Christianity: Details about 'Gospel Of Judas'
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A Gospel of Judas that was in use among an early Christian gnostic sect called Cainites was alluded to by Irenaeus, in Adversus Haeresis written in Lyon, about AD 180, who said that some of them: stated that Cain owes his existence to the highest power, while Esau, Korak, the Sodomites and all other men are dependants of each other.. They believe that Judas the Betrayer was fully informed of these things and that only he understanding the truth like no one else fulfilled the secret of betrayal that confused all things, both in heaven and on earth. They invented their own history called the Gospel of Judas. (A.H. I.31.1) No trace of it had been known, until a Coptic Gospel of Judas turned up on the antiquities "gray market", first seen under shady circumstances in a hotel room in Geneva in May 1983, when it was among a mixed group of Greek and Coptic manuscripts offered to Stephen Emmel, a Yale Ph. D. candidate commissioned by Southern Methodist University to inspect the manuscripts. The asking price, $3m for the lot, put it out of a university's reach . In the ensuing decades the manuscript was offered about, very quietly, but no major American library felt ready to purchase a manuscript that had such questionable provenance. Eventually the 62-page leatherbound codex was purchased by the Maecenas Foundation in Basel, a private foundation directed by lawyer Mario Jean Roberty. Its previous owners now claimed that it had been uncovered at Muhafazat al Minya in Egypt during the 1950s or 1960s, and that its significance had not been comprehended until recently, but other sites were presented at various negotiations. The existence of the text was made public by Rudolf Kasser at a conference of Coptic specialists in Paris, July 2004. In a statement issued March 30, 2005, a spokesman for the Foundation announced plans for edited translations into English, French and German, once the fragile papyrus has undergone conservation. A team of specialists in Coptic history will be led by a former professor at the University of Geneva, Rudolf Kasser, and their work will be published in about a year. Roberty, the Foundation's director, announced that carbon dating put the Coptic manuscript in the third or fourth centuries, a century earlier than had originally been thought, based on the script alone. In the decades the manuscript had not been meticulously handled: some single pages may be loose on the antiquities market, and the text is now thought to be less than three-quarters complete. " "After concluding the research, everything will be returned to Egypt. The work belongs there and they will be conserved in the best way," Roberty has stated . Professor Kasser revealed a few details about the text in 2004, the Dutch paper Parool revealed . Its language is the same Sahidic dialect of Coptic in which Coptic texts of the Nag Hammadi library is written. The text is probably a translation from Greek. The Codex has three parts: an Epistle to Philip that is ascribed to Peter (a variant is in the Nag Hammadi collection); the Revelation of Jacob (also known from Nag Hammadi); the Gospel of Judas. Up to a third of the codex is currently illegible. A scientific paper was to be published later in 2005, but was delayed. Currently, publication is expected for March 2006, accompanied by a possible television special. A novel by Simon Mawer, The Gospel of Judas published in 2000 (UK) and 2001 (US) revolved around the discovery of a Gospel of Judas in a Dead Sea cave, and its effect on a scholarly priest. See also
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