The Gospel of Judas

Discovery of the Gospel of Judas

The papyrus codex containing the Gospel of Judas is believed to have been originally unearthed sometime in the 1970s by an Egyptian antiquities prospector, near the village of El Minya, Egypt. The leather-bound codex made its way into the hands of an antiquities dealer named Hanna, who almost lost the fragile text to thieves around 1980. After miraculously recovering the codex, Hanna set out on a mission to sell it to the highest bidder.

In 1983, Stephen Emmel, a graduate student living in Rome, received an intriguing telephone call from a colleague. Emmel was a student of religion and a specialist in Coptic studies, and he traveled with two other scholars to Geneva, Switzerland, for an extraordinary meeting. The three men entered a hotel room; once inside, they were offered a frenzied half an hour to examine a collection of crumbling papyrus manuscripts, wrapped in newspaper and stored in shoe-boxes. The antiquities dealer who owned the manuscripts prohibited them from taking photographs or notes, and so the three scholars were forced to decipher the ancient Coptic scrolls on the spot, without any aids, and decide if they wanted to purchase them. The asking price: an astounding 3 million U.S. dollars. Emmel and his colleagues quickly realized that the papyrus scrolls were ancient and important. However, they could not afford the staggering cost. The three scholars departed empty-handed.

Neither Emmel nor his colleagues could identify the scrolls based on their short examination. But Emmel did recall one unusual fact from his brief look at the documents: the pages are filled with Coptic references to the disciple Judas, long known as the betrayer of Christ.

Having traveled from Egypt to Switzerland, the documents eventually made their way to the unlikely destination of Hicksville, New York, where the frustrated antiquities dealer laid them to rest in a safety deposit box for 16 years. Stephen Emmel, one of the scholars who viewed the scrolls in Switzerland, recalls, “When I saw the codex in 1983 it was fragile, but the 30 or so surviving leaves were still in pretty good condition.” However, the passage of time in a safety deposit box took a heavy toll on the delicate papyrus: “As it is,” says Emmel, “every one of those leaves broke into pieces, and many fragments are now missing—most probably lost forever."

The codex might have remained forever entombed in a bank vault, never to see the light of day, had another antiquities dealer, Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos, not finally bought it in April 2000. Tchacos endured several failed attempts to sell the document before it landed in the hands of the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art, who, teamed with the National Geographic Society, finally set out to restore, authenticate, and translate these mysterious scrolls. Their contents proved to be explosive: the codex included one text that began, “The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot.” It was the Gospel of Judas, rediscovered after 1700 years.