The National Geographic Society has been part of an international effort, in collaboration with the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art and the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery, to authenticate, conserve, and translate a 66-page codex, which contains a text called James (also known as First Apocalypse of James), the Letter of Peter to Philip, a fragment of a text that scholars are provisionally calling Book of Allogenes, and the only known surviving copy of the Gospel of Judas.
The newly revealed gospel document, written in Coptic script, is believed to be a translation of the original, a Greek text written by an early Christian sect sometime before A.D. 180.
The Bible's New Testament Gospels?Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?depict Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus, as a traitor. In biblical accounts Judas gives up Jesus Christ to his opponents, who later crucify the founder of Christianity. The Gospel of Judas, however, portrays him as acting at Jesus' request.
"This lost gospel, providing information on Judas Iscariot?considered for 20 centuries and by hundreds of millions of believers as an antichrist of the worst kind?bears witness to something completely different from what was said [about Judas] in the Bible," said Rodolphe Kasser, a clergyman and former professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.
The Gospel of Judas was lost for nearly 1,700 years before its discovery in the 1970s somewhere in Egypt. But the text was revealed only briefly before disappearing into the secretive world of antiquities dealers. In May 1983 scholar Ludwig Koenen of the University of Michigan received an intriguing phone call that led him to Switzerland, where he and a small group of scholars viewed some ancient Coptic documents for sale by an Egyptian owner. The seller wanted 3 million U.S. dollars for the documents, which was far beyond the university?s budget. No deal was made and the documents vanished for 17 years.
Their owner during this period, an Egyptian antiquities dealer, attempted unsuccessfully to sell the codex in New York to one of America's leading rare book and manuscripts dealers. An additional examination of the documents was made by classicist Professor Roger Bagnall of Columbia University. A sale did not materialize. The owner placed the codex a safe deposit box in Hicksville, Long Island. The trail that had led the documents from their ancient hiding place to New York is full of twists and turns, under constant threat of deterioration of the manuscript.
In 2000 the dealer finally sold the documents to an Egyptian-born Greek dealer named Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos, who turned the documents over to experts at Yale University's Beinecke Library, whom she viewed as possible buyers. At Yale, papyrus expert Robert Babcock and Coptic scholar Bentley Layton discovered the truth?Nussberger-Tchacos possessed the Gospel of Judas.
In 2001 Nussberger-Tchacos determined to sell the codex to the Swiss-based Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art. The foundation had clearly stated its goal to restore, preserve, and publish the long-hidden text and then return the original to its country of origin.
To this end the foundation entered into partnership with the National Geographic Society, which now brings the Gospel of Judas to the world after nearly 1,700 years of seclusion.
The restored original will be delivered to Cairo's Coptic Museum.
Source: National Geographic Society/www.mult-kor.hu
