A new Judas emerges from rediscovered gospel
The Gospel of Judas, which offers a radically different account of Jesus Christ's message and of his betrayal by one of his disciples, has been recovered, authenticated, and translated from Coptic into English after being lost for more than 1,600 years.
The gospel portrays Judas Iscariot as devoutly following Jesus' will in turning him over to the Romans for execution and offers very different views on the nature of man and of creation than are found in orthodox Christian teachings.
The translated document and pages of the original manuscript were displayed during a press conference yesterday at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society in Washington, where dozens of scholars from across Europe and the United States discussed a find that they said vastly expands knowledge about early Christianity.
''It is probably the most important archeological find of the last 60 years," said Bart D. Ehrman, chairman of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, a member of the panel of scholars that authenticated the manuscript. ''It is a gnostic gospel and shows Jesus and Judas in a very different perspective. Judas is Jesus' closest intimate. Rather than betraying Jesus, he actually did what Jesus wanted him to do."
Gnostic Christians believe that salvation is attained through mystical knowledge imparted by Jesus, rather than through his death and resurrection.
They believe that humans are fundamentally spiritual beings imprisoned in physical bodies, and they seek to explain why there was so much suffering in the world.
The key passage of the Gospel of Judas appears to be Jesus' statement to Judas, after reviewing the mistakes of the other apostles, that ''you will exceed all of them, for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."
Gnostic groups and texts proliferated in the first centuries after Christ's death, but went into decline after the year 180, when they were pronounced heretical by Irenaeus of Lyon, an influential church father.
Irenaeus helped lead the early church in its decision to canonize the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and to reject other gospels written after Christ's death.
The denunciation of the Gospel of Judas by Irenaeus, who is recognized as a saint by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, provides the earliest historical record of the gospel's existence.
Princeton University professor of religion Elaine Pagels, who also participated in the verification process, called discovery of the Judas gospel ''astonishing" and said that it, along with the gospels of Mark and Mary Magdalen discovered in Upper Egypt 60 years ago, ''is transforming our understanding" of the early centuries of Christian history.
The gospel's characterization of Jesus' disposition differs sharply from the gospels regarded as canonical, those accepted by the major churches. Jesus does not laugh in the New Testament, but he laughs four times in the Gospel of Judas, usually at the foibles and insecurities of apostles, including Judas.
The Rev. Donald Senior, who is president of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and who served on the authentication panel, said he did not believe the Gospel of Judas would create upheaval in the Christian world, but that it convincingly demonstrates a broad range of Christian beliefs in the early years of the faith, beliefs and ideas of which most Christians today are unaware.
The story of the gospel's rediscovery and salvation reads like the plot of a Hollywood mystery.
It began when a leather-bound collection of papyrus pages was discovered in the desert near El Minya, in central Egypt, in the 1970s.
It circulated among antiquities dealers in Europe and then in the United States, until it was put in a safe deposit box on Long Island by an Egyptian dealer who had shopped it around to collectors and failed to find a buyer.
There the gospel lay for the next 16 years, until it was purchased by an antiquities dealer in Zurich. That dealer also tried and failed to find a buyer and, alarmed by the manuscript's rapid deterioration, she handed it over to the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Basel, where its importance was recognized by Rudolphe Kasser, an eminent Swiss scholar and translator of Coptic, the language of Egyptian Christians.
By then, the papyruses -- which contained portions of three other texts, in addition to the Gospel of Judas -- were in nearly 1,000 pieces and were almost beyond saving. Scholars from Switzerland, Germany and the United States -- supported by the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery of La Jolla, Calif., and the geographic society -- became involved in conserving and translating the text and checking its authenticity.
After five years of work, European scholars assisted by new computer methodology were able to reassemble more than 80 percent of the text.
In February 2006, a missing half-page of the gospel was located in New York City.
In early 2005, radiocarbon dating tests run on five tiny sample of leather and papyrus at the mass spectrometry laboratory of the University of Arizona dated the gospel between 220 and 340 AD. Multispectral imaging tests run by a Brigham Young University specialist showed that the text had not been tampered with over the centuries.
Select pages of the manuscript will be available for public viewing at the National Geographic Museum in Washington for at least a month, starting today, and the gospel will be the subject of two books and a documentary to be shown Sunday on the National Geographic Channel.
The Maecenas Foundation has pledged to return the manuscript to Egypt, where it will be kept at the Coptic Museum in Cairo.
Charles A. Radin can be reached at radin@globe.com. 
