Although it may well strike us as a new and challenging idea, it seems that the attempt to understand Judas’s betrayal, to give him the benefit of the doubt and perhaps even redeem him, has a long-standing and continuing tradition.
FOUR
The Gospel of Judas Surfaces in Geneva
The Gospel of Judas has not been seen for many centuries, having been successfully suppressed by the orthodox church. But the veil of secrecy has just been lifted by Rodolphe Kasser, who announced to the scholarly world the fact that it had surfaced and, incidentally, that he was editing it:1
On July 1, 2004, at 11:30 AM the world finally hears more. In the Picard auditorium of a Paris research institute near the Seine, Kasser, the philological Nestor, climbs the platform of the “Eighth International Congress of Coptic Studies,” to begin his 20-minute speech, long awaited by the scholarly world, on the topic that, at first glance, seemed harmless, “Un nouvel apocryphe copte” (A New Coptic Apocryphon).
Already after a few sentences it becomes clear that Kasser will celebrate the discovery, as the “extremely seldom and wonderful resurrection” of its main document. It has to do with a work that made a sensation in the second century after Christ, but later again almost completely disappeared from the stage. It really has to do with the copy of the most condemned writing of antiquity: The Gospel of Judas, first attested by the church father Irenaeus of Lyon around 180.
Kasser’s announcement in Paris on July 1, 2004, of the discovery of The Gospel of Judas has produced all-too-sensational German-language articles in journals for the nonscholarly public, first by Ralph Pöhner in the Swiss news magazine FACTS,2 then a cover story by Roger Thiede in its German equivalent FOCUS.3 This was then followed by Robert Macalister Hall’s English-language exposé of the Internet attacks by an owner of The Gospel of Judas, Mario Jean Roberty, and an antiquities dealer, Michel van Rijn.4 Both Pöhner and Hall interviewed me by phone from Zürich and London while preparing their articles, without my answers to their questions seeming to have much effect on what they wrote. The result is that these journalistic essays, which apparently first opened up the story to a wider public, function as a very entertaining, if not very enlightening, by-product of the otherwise sensational-enough story of The Gospel of Judas.
The essay by Pöhner, entitled “Judas the Hero,” begins, just below the title, with the summary:
It is almost as old as the gospels of salvation of the New Testament—and shows a completely other view of the betrayer of Jesus. For centuries the “Gospel of Judas” was missing. Now the early Christian writing reappears. It is in Switzerland.
Pöhner quite rightly quotes scholars in the field to underline the importance of The Gospel of Judas: Ludwig Koenen, professor of classics at the University of Michigan, reported that “there was no doubt as to its authenticity”; “in my capacity I could judge that.” Steve Emmel, professor of Coptic studies at the University of Münster, Germany: “of extraordinary interest.” Peter Nagel, professor of church history at the University of Bonn, Germany: “very, very valuable.” And Charles Hedrick, professor of religious studies emeritus at Missouri State University: “It is always exciting when one discovers a lost Gospel. This one here will help us to complete the scintillating picture of Christianity in the second century.”
Indeed, scholars assume that The Gospel of Judas was written somewhat more than a century after Jesus’s death. As we have seen, the standard edition of the apocryphal New Testament books states:
Dating: The Gospel of Judas was of course composed before 180, the date at which it is mentioned for the first time by Irenaeus in adv. Haer. If it is in fact a Cainite work, and if this sect—assuming it was an independent Gnostic group—was constituted in part, as has sometimes been asserted, in dependence on the doctrine of Marcion, the apocryphon can scarcely have been composed before the middle of the 2nd century. This would, however, be to build on weak arguments. At most we may be inclined to suspect a date between 130 and 170 or thereabouts.
But The Gospel of Judas disappeared soon afterward, and wasn’t seen again until 1983. The University of Michigan is the American university with the strongest tradition of acquiring and editing papyrus manuscripts. And in 1975, Michigan reinforced this reputation by luring from the German University of Cologne to its Classics Department, a distinguished expert with quite a track record of his own for acquiring and editing papyrus manuscripts, Ludwig Koenen. Perhaps he is best known for the Cologne Mani Codex, a miniature biography of the third-century Persian founder of the dualistic religion of Manichaeism, which is today the star exhibit in the papyrus collection of the University of Cologne. It is so miniature that it can hardly be read with the naked eye, and must have served more as an amulet to bring good luck than as a book to put on the shelf, much less to read.
Since Koenen had good connections both inside and outside Egypt for acquiring manuscripts, it is no coincidence that it is he who was invited to come to Geneva to meet with a Copt from Egypt and a Greek from Athens who had important manuscripts for sale. Koenen had received a few photographs of very bad quality, presumably so that they could not be used for unauthorized publication, but good enough to indicate the importance of the papyrus manuscripts. He had been able to identify one as a Greek mathematical text, in which he was primarily interested, and another as the book of Exodus in Greek, in which his Old Testament colleague David Noel Friedman was interested. So the two of them resolved to fly to Geneva and negotiate the purchase. But a third was written in Coptic, which neither of them could read, and which neither was interested in purchasing.
Koenen knew that I was working in Coptic, as the American representative on the International Committee for the Nag Hammadi Codices. Hence Koenen approached me as to whether I would be interested in participating in the negotiations (and funding), so as to acquire the manuscripts in Geneva. He was flying to Geneva in May 1983 to meet with the sellers, and hoped to consummate a deal for their purchase while there.
I was not free to go to Geneva on a moment’s notice, and the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity of which I was director did not have funds for such an acquisition, no matter how tempting it might be. But I did the best I could under the circumstances. I had brought together a team of young American scholars to edit the Nag Hammadi Codices, and so I sent out an urgent appeal to them to see what they could do to make this venture possible.
The only member of our team who was able to offer any assistance was Harold W. Attridge of Southern Methodist University. Harry had been a Junior Fellow at Harvard, the highest distinction a graduate student there could receive. Then Harry moved to his first teaching position at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Harry later moved on to Notre Dame, where he became dean, and from there to Yale University, where he is currently dean of the Divinity School.
Harry secured a pledge from the acquisitions funds of the Bridwell Library at Perkins School of Theology, authorized by Deckerd Turner, the divinity librarian at the time, for the total budget for the year, $50,000. Harry reports that “Mr. Turner and Bridwell had a fund for the purchase of rare and theologically significant books and he was happy to collaborate with the effort to acquire the codices.” Harry notified me promptly that this money could be made available for the Geneva venture.5 It is interesting that the manuscripts would actually be seen by Attridge years later when he was at Yale.
Since I did not have sufficient funds to make the trip from California to Geneva to verify the value of the Coptic manuscript and negotiate its purchase, I thought the best I could do was to fund the trip for a former student of mine, Stephen Emmel, who was doing research at the time with Tito Orlandi, Italy’s foremost Coptic scholar, in Rome, which was a less expensive “short” train trip from Geneva. I persuaded Steve to go to Geneva on my behalf.
Steve had become fascinated with Gnosticism when he was still in college and part of the student culture that grew out of resistance to the Vietnam Wa
r. Like most college students of the time, he knew all about taking trips through the heavens, but he determined that “thinking is the best way to travel.” He came across Gnosticism in an introductory course on Judaism and Christianity in 1970 and then happened to get hold of Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion,6 a book that made existential sense for him of the complicated mythology of Gnosticism, with its message of Gnostics escaping this evil world below by flying through the skies to the higher unknown God above.
Nothing would do but that Steve had to learn about these ancient “hippies,” whose secrets were due to be revealed in the still unpublished Nag Hammadi Codices. Steve recalls,
I became interested in Coptic history while I was a student at Syracuse University in the United States at the beginning of the 1970s. I was interested in philosophy and religion—all the philosophies and religions—as different ways in which human beings have searched for truth and the meaning of life. In an introductory university course about Judaism and Christianity, I discovered the ancient Gnosis or Gnosticism, and I learnt that most of the original ancient Gnostic sources were written in Coptic. The most important sources are the Nag Hammadi codices, which are ancient papyrus books written in Coptic. I was so interested in reading these books that I learnt Coptic, and came to Cairo in 1974 to work on them at the Coptic Museum with my university professor, James M. Robinson.
Steve found out that I was the person in America at the center of efforts to break the monopoly so as to get access to these new manuscripts, and so he came to study with me. That was just when I was about to go to Cairo for a sabbatical in order to reassemble the fragmentary leaves of the codices so that they could be photographed and published, the way I had figured out to break the monopoly. He tagged along… and ended up the best conservator of papyrus anywhere! Steve stayed on in Cairo long after my sabbatical was over, to complete the work of assembling the fragments to restore the leaves.7 And so he was still in Cairo at the right time to help me, from a distance, organize the First International Congress of Coptology and found the International Association for Coptic Studies.
Steve has advanced brilliantly throughout his career, ending up in the only permanent Chair of Coptic Studies in the world, at the University of Münster, Germany. The Institute for Egyptology and Coptology, where he works there, is in effect the Secretariat of the International Association for Coptic Studies he helped me found. He edits its Newsletter and helps to organize its congresses every four years. Indeed, he was closely involved in organizing the most recent congress in Paris, in 2004, where The Gospel of Judas was first announced.
Koenen and Friedman took the plane from Ann Arbor, and Steve took the train from Rome. On May 15, 1983, they met in Geneva in a hotel room with a Copt from Egypt, who spoke no English, and a Greek from Athens, John Perdios, who spoke English and functioned as translator.
Perdios had grown up in the international society of Cairo. But with the Egyptian revolution that deposed King Farouk and created a socialist state, most of the well-to-do foreign colony left. Though Perdios now lived in Athens, he stayed in contact with his Coptic friend, for they had been classmates in Cairo. Obviously Perdios was functioning as the intermediary for the Coptic owner in the transaction.
Steve has recently described what went on:8
That was in 1983. At the time I did not know that it had to do with The Gospel of Judas. The codex contained three writings. I could identify on the spot the second text. I could also see the third part, a dialogue between Jesus and the disciples. I even read the name Judas. Only I did not see the line “The Gospel of Judas.”
When asked why he did not see the title, he replied:
The circumstances under which we had to work were very unfavorable. The examination took place in a hotel. We only had half an hour time, and were not permitted to take any photographs, or write anything. The papyrus leaves were very fragile. So I could peep in only here and there.
Malcolm Macalister Hall, another journalist reporting on the story, quoted Steve in considerably more detail:9
“We were given about half an hour to look into what were effectively three shoeboxes, with the papyri wrapped up in newspapers,” says Emmel. “We weren’t allowed to make any photographs, or take any notes. The people who had them knew really nothing about them except that they were valuable—and that they wanted money.”
The bundles included a mathematical treatise, and the Book of Exodus, both in Greek. Emmel saw that the Coptic manuscripts—in a single leather-bound volume with its back cover missing—included The First Apocalypse of James and The Letter of Peter to Philip (both already known to scholars from a huge collection of ancient manuscripts which had been found in the 1940s, known as the Nag Hammadi Library). But there was another manuscript too. It appeared to be a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples. Emmel saw the name Judas, but, because the papyrus was in such fragile condition and beginning to crumble, he could only lift each page slightly with his philatelist’s tweezers, and could not see any title page. However, he deduced—correctly, as it turned out—that this was a previously unknown work of Gnostic literature, and unique. (An early sect within Christianity, the Gnostics were repeatedly denounced as heretics.)
To Emmel, the meeting had an air of cloak-and-dagger, and he suspected that the papyri had been smuggled. “The indication was that these were people who were not exactly working in bright daylight,” he says. “I think there was no question but that this material should have still been in Egypt.” And the price came as a shock.
“They were asking $3m—and they said that this was down from the original asking price of $10m. I don’t know if that was true—I think this was just a way of saying $3m was a bargain. They were not interested in selling any of the items separately. And my budget from Southern Methodist was just $50,000. We were flabbergasted by this price.”
Emmel says Professor Ludwig Koenen—the leader of the academic party—then went into the bathroom with the Egyptian, to negotiate. “When they came out I could see on Koenen’s face it was a no-go,” Emmel recalls. Banned from taking notes, he had all the while been desperately trying to commit to memory all the details of the texts he had seen. When the two sides then had a valedictory lunch together after the failed deal, Emmel made his excuses, slipped out to the lavatory, pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and noted down everything he could recall. He never saw the manuscript again….
Stephen Emmel agrees that this has been just another disaster for Coptology. “It is, but we’re used to it,” he says, resignedly. “Coptic manuscripts in general have not survived well. It’s not anything new, but it’s sad because if scientists could have taken that manuscript out of its shoebox in that hotel-room in Geneva in 1983 and worked on it, we would have had a very well-preserved manuscript. Now we’ve got another collection of fragments. We may never be able to restore it fully.”
A Dutch reporter, Henk Schutten, also quoted Steve in some detail:10
The meeting was extremely secretive, the manuscripts were smuggled out of Egypt, so much was clear. Questions about the origin were not appreciated.
They were not experts. They believed that there were three manuscripts, but there were actually four. After a quick listing, we learned that they dated from about the fourth or the fifth century AD. Two manuscripts, a translation of the Book of Exodus and a mathematical essay, were written in Greek. They were packed in separate boxes just like some letters of Paul the Disciple also written in Coptic (old Egyptian).
They were held together by a leather strap and the edges should have been intact back then. Its owners have not cared much for the find. Only half of the strap and part of the probable cover had been preserved and there were holes and tears in the pages.
The numbers of the pages went up to sixty, while most papyrus-codices are at least twice as big. I suspected half of the manuscript to be missing.
When asked what he thought when he saw the name Judas, Steve replied:11
The name was not
decisive. Just as any knowledgeable person would have done, I assumed that it had to do with the namesake of Judas Iscariot, the disciple Judas Didymos Thomas. He occurs often in apocryphal Gospels, more often than Judas Iscariot. It is also for him that The Gospel of Thomas is named. If I had seen the title at the end, it would of course have immediately occurred to me that Iscariot was meant, especially since right above it, as the last sentence of the text, there stands: “Judas took some money and handed him over.”
The sale price was $3,000,000, which of course was far more than the potential purchasers could produce. Perdios later reported to me that Friedman had said off-handedly that the owner should drop one zero from the asking price. Of course, when bargaining in the bazaar, it is expected that one will not pay the first asking price, but will negotiate down to a mutually agreeable price. This is the world in which the owner had always lived and understood quite well. But it would be considered an insult for the first counteroffer to be only 10 percent of the asking price, as if the seller knows nothing of the value of his wares or is simply trying to milk the potential buyer. Hence, the owner was offended. The negotiations ended before they had really begun. In any case, they would hardly have succeeded, since a tenth of the three million was probably as much or more than the purchasers would have been able to produce. In fact, Steve is reported to have said:12 “We could perhaps have paid a tenth.” The three codices were not acquired, and the three potential purchasers went away empty-handed.
Secrets of Judas Page 9
