Lost Gospel : The Quest for the Gospel of Judas

Excerpt from Foreward:

In fall 2004 I received several unexpected and rather mysterious hone calls. The first was from a professional friend of mine, Sheila, who has for years worked on biblical archaeology in Israel. After a brief chat about her next dig, she raised the question that had prompted her call: Had I ever heard of a Gospel of Judas?

I had only a vague recollection of the book: It was one of the gospels that was mentioned by some of the early church fathers, but that had evidently been destroyed or at least lost many centuries ago. It is included in none of the standard reference works of the early Christian "apocrypha" - that is, the surviving gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses that were not included in. the New Testament. I wasn't able to tell Sheila much more about it.

Her question struck me as odd -- why would she be asking me about a gospel that hardly anyone had ever heard of, and that no one had ever seen? I decided to reread the ancient discussions of the Gospel of Judas, just to refresh my memory. It did not take long, as the gospel is mentioned in only a couple of ancient sources.

It turns out, the Gospel of Judas had turned up in Egypt, in a manuscript written in Coptic (the ancient Egyptian language that the Nag Hammadi documents were also written in). It was in the possession of a group in Switzerland called the Maeccnas Foundation, which was interested in involving National Geographic in the publication and translation of the text. In response, the Society was concerned, first off, to learn if this was real thing or a later forgery. ?

I agreed to help. What the Society wanted was my expertise on early Christianity, to help them see the broad historical significance of a text like this. They were also planning to secure the services of a scientist who could provide a carbon-14 dating of the manuscript. I told them that they would also need a Coptologist -- ?

There were vet other pressing questions. Where was the text found? Who discovered it? When? Where had it been in all the years since its discovery? Why had none of us heard about it? Who so far had seen it? How did it come to be in the possession of the Maccenas Foundation, the group that evidently owned it? Could they be trusted to make the text available to the rest of the world, scholars and nonscholars alike? How would they publish it? Who would translate it? And so on?