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By Even Jesus recognized that there was something paradoxical about his betrayal by Judas Iscariot in three of the four canonical Gospels, with a kiss. "And truly the Son of man goeth, as it was determined," he says in Luke 22, "but woe unto that man by whom he is betrayed!" In other words, Judas is damned for helping bring about the salvation of humankind. This is doctrinally explicable: in the working out of God's plan, some people get damned. But in human terms, it's as puzzling as that kiss-which either is gratuitously cruel (he could have just pointed) or suggests that the self-divided Judas is already having the seller's remorse that leads, in Matthew, to suicide. And Jesus knows all along who will sell him out. In John's account of the Last Supper, he tells Judas: "That thou doest, do quickly"-and Judas "went immediately out." In shame and terror, we assume. But it sounds almost as if he were obeying an order that both of them understood. We've always known that there was a Gospel of Judas, which might clear some of this up. In the year 180, Irenaeus, a church father in Lyon who specialized in rooting out heresy, denounced it as "fictional." The Gospel was in vogue for a few hundred years, then disappeared from history-until last week. The National Geographic Society has just published a translation of the long lost work, with a companion volume explaining its provenance and exploring its meaning. Actually, it's a translation of a translation: the scribe wrote in Coptic, circa 300, from a Greek original, surely lost forever. This Gospel tells us that Judas was Jesus' only true disciple, to whom he imparted secret mystic knowledge, and whom he asked to turn him in to the Romans, in order to free his spirit from its fleshly prison. The story of the manuscript resembles an Indiana Jones movie-or, more to the point, a Dan Brown novel. (An unseen hand must have arranged for the Gospel of Judas to be published while the "Da Vinci Code" craze still had life in it.) The crumbling papyrus-13 sheets, in more than 1,000 fragments, written on both sides-was found in a cave in the Egyptian desert in the 1970s, passed from one antiquities dealer to another, and ended up in a safe-deposit box in Hicksville, N.Y. In 1983, scholar James M. Robinson, who created the team that restored the Nag Hammadi manuscripts-source of the similarly contrarian Gnostic Gospels-was told that the Gospel of Judas was up for sale in Geneva. He couldn't come up with the $3 million. In 2000, it was offered to Yale, which begged off; an Ohio dealer briefly stored it in a freezer. At last, its price reportedly down to $1 million, the manuscript ended up with the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art, which started restoration, translation and authentication.
Don't be expecting this fragmented manuscript to read like the King James. Small sample: " '[Truly] I say to you, [...] angel [...] power will be able to see that [...] these to whom [...] holy generations [...] After Jesus said this, he departed." And not a minute too soon. The secret wisdom Jesus confides-when he's not laying out a hierarchy of angels, gods and more gods that makes Hinduism sound minimalist- is a lot like that of the Gnostic Gospels, which posit a strict enmity between flesh and spit. Judas' betrayal of Jesus has sparked considerable anti-Semitism over the centuries, and the new Gospel may help Christians see beyond ancient-and historically unfounded-stereotypes,. Or it may simply add to our sense of how inchoate and multifarious early Christianity was, before such church fathers Irenaeus codified Robinson, who tried to acquire the manuscript again in 1993, says the Gospel is a sensation-but only to scholars, not the public. His own book, "The Secrets of Judas," hardly oversells the translation. "It tells us nothing about the historical Jesus., nothing about the historical Judas," he told NEWSWEEK. "It only tells what, 100 years later, Gnostics were doing with the story they found in the canonical Gospels. I think purchasers are going to throw the book down in disgust." "But right now, people are loving the idea that Jesus and Judas were dear friends who were in it together - it's such a downer to think the guy sinned and felt bad-and the hoopla machine is grinding away. The book. The book about the book. The National Geographic TV show about the book and and the book about the book. The audiobook. (Can't wait to hear thee passage above.) Last week, the public unveiling of the manuscript. Next year, the illustrated critical edition. Can the lipstick tie-in be far behind?"
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