Table Of ContentThe Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot
Also by Bart D. Ehrman
Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene:
The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission,
Corruption, and Restoration, Fourth Edition
(with Bruce M. Metzger)
Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code
The New Testament: A Historical Introduction
to the Early Christian Writings,
Third Edition
A Brief Introduction to the New Testament
The Apostolic Fathers: Volumes I and II
Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture
and the Faiths We Never Knew
Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It
into the New Testament
Christianity in Late Antiquity, 330–450 CE:
A Reader
(with Andrew Jacobs)
The New Testament and other Early Christian Writings:
A Reader, Second Edition
Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium
After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity
The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of
Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament
Didymus the Blind and the Text of the Gospels
The Lost Gospel of
Judas Iscariot
�
A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed
2006
Bart D. Ehrman
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Copyright © 2006 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ehrman, Bart D.
The lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot : a new look at betrayer and
betrayed / by Bart D. Ehrman.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-10: 0-19-531460-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-531460-1
1. Gospel of Judas—Criticism, interpretation, etc.
I. Title.
BS2860.J83E37 2006
229'.8—dc22
2006048268
All photos by Kenneth Garrett / National Geographic Image Collection.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Preface
vii
1 My Introduction to the Gospel of Judas
1
2 Judas in Our Earliest Gospels
13
3 Judas in Later Gospel Traditions
35
4 Before the Discovery: Our Previous Knowledge of
a Gospel of Judas
53
5 The Discovery of the Gospel of Judas
67
6 The Gospel of Judas: An Overview
85
7 The Gospel of Judas and Early Christian Gnosticism
99
8 Jesus, Judas, and the Twelve in the Gospel of Judas
121
9 Who Was Judas Iscariot?
141
10 What Did Judas Betray and Why Did He Betray It?
153
11 The Gospel of Judas in Perspective
171
Notes
181
Index
189
v
To Dale Martin,
friend and scholar extraordinaire,
who has always pushed me
to look at things differently
M
Preface
vii
ost of the Gospels from early Christianity have been irretrievably lost.
Occasionally one turns up, found by trained archaeologists looking for
them or, more commonly, by local peasants inadvertently coming upon a trea-
sure that is, quite literally, beyond their dreams. It is rare—a once-in-a-lifetime
experience at best—for a scholar to have the opportunity to be involved with
the first evaluation, authentication, and publication of a newly discovered Gos-
pel. As it turns out, I was lucky.
A series of unexpected phone calls, some of them from the National Geo-
graphic Society, alerted me to the discovery of a long-lost Gospel, the Gospel
of Judas Iscariot. Scholars had known of the one-time existence of this Gospel
from the writings of the early church fathers. But these ancient reports were
bizarre and hard to believe. Could there be a Gospel of Jesus written from the
perspective of his mortal enemy and betrayer, Judas Iscariot? And could such a
Gospel actually paint Judas in a favorable light, claiming that, contrary to all
tradition, he was in fact Jesus’ closest disciple and confidant? National Geo-
graphic wanted me to help authenticate the Gospel and establish its historical
significance. I jumped at the chance, and here I can tell the story.
This is a Gospel that seemingly has appeared out of nowhere, discovered in
a tomb in Egypt some thirty years ago, and now available for the first time for
readers intrigued with the history of early Christianity and the many forms of
Christian belief and practice of the early centuries. It is in fact a Gnostic Gos-
pel. And it is one of the most intriguing ever discovered. It is not a Gospel
written by Judas or by anyone who actually knew him. It is not as ancient as
Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. But it is one of our earliest surviving non-
canonical Gospels. And the tale it has to tell is remarkable.
viii
Preface
In recounting the story I have incurred some debts that I would like to ac-
knowledge. My thanks go to National Geographic, especially Terry Garcia,
Senior Vice President of Missions, for bringing me on board for the project,
and Betty Hudson, Senior Vice President of Communications, for all her sup-
port. Robert Miller, my friend and editor at Oxford University Press, gener-
ously agreed to publish my account and read my manuscript with a keen editorial
eye. Especially to be thanked are my friends in the field, scholars who have
read the following pages, saved me from egregious mistakes, and tried to save
me from many more: Dale Martin, of New Testament fame and fortune, from
Yale University, to whom I have dedicated this book; Andrew Jacobs, the bright-
est star on the horizon of Late Antique Christianity, at the University of Cali-
fornia, Riverside; Zlatko Plese, my brilliant colleague at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Coptologist nonpareil; Herb Krosney, the inves-
tigative reporter who more than anyone else is responsible for making the
discovery of this Gospel known to the world; an anonymous but unusually
keen and insightful reader obtained by Oxford University Press, whose com-
ments have made me think and think; and my wife, Sarah Beckwith, a medi-
evalist in the Department of English at Duke, whose perceptiveness and intellect
are uncanny.
Translations of the Gospel of Judas are by Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer,
and Gregor Wurst, in collaboration with François Gaudard, in The Gospel of
Judas (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2006); translations of the New
Testament and other early Christian writings are my own, unless otherwise
indicated.
Preface
ix
The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot
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CHAPTER ONE
My Introduction
to the Gospel of Judas
1
I
first saw the Gospel of Judas on Sunday, December 5, 2004, in a restoration
studio just outside of Geneva, Switzerland. I was exhausted but exhilarated.
The day before, I had given two lectures on the history of early Christianity for
the Program in the Humanities at my home institution, the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. I then drove straight to the Raleigh-Durham airport
for an overnight flight to Geneva. From there it was a quick taxi ride to the
hotel. The schedule was tight: I didn’t have time to unpack before meeting my
contacts.
We met in the lobby of the hotel, and I was ushered into the backseat of a
van along with six others. We were driven off to our rendezvous point, in Nyon,
Switzerland, on Lake Geneva. It was a cold and dreary day, and tired as I was,
I knew this trip was something special.
I was one of a small team of scholars assembled by the National Geographic
Society to help them verify the antiquity and authenticity of a newly discov-
ered Gospel. There was an air of secrecy about the meeting. Each of us had
been required to sign a nondisclosure agreement. We were not to discuss with
anyone—most especially the press—what we were about to see and hear. Na-
tional Geographic was considering whether to make a large financial invest-
ment in the authentication, publication, and promotion of this Gospel, and they
didn’t want anyone leaking the news of just what it was.
It was allegedly an ancient manuscript containing an account of Jesus’ min-
istry from the perspective of his betrayer, Judas Iscariot. No one thought the
Gospel was actually by Judas himself. Judas was an illiterate peasant, like
Jesus’ other disciples. But there was the possibility that it was one of our oldest
surviving Gospels: not as old as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but possibly
from the second Christian century. That century had seen a proliferation of
2
The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot
Gospels forged in the names of Jesus’ disciples—Gospels written in the names
of Thomas, Philip, and Mary, for example. This Gospel would be different,
however. All the other surviving Gospels told the story from the perspective of
Jesus’ friends. This one allegedly was by his enemy. But according to the hints
and rumors circulating in the early church, this lost Gospel named after Jesus’
betrayer portrayed Judas Iscariot not as the rotten apple in the apostolic barrel
but as the one disciple who understood Jesus’ teaching and did his will. Was
this the Gospel that had now been discovered? Did we now have that “other
side” 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 expedi-
tion. In addition to Terry Garcia, executive vice president for missions at Na-
tional Geographic, there was Herb Krosney, the investigative reporter who
had first brought news of the potential story to the attention of National Geo-
graphic; John Heubusch, head of the investment programs for Gateway Com-
puters and its Waitt Family Foundation, which was considering whether to
make a sizeable contribution to the project; and the other two experts who had
been flown in to provide National Geographic with the information it needed
to 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. Timothy
Jull, director of the National Science Foundation’s Accelerator Mass Spec-
trometer Facility in Tucson, Arizona, a scientist who specialized in the carbon-
14 dating of ancient manuscripts. Earlier in his career Jull had helped establish
scientific datings for the Dead Sea Scrolls. There was Stephen Emmel, an
American-born scholar who held a prestigious chair at the University of Münster
in Germany in the field of Coptology—the study of the ancient Egyptian lan-
guage Coptic, the language in which the document was allegedly written. And
there was me, a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity, with a
particular interest in the “lost Gospels,” that is, the Gospels of the early centu-
ries that did not make it into the canon of Christian Scripture.
Our charge was to verify that the initial reports about the manuscript could
be trusted, that this was indeed an ancient Coptic text that told part of the
Gospel story from the perspective of Jesus’ betrayer, Judas Iscariot.
The manuscript was being kept in the studio of one of Europe’s leading
experts in manuscript restoration and preservation, Florence Darbre, who was
connected with the renowned Martin Bodmer Foundation in Switzerland. I
must admit that when we arrived, I was a bit taken aback. Given the impor-
tance of Darbre’s work, I was expecting a more lavish setting. Darbre’s studio
was in the most inauspicious spot one could imagine, on the second floor of a
slightly dilapidated building above a pizza shop in a small, unimpressive Swiss
town far removed from the cultural center of Geneva. But outward appear-
ances can be deceptive. For within this studio was one of the world’s treasures
from antiquity, which Darbre had spent three years meticulously piecing to-
gether. This was a Gospel text that had appeared on the antiquities market
My Introduction to the Gospel of Judas
3
some twenty-five years earlier but was virtually unknown to the world of schol-
arship, let alone to the public at large.
We filed out of the van, into the building, up the stairs, and into a large room
with a large picture window overlooking an empty field and the industrial build-
ing next to it. Joining us there, along with Darbre, were Frieda Tchacos
Nussberger, the antiquities dealer of Greek origin who owned the manuscript,
and her legal counsel, the Swiss lawyer Mario Roberty, internationally known
for his work with European clients interested in fine art and antiquities.
There was excitement in the air as the meeting began. After the introduc-
tions, Roberty made some preliminary remarks on the manuscript we were
about to see. It had been acquired in 2001 by an organization that Roberty
himself had founded some seven years earlier, called the Maecenas Founda-
tion, which was dedicated to the restoration of ancient artifacts and to return-
ing them to their nations of origin. The manuscript had originally been
discovered in the late 1970s. Its early history was shrouded in mystery, but its
whereabouts from 1983 to the present could be documented with relative cer-
tainty. The manuscript consisted of sixty-two pages of text, written on papyrus
(the ancient equivalent of paper); it was a small anthology, containing several
different texts from Christian antiquity. Two of these texts were already known
to scholars from earlier manuscript discoveries in Egypt: a book called the
Letter of Peter to Philip and another called the First Apocalypse of James, both
of them apocryphal writings. The third was of immediate and enduring inter-
est. It was an ancient Gospel. Like the other texts, this was a Coptic translation
of a much earlier document. The manuscript itself, Roberty indicated, was
from the fourth century, but the foundation had reason to believe that it was a
copy of a document originally written in Greek as early as the mid-second
century. It was in fact probably the Gospel referred to around 180 CE by the
church father and heresy hunter Irenaeus, who mentioned a Gospel in use among
a group of Christian “heretics” known to history as the Gnostics. Irenaeus called
it the Gospel of Judas.
Roberty was sophisticated and urbane, and he spoke with authority in im-
peccable English. He was very interested in getting the experts’ opinions on
the document, although he and his colleagues had no doubt at all about its
authenticity. For the past three years it had been meticulously studied and trans-
lated by one of the world’s very senior Coptic scholars, Rodolphe Kasser, pro-
fessor emeritus at the University of Geneva. Kasser was an authority of
international status, and his word was gold. National Geographic wanted to
know if we would agree with his assessment of the document and his evalua-
tion of its significance.
Next to speak was Frieda Tchacos Nussberger, the antiquities dealer, in her late
fifties. 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 trying
to interest National Geographic in contributing to its restoration and publication.
4
The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot
This was not just an antiquarian interest for her; she had large sums of money
invested in the manuscript and was looking for a financial backer.
Then it was restoration expert Florence Darbre’s turn. She spoke of the
manuscript with special affection and let us know what a miserable state it had
been in when it was first brought to her attention three years earlier. The manu-
script had not been conserved and protected after it had been discovered and
removed from (smuggled out of?) Egypt. By the time it came into her hands it
had been manhandled; its fragile pages had broken and been senselessly re-
shuffled. It was literally falling apart. Her first step had been to place all the
surviving pieces—full pages and small fragments—under protective glass, and
then to begin the arduous process of arranging the pages in their original se-
quence and fitting the hundreds of small fragments together, much like reas-
sembling an enormous jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the final picture
might look like. In this work she had been assisted at every step by Rodolphe
Kasser, who was able not only to help reassemble the manuscript but also to
read 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, who
had made the trip from his home town of Yverdon-les-Bains in order to meet
with us and discuss for the first time this text, into which he had poured three
years 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 princi-
pally involved with Coptology—the study of the Coptic language and the an-
cient texts written in it—and I was an expert in early Greek-speaking Christianity
and the manuscripts (including those of the New Testament) that it had pro-
duced. I knew, of course, of Kasser’s work, as he was one of the premier schol-
ars in his field. And I knew that he must, by now, be an old man. What I did not
know was that he was suffering from an advanced stage of Parkinson’s disease.
He moved slowly and his hand continuously twitched while Frieda Nussberger
made the introductions. Nussberger clearly had a special affection for this
eminent scholar, who had worked so long to restore and translate the precious
manuscript she owned.
The only person that Kasser already knew there from the National Geo-
graphic team was Stephen Emmel, the American Coptologist brought along to
verify Kasser’s judgment that this was an ancient manuscript written in ancient
Coptic. Though two decades his junior, Emmel was respected by the grand old
master in the field. And as irony would have it, Emmel had actually laid eyes
on this manuscript once before, over twenty years earlier in a hotel room in
Geneva, under darker and less controlled conditions, as a previous owner was
trying 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 graduate
student at Yale, was the same he was about to see now, as a seasoned scholar in
the field. But he couldn’t know until they brought it out for us to examine—
