The Gospel of Judas

In April of 2006, National Geographic announced that they were releasing the The Gospel of Judas which they claimed “presents a newly discovered account of the life of Jesus Christ.”

Newspapers all over the world picked up on the headline that there was some earth-shattering discovery within this document, one that was to throw a new contrary light on the traditionally accepted story of Jesus’ betrayal and the role of Judas in his execution. On April 7th, the full translation of the document went online.

Now that the codex and translation are available, the only conclusion an individual can draw who is remotely familiar with early church documents is that we’ve all been had by a hoax- or at the very least, a very cynical public relations campaign.
This is not to say that there is not a Coptic document called the “Gospel of Judas” which dates to within 300 years of the beginning of Christianity. There is. But it is light-years away from being what we were told it was.

The first clue should have been the timing of the press release: Less than two weeks before the Christian holiday Good Friday/Easter, when Judas is said to have betrayed Jesus. The release also happened to coincide with the paperback release of The DaVinci Code, and the movie is just two weeks away. Many of the “experts” who were involved in publicizing the Gospel of Judas even pointed out that it was a Gnostic work, similar to the ones that Dan Brown cited in The DaVinci Code to support his (plagiarized) thesis of the church covering up the “truth” about Jesus’ life and death.