The manuscript know as the Gospel of Judas is a series of tattered and fragmented sheets of papyrus in Coptic, an Egyptian script, and is contained in a 66-page, leather-bound “codex” that the National Geographic Society unveiled April 6.
Terry Garcia, a National Geographic executive, said a series of tests have shown that the text is authentic.
The text was discovered in a cavern near El Minya, Egypt, in the 1970s, and spent decades on the gray market. National Geographic did not say who found the manuscript.
Scholars say the manuscript was produced around A.D. 300 and reflects the theological traditions of a second-century sect of Gnostics, a community that believed true spirituality derived from an inner knowledge, or gnosis. Figures depicted as sinful in the Old Testament, such as Cain and Esau, were typically extolled under Gnostic theology.
Around the year 180, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, a heresy watchdog of the early church, targeted the community for declaring that “Judas the traitor … alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal.”
Religion News Service