Gospel of Judas codex
What happens when a media company with visions of books and TV specials brokers conditional access of an ancient manuscript? Well, if the saga of “The Gospel of Judas” is any indication, it doesn’t end well. And why should it? National Geographic required a ridiculous level of secrecy, which has fueled tension and division in the small academic community since the company announced in 2006 it had acquired the Judas manuscript and handed it over to a few prominent scholars for interpretation.
“The Gospel of Judas” recast Judas as a good guy, Jesus’ favorite disciple. Not a betrayer but close confidant who followed Christ’s order to hand him over to the Romans. The Judas codex was written after Judas’ death and is considered pure fiction, but at least a window into how a Christian sect saw the most notorious turncoat in history. It was good TV and created a cottage industry of for book publishers, but it was based on limited research and, many biblical scholars claimed, sloppy scholarship. The Chronicle of Higher Education digs deep into this story to see what went wrong in “The Betrayal of Judas”:
