What is the Gospel of Judas?
The document was probably written by followers of Jesus Christ. It exists in an early fourth century Coptic text. According to the canonical Gospels, Judas betrayed Jesus to Jerusalem’s Great Sanhedrin, which officiated over the crucifixion of Jesus with the endorsement of representatives of the occupying power, the Roman Empire. The Gospel of Judas, on the other hand, portrays Judas in a very different perspective than do the Gospels of the New Testament, according to a preliminary translation made in early 2006 by the National Geographic Society: the Gospel of Judas appears to interpret Judas’s act not as betrayal, but rather as an act of obedience to the instructions of Jesus and that Judas thus served Christ by helping to release Christ’s spirit from its physical constraints. The content of the gospel had been unknown until a Coptic Gospel of Judas turned up on the antiquities “grey market,” in Geneva in May 1983. In 2006 the document was restored and translated from the Coptic lan
