In a press statement, the UK’s Bible Society said it would be “miraculous” if the Gospel of Judas unveiled in Washington DC last week “was actually written by Judas the apostle, since he had been dead for over 100 years”.
The Bible Society stressed that the Gospel of Judas, which portrays Judas as a favoured disciple who turned Jesus in at his own request, was regarded as a fake by the early Christian writer Irenaeus, being written a whole century after the real Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver.
Other Bible experts have expressed an academic interest in the text and what it can reveal about later Christian history but have also been quick to dismiss the media claims that the Gospel of Judas will challenge the Christian faith.
Dr. Simon Gathercole, a New Testament expert from The University of Aberdeen, stated: “The so-called "Gospel of Judas" is certainly an ancient text, but not ancient enough to tell us anything new about the real Judas or Jesus. It contains a number of religious themes which are completely alien to the first-century world of Jesus and Judas, but which did become popular later, in the second century AD.“An analogy would be finding a speech claiming to be written by Queen Victoria, in which she talked about The Lord of the Rings and her CD collection.”
The crumbling papyrus text is the most interesting to scholars and theologians from a bundle of texts unearthed in the Egyptian desert in the late 1970s and which resurfaced following decades of being passed through the hands of antiquity dealers.
New Testament expert at the University of Manchester, Dr Todd Klutz, said: “Like nearly all literary remains from antiquity, the Coptic manuscript of the Gospel of Judas will need to be analysed and discussed by scholars for a considerable time before anything resembling sober results can be attained.Based on informed reports by those who know the text best, I would conjecture that its greatest value will not reside in what it might tell us about the historical figures of Jesus and Judas but rather in what it reveals about the immediate context of its third or fourth century copyist.
University of Manchester, Dr Todd Klutz
“Based on informed reports by those who know the text best, I would conjecture that its greatest value will not reside in what it might tell us about the historical figures of Jesus and Judas but rather in what it reveals about the immediate context of its third or fourth century copyist and possibly also the Greek text on which it is probably based - which may correspond to a document criticised by Irenaeus late in the second century.”
The text was launched in Washington D.C. last week by the National Geographic Society after painstaking reconstruction. According to carbon dating, it was written in the fourth century AD, with experts at the launch confident it was a translation from Greek into Coptic.
