Apr 7, 2006, 19:00 GMT
Washington - The Gospel of Judas, attacked as heretical in early church texts but lost to Christianity for the last 17 centuries, was revealed Thursday by scholars in Washington.
The 26-page papyrus document casts Judas Iscariot as the best friend of Jesus, doing his master's bidding by betraying the Messiah.
For nearly two millennia, the four accepted gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have made Judas a synonym for betrayal, portraying him as selling out Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. His kiss identified Jesus for the Romans to arrest, and after the crucifixion, a guilt-ridden Judas was said to have committed suicide.
In the newly revealed version, believed to have been written in the second century in Greek by an unknown author, Jesus tells Judas, 'You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.'
Rodolphe Kasser, a top scholar of early Egyptian Christianity and co-editor of the annotated Gospel of Judas now being published, describes Jesus in the book as saying it was 'necessary for someone to free him finally from his human body, and he prefers that this liberation be done by a friend rather than by an enemy.
'So he asks Judas, who is his friend, to sell him out, to betray him. It's treason to the general public, but between Jesus and Judas it's not treachery.'
Pages from the codex were unveiled at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society, a US-based group that promotes knowledge in wide fields including natural science, history and geography. The ancient document goes on public display Friday at the National Geographic Museum in Washington.
A two-hour special television broadcast on Sunday offers revelations about the ancient document, purported to be a long-hidden account of the life of Jesus by one of his disciples. For Christians, the broadcast coincides with Palm Sunday, the day of Christ's triumphant entry into Jerusalem, where he would be crucified. The following Sunday, April 16, is widely celebrated as Easter to commemorate Christ's resurrection.
The rediscovered gospel is typical of the Gnostic sect of early Christians, who believed that the material world was corrupt. They sought salvation through secret knowledge, revealed by Jesus to his disciples, to escape their material bodies and re-enter the spiritual realm.
The Gospel of Judas was previously known only through surviving references in early Christians writings. Most were condemnations, such as one in the year 180 by St. Irenaeus, bishop of what is now Lyon, France, in a work written to condemn what he considered heresies at a time when many competing gospels and strains of Christian interpretation were competing across the Mediterranean world.
St. Irenaeus called the Gospel of Judas and other alternative versions of the life of Christ 'fictitious histories.'
But the Gospel of Judas was soon lost to history, until the discovery of the current version, a translation from the original Greek into Coptic, the ancient language of early Christians in Egypt.
Radiocarbon dating of the papyrus sheets and leather binding put the origins of the material between the years 220 and 340. Testing of the ink confirmed the time frame.
The theological content, style, grammar and script were all consistent with other Gnostic texts of the era in Egypt, according to academics who examined the manuscripts. A convincing forgery of such obscure cultural details would be improbable, one of the lead scholars on the project said.
Written in the ancient language of Egypt's Coptic Christians, the pages are believed to have turned up in the 1970s in Egypt, perhaps near the city of al-Minya, Egypt, along the Nile some 200 kilometres south of Cairo.
An antiquities prospector sold the book to a Cairo antiquities dealer. It was stolen with most of his collection around 1980 but eventually recovered.
In 1983 the dealer, seeking buyers, showed the papers to three academics, including Coptic scholar Stephen Emmel, then a graduate student in Rome. They were not allowed to photograph or take notes on the collection of brittle papyri, which were folded in newspaper and stuffed inside shoe boxes.
Now professor of Coptic studies at the University of Muenster in Germany, Emmel said it was clearly an ancient, valuable find, but they had too little opportunity to realize it contained the Gospel of Judas. At the time it was 60 pages in full, but much of it disintegrated in the following two decades before it was properly conserved.
He and the other two scholars in 1983 were unable to purchase the codex, for which the Egyptian dealer was asking 3 million dollars, and it disappeared again. It was eventually stored in a safe-deposit box in 1984 at a bank outside New York City.
The document stayed there until its purchase in 2000 by Swiss- based antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos, who still had no idea of the exact contents.
She let it be examined by scholars at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where papyrus expert Robert Babcock recognized it as the Gospel of Judas. The 26 surviving pages also contain a letter of Peter to Philip and fragments of other obscure religious documents.
After unsuccessful sale attempts, Nussberger-Tchacos left the codex with the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art. Eventually, the National Geographic Society and the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery, based in La Jolla, California, joined to restore and translate the Gospel of Judas, in exchange for publication rights.
The full document will eventually be housed permanently in Cairo's Coptic Museum.
'We can consider it a real miracle that (such an ancient literary work), especially one threatened by the hatred of the great majority of its contemporary readers, who saw it as a shame and a scandal, destined to be lost ... would suddenly appear and be brought to light,' said Kasser, leader of the restoration and translation project.
© 2006 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur