Roger Pearse

I had an email this morning from Mario Roberty, who owns the ms. that the book would be published today.

National Geographic have created a set of pages for it here.

The Coptic text is available for download from here.

The English text is published as:

The Gospel of Judas. Edited by Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst with Additional Commentary by Bart D. Ehrman. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2006. (ISBN 1-4262-0042-0, U.S.$22)

Further details summarised from the site:

Codex Tchacos is named after Dimaratos Tchacos, father of Zürich-based antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos, who bought the document in September 2000.
The codex contains not only the Gospel of Judas, but also a text titled James (otherwise known as the First Apocalypse of James), the Letter of Peter to Philip, and a fragment of a text that scholars are provisionally calling Book of Allogenes.

The codex, containing the Gospel of Judas, was discovered in the 1970s near El Minya, Egypt, and moved from Egypt to Europe to the United States. Once in the United States, it was kept in a safe-deposit box for 16 years on Long Island, New York, until antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos bought it in April 2000. After two unsuccessful resale attempts, Nussberger-Tchacos—alarmed by the codex's rapidly deteriorating state—transferred it to the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Basel, Switzerland, in February 2001, for restoration and translation. The manuscript will be delivered to Egypt and housed in Cairo's Coptic Museum.

Several pages of the Gospel of Judas as well as pages from the other three texts in the codex will be on exhibit at National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, D.C., beginning Friday, April 7, 2006, for a limited engagement. After Kasser and his team complete conserving and translating the manuscript, the codex will be given to Egypt, where it will be housed in Cairo's Coptic Museum.

Details of scientific examination -- radio carbon dating the papyri, multi-spectral imaging, paleography and ink analysis are here, with images. Key-points:

• The National Geographic Society submitted five tiny samples of the Gospel of Judas for AMS testing at the University of Arizona's radiocarbon dating lab in Tucson—the same lab that dated the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Judas fragments included four minute pieces of papyrus and a small bit of the book's leather binding with a piece of attached papyrus page. No part of the ancient script was altered or damaged during this process. The results allowed lab experts to confidently date the papyruses to between A.D. 220 and 340. "The calibrated ages of the papyrus and leather samples are tightly clustered and place the age of the Codices within the third or fourth centuries A.D.," reported Tim Jull, director of Arizona's AMS facility, and research scientist Greg Hodgins.
  
• Stephen Emmel, professor of Coptic studies at Germany's University of Munster, analyzed the Gospel of Judas ... "The kind of writing reminds me very much of the Nag 'Hammadi codices," he wrote, referring to a famed collection of ancient manuscripts. "It's not identical script with any of them. But it's a similar type of script, and since we date the Nag 'Hammadi codices to roughly the second half of the fourth century or the first part of the fifth century, my immediate inclination would be to say that the Gospel of Judas was written by a scribe in that same period, let's say around the year 400."
  
• McCrone Associates, a firm specializing in forensic ink analysis, conducted a transmission electron microscopy (TEM) test on samples of the document's ink. The procedure uncovered the components used to create the ancient ink and found that they are consistent with ingredients in known inks from the third and fourth centuries A.D. The ink includes a carbon black constituent, in the form of soot, bound with a gum adhesive. An additional procedure, Raman spectroscopy analysis, established that the ink also included a metal-gallic component like those used in third-century iron-gall inks. McCrone Associates reports that the Gospel of Judas may have been penned with an early form of iron-gall ink that included a small amount of carbon black (soot). If so, it could be a previously unknown "missing link" between the ancient world's carbon-based inks and the iron-gall alternatives that became popular in medieval times.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Trout

Just saw that myself: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4882420.stm

My question would be to any believers that if/when historical evidence surfaces that the basis of biblical stories are false or at the very least "different" is that enough to re-work your beliefs? Are you willing to accept change and how would you deal with it?

And how can one version of what's "holy" or right conflict with another (from the same church) yet everyone just keep on accepting things no matter what?

Toto

Previous thread from last year

Toto

Amazon link:


The Gospel of Judas (or via: amazon.co.uk).

Julian

Finally...! I was beginning to wonder if it would ever happen. Anyways: Yay!
Erm, what's the disconnect here? The C14 dating seems to be rock solid. Did he mean 300? Is this a typo?

Julian

Roger Pearse

Not by me, anyway. But I think not; these are two different approaches to dating. The other C14 result in that article was '3rd/4th century. I would guess that the C14 dates are not that reliable, given the wide timespan involved. But I'm certainly willing to learn otherwise, of course.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

jeffevnz

Well the two estimates were made using different methods, one from analysis of the handwriting, and one from carbon dating. Prof Emmel doesn't state the error bar for the estimate based on analysis of the script, but of course there is one. If it is more than 60 years, then the results are consistent.

In that case, only a date in the early to mid 300's is consistent with all three estimates.

The carbon dating is probably the most precise method, so its error bar of give or take 60 years should be the smallest of the three.

jeffevnz

Actually, the C14 dates are probably the best. Realistic error bars on the other methods are more like plus or minus a century.

Roger Pearse

Excerpts of the English translation are online at the NY Times site in PDF and I have also placed it here in HTML form, for those who (like myself) hate PDF's.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

funinspace

Not that I fit the profile of whom you are asking, but I don’t see how this would make for any significant change. Judas is already a paradox at many levels to the moderate to liberal Protestant. Was he just a bandit, who hid as a disciple and never believed? Was he a rebel who hoped for a warrior king to liberate in the here and now, and felt betrayed with Jesus only being a spiritual king (at least until a claimed second coming)? Was he just a pawn of God, and had no choices of his own? None of these scenarios really fit completely/coherently within the texts of the Gospel stories. The Gospels also conflict in the circumstances of he died, but for those willing to perform verbal gymnastics. So could this Gospel of Judas be another option, in that he was aware of his role and the need for his betrayal…why not? It's not like there aren't many Christians who take the NT as still very human documents and recognize a literary license or 9. Or is there more in this Gospel that draws a sharp line from the others?

What would a literalist/evangicalist think: Why this gospel is a crock of course, because it wasn't canonized in the HS guided Synods…end of story.