PENGUIN BOOKS
READING JUDAS

Karen L. King is the Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard University in the Divinity School. Trained in comparative religions and historical studies, her teaching and research specialities in the history of Christianity lie in women’s studies, orthodoxy and heresy, and the Coptic Gnostic literature. Her publications include The Secret Revelation of John and The Gospel of Mary of Magdala; Jesus and the First Woman. She is the recipient of awards for excellence in teaching and research, and has received grants from numerous organizations including the Ford Foundation. Her professional associations include membership in the American Academy of Religion, the Society and Stydiorum Novi Testamenti Societas.

Elaine Pagels is Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University and the author of six previous books, including The Gnostic Gospels (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award) and the New York Times bestseller Beyond Belief. Sher lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Reading Judas

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ALSO BY ELAINE PAGELS

Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas
The Origin of Satan
Adam, Eve, and the Serpent
The Gnostic Gospels
The Gnostic Paul

ALSO BY KAREN L. KING

The Secret Revelation of John
What Is Gnosticism?
The Gospel of Mary of Magdala

Reading Judas

THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS AND
THE SHAPING OF CHRISTIANITY

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Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King

VIKING

To Lyn and Norman Lear
in loving friendship
—E. P.

and

To Norman C. Cluley
with warmest gratitude
for his unfailing love and support
—K. L. K.

Contents

Introduction

Part One: Reading Judas, by Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King

CHAPTER ONE: Judas: Betrayer or Trusted Disciple?

CHAPTER TWO: Judas and the Twelve

CHAPTER THREE: Sacrifice and the Life of the Spirit

CHAPTER FOUR: The Mysteries of the Kingdom

A Final Note

Part Two: The Gospel of Judas, by Karen L. King

English Translation of the Gospel of Judas

Comments on the Translation

Index of Cross-References

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Introduction

FOR MORE THAN A DECADE we had heard rumors that a fabled gospel ascribed to Judas Iscariot had been discovered. In April 2006, the archaeological find was at last made public by the National Geographic Society. We now know that sometime in the 1970s, a copy of the Gospel of Judas, translated into Coptic from its original second-century Greek, had been found in Middle Egypt near Al Minya. It is rumored that peasants accidentally came upon a burial cave containing a limestone box that for centuries had carefully preserved ancient writings. One of these was a papyrus book (the Tchacos Codex) that dates approximately to the fourth century. Over the years, dealers secretly showed these writings to a number of people in efforts to sell them at an extraordinary price. Moved from place to place and improperly stored—first in a humid safety-deposit box in Hicksville, New York, for almost seventeen years, and later frozen (!)—the Tchacos Codex suffered considerable damage from the time it was found until 2001, when it came into the able hands of the philologian Rodolphe Kasser, who, along with the conservator Florence Darbre and the historian Gregor Wurst, labored hard over the fragments for five years to restore the text as close as possible to its original condition. The new translation into English offered here is based on their work.1

Our concern here, however, is not with the history of the discovery but with the meaning of this extraordinary find. Historians already knew about the Gospel of Judas from the writing Against Heresies by the second-century church father Irenaeus, who wrote about a group of Christians:

They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produced a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.2

The Gospel of Judas thus must have existed at the time Irenaeus wrote against it, around 180 C.E. The gospel itself was probably written in the mid—second century—but Irenaeus’s comments only provoke more questions. What did this mysterious gospel say beyond promoting Judas as the one “who knew the truth as no others did”? What truth did he know?

At our first reading, the author of the Gospel of Judas struck us as a very angry man with an offensive, even hateful, message, for he portrays Jesus repeatedly mocking his disciples and charging them with committing all kinds of sins and impurities in his name. And it seemed to us that the author was doing exactly that himself—using Jesus’s name to propagate his own homophobic and anti-Jewish views. We felt an immediate aversion to the Gospel’s sometimes strident, mocking tone and slanderous accusations. It felt too much like the other side of the bitter invective so well known from the harangues of early church fathers like Irenaeus against their opponents—the kind of polarizing language that is so deeply disturbing in our own era of religious and political discord and violence.

But once we moved past this initial impression, we found that not all is angry. Much of the Gospel of Judas is filled with Jesus’s brilliant teaching about the spiritual life. Why, then, the author’s rage? What matters so deeply? And most important, what hope does the author offer to redeem his anger? The answers to these questions lead deep into the agonizing controversies and exultant visions of God that would ultimately come to shape Christianity and capture the hearts and souls of people for millennia to come. These are the matters we address in Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity.

The most obvious questions are the easiest to answer: Did Judas really write this gospel? Can we learn anything new here about the historical Judas, Jesus, or his other disciples? Because the Gospel of Judas was written sometime around 150 C.E., about a century after Judas would have lived, it is impossible that he wrote it; the real author remains anonymous. Neither do we learn anything historically reliable about Judas or Jesus beyond what we already know from other early Christian literature. Instead, the Gospel of Judas opens a window onto the disputes among second-century Christians over the meaning of Judas’s betrayal and Jesus’s teaching, raising such questions as: Why would a troubled disciple betray his master, Jesus? How could any Christian imagine Judas—his betrayer—to be Jesus’s favorite and most trusted disciple? Why condemn Jesus’s other disciples as immoral killers? What are “the mysteries of the kingdom” that Jesus reveals to Judas alone? Why is it his star that leads the way?

To understand what inspires the author’s passion, we have to place the people who wrote and read the Gospel of Judas in the midst of the controversies and visions that shaped it. Some scholars have tried to do this by categorizing the Gospel of Judas as a “Gnostic” gospel, placing it on the losing side of battles waged among early Christians with diverse interpretations, beliefs, and practices, each group claiming to be the only one with the truth (the “orthodox”). And indeed the Gospel of Judas in some respects resembles other early Christian works that have been discovered in Egypt over the last century and that scholars label “Gnostic,” especially those from the remarkable find near the village of Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945.3 Many of those texts, too, let us hear voices that have been lost for over fifteen hundred years, silenced by those who won the name of orthodoxy for themselves.

Like some of these other newly recovered works, the Gospel of Judas understands human nature to be essentially spiritual, believing that the physical body decomposes at death while the spirit-filled soul lives forever with God in a heavenly world above. It, too, sees Jesus as the divine revealer sent by God to teach about his kingdom to an ignorant and unrighteous—or self-righteous—humanity.

But calling the text Gnostic can also lead to a number of false impressions, primarily because until recently, scholars have derived their descriptions of “Gnostic” Christians almost solely from the early church fathers, not from the newly discovered writings. Indeed, they invented the term Gnosticism in the eighteenth century, long before the new texts were discovered. The only primary sources available to historians then were from those Christians like Irenaeus, who had written against works like the Gospel of Judas. So modern scholars’ views are defined by their characterizations of heresy. As a result, we continue to hear only one side of the debates—the view of the winners—making it almost impossible to imagine what Christianity was like at the time the Gospel of Judas was written, when Christianity was developing and it was not clear whose views would dominate.

An even more difficult problem is that reading the new texts through the lenses of their opponents distorts what the Gospel of Judas and other newly discovered texts are saying, and makes it hard to see what the passionate arguments that informed them were really about.4 Reading the Gospel of Judas as just another example of well-known Gnostic heresy merely repeats entrenched clichés, for we only hear the losers’ voices yet again. But if we can get beyond the stereotypes that come from hearing only one side of the story—a version told so often and for so long that it has wrongly come to seem like the only possible story—then these new finds can enrich our knowledge of the diversity of early Christian imagination and practice, letting us read both the new discoveries and well-known tradition with new eyes. When we do, we can see now that the burning issue in the Gospel of Judas was one that the church fathers took pains to avoid addressing by diverting attention to other concerns.

As we will see, what roused such anger was the agonizing deaths of fellow Christians at the hands of the Romans.5 The author of the Gospel of Judas could not reconcile his belief in a deeply loving, good God with a particular idea other Christians held at the time: that God desired the bloody sacrificial death of Jesus and his followers. In this author’s view, Christian leaders who called on their fellow Christians to “glorify” themselves that way were murderers. They had totally misunderstood Jesus’s teaching and were worshipping a false god. Judas alone among the disciples understood Jesus’s teaching and that was why he handed him over to be killed. In the end, the Gospel of Judas shows us how some Christians were struggling with issues of suffering and death that concern us all, and how they envisioned a spiritual connection with God that persists now and forever.

Identifying Judas as Jesus’s most loyal confidant was no accident. Whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas was well aware that Christians almost uniformly condemned Judas as a betrayer; the author even has Jesus tell Judas that he will be cursed by the rest of humanity (Judas 9:28). Indeed, the author must have chosen Judas precisely in order to shock other Christians of his own day.6 When he accused them of human sacrifice, false worship, and other despicable heresy, his tone is not one of gentle persuasion or peaceful discussion: It is a direct and sustained attack on the deeply held convictions of certain other Christians.

Not all disagreements among Christians divided them, but those expressed in the Gospel of Judas surely did. For the author of this gospel has Jesus tell his disciples that in the end God will condemn them and they will be destroyed (5:16; 14:16)— except for Judas, who will rule over them all (9:29). He is the prophet of the end times, and Jesus tells him, “Already your horn is raised up and your anger is full, your star has passed by and your heart has prevailed” (15:5).

The author of the Gospel of Judas speaks as “true believers” so often do—insisting that only those who stand with him will prevail—and that God will utterly condemn everyone else. Like sectarians from his own time to the present, this author insists on breaking away from everyone else to form the only “pure” group of “true Christians”—just as he pictures Jesus telling Judas twice that he must separate himself from the others. Separating the other disciples is a judgment against them—but one which hints that those behind the Gospel of Judas are on the defensive. Its author hurls charges so outrageous that they cannot be taken literally—but they do show how hot feelings were running during a climate of persecution, when all Christians must have felt themselves in danger of arrest and execution. Meanwhile, leaders like Tertullian were accusing people who avoided martyrdom by fleeing of being cowards with only a frivolous and cold faith, people who would end up in hell along with all who followed them.7

This author could object, however, that neither Jesus nor Judas avoided violent death. Judas actually becomes the first martyr, for according to the Gospel of Judas, he did not commit suicide but was stoned to death by “the twelve” (Judas 9:7–8). By charging Christians with Judas’s death, the Gospel of Judas throws the bishops and their followers together with Roman persecutors, whom he accuses of worshipping demons. All of this suggests that the anguish on both sides of the dispute has erupted into uncontrolled bitterness. It is impossible to imagine them gathering to worship together in the same community of Christian fellowship and love.

Yet the Gospel of Judas, even in its fragmentary state, shows us far more than a glimpse into one particular dispute. It also offers a window onto the complex world of the early Christian movement and shows us that what later historians depicted as an unbroken procession of a uniform faith was nothing of the kind. As we said, the traditional history of Christianity is written almost solely from the viewpoint of the side that won, which was remarkably successful in silencing or distorting other voices, destroying their writings, and suppressing any who disagreed with them as dangerous and obstinate “heretics.” In place of the intense controversies and startling innovations from which the movement was born, they pictured Jesus teaching his simple gospel to “the twelve,” who, in turn, handed down the same exact message—which they called the “deposit of faith,” like money deposited in a bank. With fixed creed and canon, the disciples’ followers then supposedly delivered the message intact to the next generations of proper guardians of divine truth—to bishops and other ordained clergy all over the world. Many people have found this picture enormously appealing because it assures them that what they have learned as “Christianity” must be God’s truth. That picture of early Christian history could remain unquestioned only so long as the voices of dissent were absent.

But whoever reflects on how revolutions actually happen—including religious revolutions—realizes that this picture not only distorts the historical account by freezing its vibrant dynamism but that the picture is also a hugely oversimplified one. Over the last 150 years or so, we have gained access to over forty gospels, letters, and other early Christian works.8 We can now see more clearly that the early history of Christianity was tumultuous—a time of intense reflection, experimentation, and struggle involving every fundamental issue.

But, someone may ask, are these “other voices” really Christian? We often use the term as if its definition were clear, fixed, and universal, and speak as if it were obvious what is Christian; but in the second century, as in the twenty-first, those on both sides of various controversies often claimed to possess the truth for themselves—and denied that claim to others. In the same way, historians often used to speak of “the early Christian church”—as if only one group met in each city and every member was united with every other one by the same teaching, ritual practices, and concerns for the poor and sick. Historians today, however, see that major cities would have had many groups of Jesus’s followers. Just as varied groups can be found in any cosmopolitan center today, from New York to Mexico City, from Johannesburg to Brussels, so during the second century in the city of Rome, for example, churches formed of believers who came from all over the empire—from Syria and Turkey, Egypt and North Africa. They spoke Greek and Latin or tongues from their native lands; many were bilingual. Some of the immigrants were prominent teachers, offering instruction in the “philosophy” of Christianity—and often sparking deep controversy among themselves and their students.9 We now can see that what used to be called “the Christian Church” at Rome, as if there were only one, actually consisted of an aggregate of groups located in different sections of the city. Each group was its own island, with its own meeting place, its own leaders, and very often its own understanding of the gospel. Although various groups may have perceived themselves as “cells of one church” and sometimes worked together, for example in collecting for the poor or sharing eucharist gifts, no unified or uniform institution existed. Only in the second half of the second century do we see a single bishop elevated over the rest—and with that, clear lines start to be drawn, dividing the groups by excluding those now regarded as “heretics.” This is the story for second-century Rome. No doubt the situation in other cities varied, but the result was the same.

The rise of bishops, however, did not eliminate the competition or end the controversy. As the movement attracted increasing numbers of new members, it simultaneously attracted intense suspicion from hostile outsiders, and stories of persecution and martyrdom became increasingly widespread. Teachers like the second-century martyr Justin tried to defend Christians from hostile charges while at the same time attacking other Christians, even respected leaders like the Egyptian poet and spiritual director Valentinus, calling them “heretics,” accusing members of such groups of being inspired by Satan. Irenaeus, who became a bishop in rural Gaul, traveled to Rome to visit a bishop there and was distressed and shocked by the diversity he found among Christian groups in Rome. Following Justin’s example, Irenaeus sought to create a unified church by denouncing independent spiritual teachers, insisting that everyone must believe the same doctrines and consigning all gospels other than the canonical four to the rubbish heap. About 150 years later, the most unexpected convert of all, Constantine, who became emperor of the Roman empire—with Christ’s help, he believed—answered the prayers of persecuted believers by stopping the persecution and becoming instead the defender and patron of Christians throughout the Roman world. But being a pragmatic ruler, Constantine attempted to resolve the differences among various Christians by supporting certain powerful leaders—men who were bishops of churches in major areas. Constantine funded only groups that agreed to a definition of Christianity, which was established by bishops he gathered together in 325 C.E. at the lakeside town of Nicaea in present-day Turkey. Those who objected were cursed (“anathematized”). In the following centuries, dissenters saw their buildings confiscated or burned to the ground, and their members either forced to conform with Nicene teaching and practice or hounded out of the churches as “heretics.” Although their many writings had been read and copied for centuries, those too were—quite literally— forced underground, mute casualties of the war against heresy.

Yet not everything was lost. Like the Gospel of Judas, many books were buried in jars or hidden in graves, preserved for a distant future in which their silenced voices might speak again. Before these writings were recovered, it was hard for us to read the ancient accounts of Irenaeus and others who ridiculed these texts and understand why anyone would take the time and effort to bother to refute such preposterous and immoral ideas. But now that these lost Christians speak in their own voices, we are learning why they were such a threat to other Christians and why the attacks were so agonizing. We can see that they raised deep and compelling issues—about the nature of God, the meaning of Jesus’s teaching, the suffering of martyrs, and much else— issues close to those in our own day.

The Gospel of Judas, as no other surviving work from earliest Christianity, exposes the agonizing passion and the anger some Christians felt at the horrible, violent deaths of their family and friends—fellow believers who were put to death to entertain the Roman crowds and to cower any resistance into submission. But their anger was directed less against the Romans than at their own leaders for encouraging Christians to accept martyrdom as God’s will, as though God desired these tortured bodies for his own glory. We can feel their visceral denial that such a God was worthy of any honor. The Gospel of Judas shows us that the God they worshipped—and the religion they were ready to die for— was different. Jesus taught about the mysteries of the kingdom, about the realm of the luminous God beyond this world of chaos and death, the God who had prepared an eternal home in a great house made of living greenery and light above. As the age of martyrdom closed with the conversion of Constantine, stories glorifying the martyrs came to dominate the history of Christian origins, providing spiritual heroes for the new imperial church. The Gospel of Judas restores to us one voice of dissent, a call for religion to renounce violence as God’s will and purpose for humanity.

However we evaluate these new voices, their existence means that it will no longer be possible to tell the story of Christianity the same way. Gospels we had never known now invite us to enter the extraordinarily dynamic world in which Christianity was shaped. They offer us the opportunity—and the challenge—to see with new eyes the familiar traditions we call Christianity.

PART ONE
Reading Judas

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CHAPTER ONE
Judas: Betrayer or Favored Disciple?

WHAT WOULD SO TROUBLE a loyal disciple, after a long and arduous time devoted to his teacher, that he would betray him to the enemies who for years had wanted to kill him? Why would Judas have identified Jesus to the armed crowd of men who came to capture and arrest him late at night, when most of those who would defend him were sleeping?

For thousands of years, Christians have pictured Judas as the incarnation of evil. Motivated by greed and inspired by Satan, he is the betrayer whom Dante placed in the lowest circle of hell. But the Gospel of Judas shows Judas instead as Jesus’s closest and most trusted confidant—the one to whom Jesus reveals his deepest mysteries and whom he trusts to initiate the passion. Startling as this sounds at first, the perceptive reader will note that the familiar New Testament gospels have long offered hints of this. All the New Testament gospel writers agree that Jesus anticipated, even embraced, his own death. The Gospel of Mark says that right before Jesus led his followers toward Jerusalem, where he would suffer and die, he secretly told them that it was necessary for all these things to happen (Mark 8:31). The Gospel of John suggests that Jesus himself was complicit in the betrayal, that moments before Judas went out, Jesus had told him, “Do quickly what you are going to do” (John 13:27).1 The Gospel of Judas follows these hints to their logical conclusion. And yet it, too, does not resolve the issue finally but only succeeds in raising again—and more forcefully than ever—the question of why Jesus was betrayed and what his death means.

The New Testament gospels show that after Jesus’s shocking arrest, torture, and slow, horrifying public execution, various groups of his followers told and retold those events as they struggled to understand how things could have gone so wrong. If Jesus had been God’s chosen one, how could his enemies have gained power to kill him? Who actually engineered the plot that succeeded? What role did Judas really play? Despite all that the New Testament gospels say, the various anecdotes about Judas left many questions open—questions that have baffled and intrigued people ever since. The betrayer always intrigues us more than the disciples who remain loyal, as artists have shown, from Giotto’s famous painting of the traitor’s kiss to the paradoxical story of Judas written by Jorge Luis Borges; from Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ to Michelangelo’s Satan, pictured for eternity in the act of devouring Judas in hell.

The New Testament gospels suggest that by the time Jesus entered Jerusalem for the last time, his fame as a teacher and healer had gained him a large following, a situation that aroused the Roman rulers to suspect he was fomenting revolution, and so they put him to death as a signal to other would-be rabble-rousers and rebels. And indeed his capture, arrest, and execution could have ended the story. Many quit the movement at that point. The Gospel of Luke tries to counter these disappointments by telling a story of two who initially had given up hope. As they explained to a traveler, “(W)e had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21), but events had proved them wrong—until Jesus himself miraculously appeared and set them straight. Yet others stubbornly held to their convictions. Rumors that close companions, like Mary of Magdala and Peter, had seen him miraculously alive again electrified some of his followers, who declared that they believed these stories, even though many others rejected them outright. But instead of clarifying everything, the resurrection stories, too, raised more questions. Why had his death been necessary? What had it accomplished?

Now, however, the Gospel of Judas, along with many other ancient Christian texts discovered recently, from the Gospel of Mary of Magdala to the Apocalypse of Peter, lets us see that the New Testament writers were not the only ones troubled by these questions. Various Christians among the earliest generations asked—and struggled to answer—fundamental questions that look past Judas to Jesus. Who was—or is—Jesus? And what is the “good news” (that is, the gospel) about him? Although these works have been lost for over fifteen hundred years, ancient accounts had told us about them. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, knew about such gospels and mentioned the Gospel of Judas among many others, including the Gospel to the Egyptians and the Gospel of Thomas. Irenaeus realized that some Christians used only one gospel, while others used several, along with the letters of Paul the apostle and many other writings attributed to Jesus’s disciples. But Irenaeus was suspicious of those who used so many of these gospels, suggesting that those who did so were heretics; for, he declared, “the heretics say that they have more gospels than there really are… but in reality, they have no gospel that is not full of blasphemy.”2 Irenaeus was the first, so far as we know, to insist that the church has “only four gospels, not more and not fewer.” Why not? Irenaeus offers a cosmological explanation. Just as “there are four corners of the universe, and four universal winds,” so, he says, “it is fitting that she should have four pillars” that hold up God’s truth.3 And why these four? The Gospels of Matthew and John, Irenaeus declared, were written by actual apostles, and Mark and Luke by disciples of these apostles. These gospels were reliable, he argued, because they alone could be traced back to eyewitness accounts written by Jesus’s most trusted followers.

Few New Testament scholars today would agree with Irenaeus’s reasoning, much less with what he says about who wrote these gospels. For while the New Testament gospels contain traditions—sayings of Jesus, parables, and anecdotes—that go back to early times, even the earliest of the gospels, the Gospel of Mark, was written about forty years after Jesus’s death, and the rest about ten to thirty years later. It is highly unlikely that any of them were written by disciples who personally knew Jesus, but we do not know who actually wrote them. Furthermore, many of the gospels that Irenaeus dismisses as illegitimate, like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip, also claim to be written by members of the same inner circle of disciples; but we have no independent evidence to verify who actually wrote any of them, either.

The claims to apostolic authorship—whether by Irenaeus or those he opposed—belong to second-century battles over whose views would dominate the nascent Christian religion. Certainly, those who wrote and circulated the gospels Irenaeus denounced did not think of themselves as heretics but as Christians. Now that we possess not only Irenaeus’s refutation but copies of some of the works he wrote against—including the Gospel of Judas—we can see how one-sided his presentation is. And for the first time, we can hear other sides of the debate.4 If we were now to put Irenaeus in conversation with the author of the Gospel of Judas, the debate might sound something like this:

Irenaeus: You heretics reject the God and creator of the world who sent Jesus to die for our sins. And contrary to the clear evidence of Scripture, you deny the goodness of the Creator and his creation. You may practice a strict ethics, but only as evidence that you hate the flesh. By denying that Jesus had a physical body and that believers will rise from the dead even as Jesus did, you undermine salvation and make meaningless the church’s eucharist of bread and wine (as Jesus’s body and blood). You think that you are saved because of your spiritual nature and heavenly origin, so you don’t need faith in Christ. Instead you claim to have special knowledge revealed to you alone. This elitist attitude is not only arrogant, it’s completely in error and you will be condemned forever.5

The Gospel of Judas’s