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Discovery

The first night I spent communing with Judas Iscariot and the Gospel of Judas was in the autumn of 2005, in Washington DC, in an office I was occupying at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society. The office, I was told, was used by a photographer associated with the image of the young woman from Afghanistan, with piercing green eyes, who graced the cover of the National Geographic Magazine some years ago. Now she gazed down off the wall at me as I in turn looked at the text of the Gospel of Judas. Maybe she was looking over my shoulder at the text. I had been invited to join the National Geographic research team, with Coptological colleagues Rodolphe Kasser, Gregor Wurst, and François Gaudard, and our scholarly assignment was to produce an edition of Codex Tchacos, which includes the Gospel of Judas. When that night I cast my eyes upon the Coptic text of the Gospel of Judas for the first time, I was astonished to see names that were familiar from my work on Sethian gnosis: Barbelo, Autogenes (Self-Conceived), Seth, Yaldabaoth, Sakla, Nebro. And there was the startling title of the text: the Gospel of Judas—that is, Judas Iscariot, the disciple of Jesus damned by the Christian church as the betrayer of his master. Here, for the first time in over fifteen hundred years, the Gospel of Judas, attacked by Irenaeus of Lyon and other heresy hunters as the quintessential heretical gospel, could be read and studied once again.

The tale of the discovery, publication, and interpretation of the Gospel of Judas is one of the truly fascinating stories of literary remains uncovered in the sands of Egypt.1 The early stages of the story remain shrouded in the mystery and uncertainty characteristic of many such tales of discovery. It has been suggested that the Gospel of Judas, preserved in Coptic in what is now called Codex Tchacos, was found near al-Minya in the 1970s, along with a codex of Coptic translations of letters of Paul, a Greek text of the book of Exodus, and a Greek mathematical treatise. Herbert Krosney, the author and journalist who pieced together the story of the discovery, describes the circumstances of the find. According to Krosney, Codex Tchacos and the other texts were found by local fellahin in a cave that was located at the Jabal Qarara and had been used for a Coptic burial. The cave contained, among other things, Roman glassware in baskets or papyrus or straw wrappings. Krosney writes, “The fellahin stumbled upon the cave hidden down in the rocks. Climbing down to it, they found the skeleton of a wealthy man in a shroud. Other human remains, probably members of the dead man’s family, were with him in the cave. His precious books were beside him, encased in a white limestone box.”2

As the story continues, thereafter Codex Tchacos, with the Gospel of Judas as one of its texts, was brought to Cairo, put on display, stolen, recovered, and shown to scholars in Europe. Eventually the codex found its way to the United States, where it was stored in a safe-deposit box in Hicksville, New York, for sixteen years, then obtained for purchase by an American collector, Bruce Ferrini, who put the papyrus in a freezer in a misguided effort, it seems, to separate the papyrus pages. Such inappropriate handling of the codex clearly caused considerable damage to the papyrus. Nonetheless, the papyrus pages of Codex Tchacos have been painstakingly reassembled, and the text has undergone radiocarbon tests for samples of the papyrus and leather binding and a transmission electron microscopy (TEM) test for the ink in order to establish an ancient date for the codex. Such an ancient date, in the late third or early fourth century, has been confirmed by the scientific tests. In 2006 a Coptic transcription of the Gospel of Judas was made available online, and a popular book was published by the National Geographic Society. In 2007 a critical edition of the Gospel of Judas and Codex Tchacos was published; and following that, in 2008, a second, slightly updated translation of the Gospel of Judas was produced.

The conclusion of Codex Tchacos is not currently available, and it may either have fallen into the hands of some person or organization or have been damaged and destroyed. The codex as now known from the papyrus that is available must have contained at least five texts:

1. the Letter of Peter to Philip (1,1—9,15), a text also known in a slightly different version as the second tractate of Nag Hammadi Codex VIII;

2. a text called James (10,1—30,27), a version of a tractate titled the Revelation (or, Apocalypse) of James (and given the title First Revelation of James by scholars to distinguish it from the so-called Second Revelation of James), preserved as the third tractate in Nag Hammadi Codex V;

3. the Gospel of Judas (33,1—58,28);

4. a fragmentary text provisionally called a Book of Allogenes (59,1—66,25ff.), which is missing a significant amount of its contents, and is given its current title on the basis of ink traces and the name of the central revelatory figure in the work; and

5. a Coptic version of Corpus Hermeticum XIII, here known from words and phrases in fragments identified by Jean-Pierre Mahé and Gregor Wurst.3

There may have been more texts in the collection. As it currently is known, Codex Tchacos is a collection of revelatory texts about the nature of gnosis and the true meaning of life and death, including the life and death of Jesus.

Judas and Irenaeus

Rodolphe Kasser, the distinguished Swiss Coptologist and papyrologist who was the senior member of the National Geographic research team, recalls that when he first saw the text of Codex Tchacos in 2001, he let out a cry of astonishment. What once had been an intact papyrus codex with a leather cover had deteriorated into a heap of fragments piled in a cardboard box. Years earlier, in 1983, several scholars, including Stephen Emmel, currently of the University of Münster, were invited to Geneva to view a collection of codices, one of which was what is now named Codex Tchacos, and at that time, it has been noted, the codex and its papyrus pages were in much better shape. Time and unkind hands took their toll on the codex, and by 2001 the ancient book was in shambles. The story of what happened thereafter is something of a papyrological miracle. Through the skill and devotion of Rodolphe Kasser, who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, the expertise and experience of Florence Darbre of the Bodmer Foundation, and the tenacity and computer skills of Gregor Wurst of the University of Augsburg, the boxful of fragments became a book again. The Gospel of Judas was emerging from the mist—and the papyrus dust—of antiquity.

The Gospel of Judas was known by title, prior to the discovery of Codex Tchacos, from comments in the writings of such heresiologists as Irenaeus of Lyon, Pseudo-Tertullian, and Epiphanius of Salamis. The comments of Irenaeus, writing in his tract Adversus haereses (“Against Heresies”) around 180 CE are most helpful. The time of his writing suggests a date of composition for the Gospel of Judas around the middle of the second century. (It almost certainly was composed in Greek and translated into Coptic later.) Irenaeus observes (1.31.1) that some gnostics, in a revisionist reading of the documents of the Jewish Scriptures, revere figures like Cain, Esau, Korah, and the Sodomites, precisely because “such persons are of the same people as themselves,”4 that is, they, like the gnostics, have been oppressed by the demiurge and defamed in the holy book of the demiurge, since they are of the order of the realm above. Irenaeus moves directly to a discussion of Judas and the Gospel of Judas, and by clear implication he places Judas in the same camp as those who are in the know but are opposed by the demiurge and are evaluated in a negative way in biblical traditions. (This may account for the fact that in the Gospel of Judas, “Judas the betrayer” is the recipient of revelation from Jesus but is also opposed, oppressed, and presented as the one who sacrifices the mortal body Jesus has been using.) “Judas the betrayer,” Irenaeus writes, “was thoroughly acquainted with these things, they say,” and in the Gospel of Judas—“a fabricated work,” according to the heresiologist—his story is told in a gnostic version. Irenaeus considers this gospel to be the creation of those who call themselves “gnostics,” thinkers that scholars now commonly term Sethians, and he summarizes the contents of the Gospel of Judas by focusing upon the knowledge possessed by Judas Iscariot: “he alone was acquainted with the truth as no others were, and so accomplished the mystery of the betrayal. By him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thrown into dissolution.”

While it is unlikely that Irenaeus had read the actual Gospel of Judas, he seems to have gotten several things right about the character of the gospel. Judas is the most prominent and the most enlightened of the disciples of Jesus in the gospel; the significance of the handing over of Jesus by Judas is something of a mystery in the Gospel of Judas, and it merits being depicted by Irenaeus as the mustērion prodosias (in Greek), proditionis mysterium (in Latin), the “mystery of the betrayal”; the events subsequent to the betrayal in the gospel are presented in apocalyptic terms, as the eradication of evil and the destruction of heaven and earth. Irenaeus not only describes portions of the Gospel of Judas correctly; he even gets the sequence of events straight in the concluding portion of the Gospel of Judas, as is clear from the Coptic text and now even more so from newly recovered papyrus fragments of the gospel.

Contents

By the time the contents of the Gospel of Judas were coming to expression in the work going on in Washington D.C. in 2005, we began to discuss together the obvious significance of this remarkable text. One day several of us gathered for lunch at a restaurant a few steps from the National Geographic buildings. Around the table were, among others, the National Geographic photographer who would do much of the photographic work in Egypt and Europe and the author who would write the article on the Gospel of Judas for National Geographic Magazine. The plans for publication and presentation were ambitious—two or three books, a major magazine article, a television documentary, a museum exhibit. I ordered a chicken salad for lunch. While we chewed our food, we engaged in an animated conversation about the Gospel of Judas and its implications for the history of the early church and the theological options in the first centuries of the Christian movement. How, we asked, does the Gospel of Judas change the story of the early church, and how does this gospel take its place among other Christian gospels, including the four gospels in the New Testament canon? Obviously the interpretive possibilities are interesting and thought-provoking, and we kept talking until the restaurant was empty. As we were about to leave, the maitre d’ approached our table with a note that had been called in, apparently by someone who had been in the restaurant at an adjoining table and had been disturbed by the conversation he overheard. This person clearly felt called to defend traditional Christian faith against such an untraditional text as the Gospel of Judas. The maitre d’ gave me the note, and I read it to the others. The note said, “God wrote a book.” I turned to the maitre d’ and asked him how he knew to give the note to me. The maitre d’ replied that the man on the telephone had said that he should give the note to the guy with the chicken salad.

The title Gospel of Judas derives from the titular subscript (peuaggelion enioudas, 58,27–28), and the incipit or prologue of the gospel provides an overview of its contents: “The hidden revelatory discourse (plogo[s] ethēp entapophasis) that Jesus spoke with Judas Iscariot during a period of eight days, up to three days before he celebrated Passover” (33,1–6). The narrative introduces Jesus calling the twelve disciples and speaking with them about “the mysteries (emmustēri[o]n) that transcend the world and what is going to happen at the end” (33,16–18).

One day, it is said, Jesus happens upon the disciples as they are celebrating a sacred meal reminiscent of the Passover meal or the eucharist, and he laughs. Jesus laughs a great deal in the Gospel of Judas, as he does in other Sethian texts as well as elsewhere in gnostic literature.5 The disciples complain about the laughter, but Jesus insists that he is not laughing at them. He says, “You are not doing this of your own will but because this is how your god [will be] praised” (34,8–11). The disciples respond by confessing, “Master, you . . . are the son of our god” (34,11–13), but Jesus turns away from this statement of confession. They are talking about the creator of the world, the demiurge, and Jesus is not the son of the demiurge. At this the disciples are furious, and Jesus invites them to step up to him and face him, but none has the strength to do so—except Judas Iscariot. He stands before Jesus, averts his eyes, apparently in a respectful manner, and offers a profession, from a Sethian gnostic point of view, of who Jesus really is. Judas states before Jesus, “I know who you are and where you have come from. You have come from the immortal aeon of Barbelo, and I am not worthy to utter the name of the one who has sent you” (35,15–21). With a term from Hebrew, Barbelo, perhaps meaning something like “God in four” (that is, God in the tetragrammaton, the four-letter ineffable name of the divine), this profession declares that Jesus is from a transcendent realm far beyond this mortal world, and that the name of the one sending Jesus to this world is too holy to utter.6

In the Gospel of Judas the profession of Judas Iscariot is exactly right. Jesus, it is said, recognizes that Judas “was contemplating even more of the things that are lofty” (35,22–23), and so he takes him aside and begins to speak about “the mysteries of the kingdom” (emmustērion entmentero, 35,25). In fact, Jesus speaks with the disciples as a group and with Judas privately, and much of what he has to say is highly critical of sacrifice and a sacrificial cult. The Gospel of Judas is opposed to the practice of sacrifice and those who oversee sacrifice, and such criticism is directed toward sacrifice in the Jewish temple and, it appears, sacrificial themes in the Christian church, specifically in the emerging orthodox church. There is no place in the Gospel of Judas for a traditional sacrificial view of atonement. Jesus does not die for anyone’s sins in the Gospel of Judas, but rather he offers insight and knowledge through his wisdom and teaching. Still, what the “sacrifice” of the mortal body of Jesus does in the Gospel of Judas is bring about an apocalyptic conclusion to the affairs of the world.

For Judas, however, the message of Jesus is not altogether positive: he will be opposed by the others, and replaced in the circle of the twelve. He will be detained below, and Jesus laughs and calls him the “thirteenth spirit” (or daimon, daimōn, 44,21). (A couple of other passages under discussion in the Gospel of Judas, passages with faint ink traces and difficult syntactical challenges, may also add to the description of the detainment of Judas.7) The reference to Judas as spirit or daimon could be positive or negative. A daimon can be an evil demon in Judeo-Christian sources, to be sure, but it can also simply be an intermediate being between the human and divine realms, or it can be a spiritual alter ego, in the Platonic sense, of the sort that accompanied and guided Socrates. Elsewhere in the Gospel of Judas there are clear Platonic motifs, such as the observation by Jesus that each person has a star assigned to him or her, and the Gospel of Judas builds considerably on this theme of the importance of the stars and the place of the stars in human affairs.8

Judas will be the thirteenth, and he will be cursed, but eventually he will rule over the others. His star, Jesus announces, will rule over the thirteenth aeon (55,10–11). The concept of twelve aeons and thirteen aeons is used in Sethian literature, variously, but the closest and most exact parallels to the phrase “thirteenth aeon” are to be found in the Pistis Sophia and the Books of Jeu. There it is proclaimed that Sophia, the wisdom of God fallen into this world below, is persecuted by the archons of the twelve aeons, and although she is separated from the thirteenth aeon, she will return there, to her dwelling place in “the thirteenth aeon, the place of righteousness” (1.50). The thirteenth aeon retains a degree of ambiguity in the Pistis Sophia, to be sure, yet it remains the blissful goal of salvation and restoration for divine wisdom in the text. Further, like Judas, Sophia is referred to as a daimon, in two languages (Greek daimōn, Coptic refšoor), in the Pistis Sophia (1.39; 1.55). A similar situation is to be noted in Pseudo-Tertullian, in Adversus omnes haereses (“Against All Heresies”), where the wisdom (sapientia) of God is called an erring demon or spirit (daemon, 1.2). The fact that Irenaeus also reports that in the second century, around the time that the Gospel of Judas was being composed, certain gnostics (apparently Valentinians) compared Sophia and her sufferings in this world with Judas and his sufferings brings Judas even closer to the figure of divine wisdom. Irenaeus says these gnostics affirmed that Judas is “the type and image of that aeon (Sophia) who suffered” (2.20).9 The very limited presence of Sophia or wisdom on the existing pages of Gospel of Judas, a text without a mythic account of the fall of Sophia from glory, could in fact be balanced by the prominence of Judas in the gospel, as one who is opposed here below but is on his way to the thirteenth aeon. Perhaps Judas, with his apparent connections to Sophia, assumes the place of Sophia in the Gospel of Judas.10

The central section of the Gospel of Judas is a cosmological or cosmogonic revelation in which Jesus reveals to Judas the source and destiny of the light and life of God in the universe. The revelatory cosmogony is put on the lips of Jesus, but except for a single Christian intrusion into the account—an interpolation, it seems, done earlier or later, that unites the familiar Sethian angels Harmas and Athoth into the peculiar composite figure Harmathoth, apparently to make room for the surprising reference to “[S]eth, who is called Christ” (52,5–6)11—the entire cosmogony is a Hellenistic Jewish revelation, an example of a mythical or Sethian Jewish vision of the universe. The cosmogony builds on materials also found in such gnostic (and, in some cases, Sethian) texts as the Secret Book (or, Apocryphon) of John, the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, Eugnostos the Blessed, and the Wisdom of Jesus Christ. The revelatory section opens with words, attributed to Jesus, that employ the Sethian name of the divine—the great invisible Spirit—and a well-attested comment on transcendence. Jesus says to Judas, “[Come], that I may teach you about the things . . . that the human . . . will see. For there is a great and infinite aeon, whose dimensions no angelic generation could see. [In] it is the great invisible [Spirit] (p[n]oc emp[n(eum)a] nahora[t]on), which no eye of an [angel] has seen, no thought of the mind has grasped, nor was it called by any name” (47,2–13). The great invisible Spirit, taking its place in this infinite aeon, extends itself in a series of creations and emanations. Initially a luminous cloud becomes visible, and from the cloud comes Autogenes the Self-Conceived. Next four attendants appear,12 and Adamas, the generation of Seth, along with other aeons, luminaries, angels, heavens, and firmaments, beings of glory that emerge with myriads of angelic powers and in numbers with multiples of 5, 12, and 72, leading to 360 firmaments. There is, as it were, an evolution or devolution of light, with the light of the divine world shining downward. There does not seem to be room in the remaining lacunae or gaps in the text for a narrative account of the fall of Sophia or some other divine jolt in the progress of the light downward. The use of the numbers 5, 12, and 72 in passages on the heavenly aeons closely follows portions of the gnostic text Eugnostos the Blessed, which like the Gospel of Judas—and the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit—lacks an explicit account of the fall of Sophia.13

Eventually, according to the Gospel of Judas, the light extends to the chaos of the world below. Through the activity of the angel El (or Eleleth), twelve angels appear to rule over chaos. As Lance Jenott suggests in his edition, “The stories told by Judas and the Holy Book present the impetus for creation as an act of divine providence intended to bring primordial chaos under the control of benevolent heavenly powers.” Jenott compares this account with the creation stories of Genesis 1 and the Timaeus of Plato, “in which,” he says, “the creator desires to bring order out of disorder.”14 Unfortunately, rebellious demiurgic beings come to rule in the world below, and their names, derived from Aramaic or Hebrew, are as grim as their megalomaniacal natures: Yaldabaoth (“child of chaos” or “child of (S)abaoth”), Sakla (“fool”), and Nebro (“rebel”).15 The rulers of this world in turn bring forth five angels, and Sakla the fool creates earthly Adam and Eve. Initially, life looks grim and gloomy for Adam, Eve, and their human descendants, but promises are given about salvific knowledge and an enduring image. Jesus says, “God caused knowledge (gnōsis) to be given to Adam and those with him, so that the kings of chaos and the underworld would not lord it over them” (54,8–12). Somewhat later Jesus reiterates the promise, in slightly different terms, with regard to the final resolution of all: “And then the image of the great generation of Adam will be magnified, for prior to heaven, earth, and the angels, that generation from the aeons exists” (57,9–14).

Toward the end of the Gospel of Judas, in a part of the text that has been plagued with lacunae, Jesus turns to Judas and says to him, “But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man who bears me (prōme . . . etrphorei emmoei). Already your horn has been raised, and your anger has flared up, and your star has passed by, and your heart has [grown strong]” (56,17–24). The lines that focus upon the readiness of Judas recall poetic lines from the Psalms and even more so—Tage Petersen has shown—the opening of the song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2, and the prediction that Judas will sacrifice the man who bears Jesus takes the sting out of the infamous deed of Judas. The one whom Judas hands over, or betrays, in the Gospel of Judas is not the spiritual Jesus at all. The spiritual Jesus is the immortal one within. The mortal flesh is what will be handed over, betrayed, and, it is assumed, crucified.16 In the midst of lacunae, the text seems to say—in a passage that was unclear before the recent appearance of additional papyrus fragments—that something fairly dramatic may happen in the world to the ruler of the world. Whatever may be the precise content of this passage, which we shall examine below, after that Jesus says to Judas, “Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and behold the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. And the star that leads the way, that is your star” (57,15–20). Judas looks up, sees the luminous cloud—“And he entered it” (auō affōk ehoun eros, 57,22–23). A revelatory voice comes from the cloud and speaks in a lacuna, and the Gospel of Judas comes to its conclusion with an understated account of Judas handing over Jesus—or, rather, the mortal body of Jesus. By now the spirit of Jesus is gone, having returned to the light above.

Invariably ancient texts are open to a diversity of scholarly interpretations, and so it has been, in the years since 2006, with the Gospel of Judas. On account of the relative obscurity of the Coptic text, the number of lacunae that have remained in the text until the present, the faint and ambiguous character of some of the ink traces, and the mystical gnostic contents of the gospel account, the Gospel of Judas may be open to even more interpretive debate than might be anticipated. In addition to interpretations that see the Gospel of Judas as a more or less typical gnosticizing gospel with a critique of the emerging orthodox church and a proclamation of salvation through gnosis communicated by the savior to and through a disciple or disciples—I offer such an interpretation here in this book—several colleagues have emphasized features in the gospel like the statement of Jesus that designates Judas as a daimon or demon, who may be understood to be in collaboration with the demiurge and who commits an act of wicked sacrifice by betraying Jesus. Thus, April DeConick has proposed that Judas is presented in the Gospel of Judas as an evil demon in league with the ruler of this world in a gospel that functions as a gospel parody.17 Once Louis Painchaud speculated, somewhat tentatively, that the gospel’s negative portrayal of Judas, though he is enlightened with gnosis, would suggest that the gospel means to warn gnostics against the apostasy of returning to the ways of sacrificial atonement and wickedness in the emerging orthodox church (the word ap[os]tatēs, which could be translated as “apostate,” is used in the gospel at 51,14).18 John Turner has seen the text as confusing and perplexing, as being out of synch with Sethian gnosis, and he has concluded that the Coptic version of the Gospel of Judas is a later text with a complex textual history, and that it is essentially pseudo-Sethian.19 Conversely, I interpret the Gospel of Judas as a gospel of Sethian content in which Jesus gives a series of insightful disclosures about sacrificial themes and the meaning of life and death, through a specially selected disciple, none other than Judas Iscariot, who is enlightened with the revelatory knowledge Jesus imparts.

While several passages are crucial for the ongoing debate about the overall interpretation of the Gospel of Judas, four may be highlighted here. Not only are these four central to the arguments raised; they also are addressed, to some considerable extent, in the papyrus fragments that have become available. The four passages deal with 1) the meaning of apophasis in the incipit of the Gospel of Judas; 2) the meaning of Judas as the thirteenth, linked to the thirteenth aeon; 3) the context of the prediction of Judas sacrificing the man who bears Jesus; and 4) the final entry into the cloud of light and what follows.

Fragments

Herb Krosney, the author who uncovered much of the story of the discovery of the Gospel of Judas and Codex Tchacos and published the story in The Lost Gospel: The Quest for the Gospel of Judas Iscariot, has also pursued the issue of additional fragments of Codex Tchacos. He published his preliminary report of the story of the fragments in 2010 in the European periodical Early Christianity. There had been speculation—and hope—that additional papyrus of the Gospel of Judas and the other texts in Codex Tchacos might be found, so that some of the lacunae in the text might be filled. It was also assumed by many of us that if anyone might have such fragments, it would likely be Bruce Ferrini, who once had possession of Codex Tchacos and then had to surrender the codex. In 2008 Ferrini declared bankruptcy in Ohio, and he confessed that he had in fact retained papyrus pieces that he was to have returned. Krosney writes of Ferrini’s actions, “He also left the court-supervised proceedings at lunchtime, with his lawyer, and returned to the court an hour or so later with something like a lawyer’s briefcase and what appeared to be full page fragments inside.” Photographs were taken of the papyrus fragments, and they were delivered to Gregor Wurst, who sent some of them to me, and it was confirmed that the fragments surrendered by Ferrini were from the Gospel of Judas and Codex Tchacos. In 2009, a lawyer involved in the case was scheduled to deliver these fragments to Europe for conservation, so that they might be joined to the rest of the papyrus codex; but at the airport in Cleveland he was stopped and the fragments were confiscated by federal authorities. Under the auspices of issues of repatriation of antiquities, the fragments were later delivered, not to Europe, but rather to Egypt. In 2010, Bruce Ferrini died.

In the spring of 2009, the court case involving Bruce Ferrini came to a close, and it was publicly announced that among the antiquities he had to surrender were more papyrus fragments of the Gospel of Judas and the texts of Codex Tchacos. Substantial fragments of the Letter of Peter to Philip provide scholars with a very interesting and much more complete second version of that text. A fragment placed at the end of James seems to give a new and fresh understanding of the gnostic interpretation of the theme of martyrdom in that text. And a number of fragments of the Gospel of Judas now allow about 90–95 percent of the gospel to be legible, and new light is being shed on the four key passages cited above.20

1. According to ancient usage, the word apophasis, which is used in the incipit or prologue of the Gospel of Judas, can have a range of meanings, from “declaration” or “revelation” to “judgment” or “verdict.” The term is used elsewhere in literature on the gnostics, most notably in Hippolytus of Rome’s Refutatio omnium haeresium (“Refutation of All Heresies”), where the author makes reference to a work of gnosis attributed to Simon Magus titled Apophasis megale, most likely to be understood in a positive light as “Great Declaration” or “Great Revelation” (6.9.4—18.7). In the case of the Gospel of Judas, the exact meaning of apophasis is crucial for the text, since an incipit typically provides a précis of the work. A few scholars have imagined that apophasis in the Gospel of Judas might be taken in a negative sense, so that the incipit declares that the gospel is “the secret word of judgment,” the statement of the verdict against the twelve disciples, against the emerging orthodox church, or against Judas himself.21 Now in one of the recovered fragments of Codex Tchacos, not a fragment of the Gospel of Judas but instead a fragment of the Letter of Peter to Philip, the term apophasis appears again, in the context of one of the revelatory appearances of Jesus to his disciples. The restored passage reads, “[Then] a revelation (apophasis) came through (or, from) [the] light, saying, ‘It is [you] who bear witness to me’” (3,11–13). A parallel to these lines may be consulted in the Nag Hammadi Codex VIII version of the Letter of Peter to Philip, and the parallel text uses not apophasis but the Coptic word smē: “Then a voice (smē) called to them from the light, saying, ‘It is you who bear witness that I have said all these things to you. But because of your unbelief I shall speak again’” (135,3–8). While the content of the revelatory words of Jesus in the more complete text of the Letter of Peter to Philip in the Nag Hammadi version is less than fully positive, as it mentions the unbelief of the disciples, the word smē is a thoroughly neutral term used several times in the sense of a revelatory voice or voice of declaration in the versions of the Letter of Peter to Philip in both Codex Tchacos (including the fragments) and Nag Hammadi Codex VIII, and the retention of the loanword apophasis, from the Greek, in Codex Tchacos 3,11 may suggest a neutral or positive understanding of apophasis in the incipit of the Gospel of Judas as well.

2. Judas is referred to as the thirteenth, whose star is bound to reign over the thirteenth aeon, and new fragmentary remains placed on the top half of page 55 may expand the scope of meaning for Judas and the number thirteen in the Gospel of Judas. Sethian texts, such as the Nature of the Rulers, the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, and the Revelation of Adam, often make mention of the history of Israel in the Sethian story of salvation. Prior to the examination of the fragments, the Gospel of Judas seemed to have little to say about Israel in Sethian Heilsgeschichte or salvation history. Now the reading of page 55 may be expanded with information on the history of Israel as well as the place of the twelve tribes—and the thirteenth aeon. The section reads, as Jesus is speaking, “And they will . . . evil, and . . . the aeons, bringing their generations and offering them to Sakla. And after that [. .]rael (p[. .]raēl) will come bringing the twelve tribes of Israel from [Egypt (?)]. And [the generations] will all serve Sakla, [also] sinning in my name. And your star will rule over the thirteenth aeon” (55,1–13). (P)[. .]rael may be Israel or Istrael, forms of the name of the angel of Israel, as attested on magical gems.22 The story of Israel coming out, it seems to be, from Egypt could well rehearse the event of the exodus from Egypt as a part of Sethian salvation history. And the juxtaposition of the twelve tribes of Israel with the thirteenth aeon of Judas may add important content to the constellation of themes surrounding Judas and the thirteenth aeon in the Gospel of Judas.

3. In the Gospel of Judas the announcement made by Jesus that Judas will sacrifice the man who bears him has been adrift, before the recovered fragments became available, in the uncertain context of lacunae preceding and following the announcement. With recovered fragments placed, the passage on pages 56–57, though still not free of ambiguity, begins to attain greater clarity as an interpretation of the crucifixion of the mortal flesh of Jesus and the resultant eschatological events. The passage, restored, has Jesus explain, with the previous text joined with the fragments, “I’m telling [you] the truth, this baptism . . . [in] my name . . . . . . this will destroy the entire generation of the earthly man Adam. Tomorrow they will torment the one who bears me (peterpho[rei] emmoi). I’m [telling] you the truth, no hand of a mortal human [will] sin against me. [I’m] telling you the truth, Judas, those [who] offer sacrifices to Sakla [will] all . . . , since . . . upon . . . all of them . . . everything evil. But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man who bears me . . . .23 [I’m telling you] the truth, your last . . . and . . . come to be . . . the ministers of the aeon have . . . , and the kings have become weak, and the generations of the angels have grieved, and those who are evil . . . the ruler, since he is overthrown. And then the image of the great generation of Adam will be magnified . . .” (55,24—57,11). This passage incorporates another reference by Jesus to the man who bears him. The remaining lacuna in the line that explains what will happen to those who sacrifice to the archon Sakla almost certainly is to be restored by means of a verb in a future tense with a third-person plural pronominal subject (or a passive construction). One possibility, tentatively adopted here, is as follows: “those [who] offer sacrifices to Sakla will all [die (?)]” (56,13–14). There should be other possible readings. Such a reconstruction could shed light on how Judas will surpass them, in that he will live, and he will bring about events that will shatter heaven and earth and cause the cosmic forces to be undone. The concluding lines of the passage, improved with additional text, divulge the apocalyptic events that will come on the heels of the “sacrifice” or betrayal of the mortal remains of Jesus. The “sacrifice” of Jesus takes on something of a triumphant character: the ruler of the world will be overcome, and the powers of heaven and earth will be brought down and destroyed—even as Irenaeus states in his brief description of the Gospel of Judas. This seems to be, as Irenaeus puts it, “the mystery of the betrayal.”