Christianityand the manuscripts (including those of the New Testament) that it had produced. I knew, of course, of Kasser’s work, as he was one of the premier scholars in his field. And I knew that he must, by now, be an old man. What I did notknow was that he was suffering from an advanced stage of Parkinson’s disease.He moved slowly and his hand continuously twitched while Frieda Nussbergermade the introductions. Nussberger clearly had a special affection for thiseminent scholar, who had worked so long to restore and translate the preciousmanuscript she owned.The only person that Kasser already knew there from the National Geographic team was Stephen Emmel, the American Coptologist brought along toverify Kasser’s judgment that this was an ancient manuscript written in ancientCoptic. Though two decades his junior, Emmel was respected by the grand oldmaster in the field. And as irony would have it, Emmel had actually laid eyeson this manuscript once before, over twenty years earlier in a hotel room inGeneva, under darker and less controlled conditions, as a previous owner wastrying to arrange its sale to a group of Americans for a whopping 3 million.Emmel suspected that the manuscript he had seen then, as a young graduatestudent at Yale, was the same he was about to see now, as a seasoned scholar inthe field. But he couldn’t know until they brought it out for us to examine—

My Introduction to the Gospel of Judas5and through all these opening speeches and introductions he was getting noticeably edgy, wanting to see what we had come to see.I too was eager—not because I had seen the document before, but because Iknew full well its historical significance if it turned out to be what it purportedto be. This would be a major find from early Christianity, easily the greatest ofmy lifetime.After Kasser had been introduced, Emmel asked that we at last be allowedto see the manuscript. Frieda nodded to Darbre, who went into the next room,which contained her safe. She returned with several Plexiglas sheets that wereprotecting the ancient papyrus on which the text was written. And there it was,before our eyes.I’m not a Coptologist. Coptic is one of those languages that I taught myselfin my spare time over the years, mainly because I wanted to be able to readancient Coptic translations of the New Testament and some of the GnosticGospels discovered in the twentieth century. I can hack my way through aCoptic text with a dictionary and enough time. But I do know something aboutancient manuscripts, as I’ve worked at some length on Greek texts of the NewTestament since my graduate days at Princeton Theological Seminary in theearly 1980s. I know an ancient manuscript when I see one. What was placedbefore our eyes was an ancient manuscript. Was there any chance this could bea modern forgery? Almost none at all. This was the real thing.As excited as I was, Emmel was nearly beside himself. This

A Reader (with Andrew Jacobs) The New Testament and other Early Christian Writings: A Reader, . in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi . It took me a while to piece together who was with me on this little expedi-tion.