'' (Coptic ankh) is displayed on the final page of the
Codex Tchacos Authorship Like the four
canonical gospels, the Gospel of Judas is anonymous.
Date In early January 2005, researchers at the
Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory of the
University of Arizona completed their
radiocarbon dating testing of four samples of
papyrus from the
codex and one sample of leather from the binding. The mean calendar age for these samples was between 220–340 AD. In January 2006, ink samples from the codex were examined in another laboratory using
polarized light microscopy,
infrared spectroscopy,
Raman spectroscopy,
scanning electron microscopy,
transmission electron microscopy, and
x-ray diffraction. The chemical composition of the ink was determined not to match that of any modern ink, and its chemical composition was consistent with what would be expected for a document produced in Egypt during the third century AD. It is likely, based on
textual analysis of the dialect used and the presence of certain Greek
loanwords, that the
Coptic text contained in the codex is a translation from an older
Greek manuscript dating to sometime before 180 AD. Cited in support of this dating is the reference to a "Gospel of Judas" in the work
Adversus Haereses. This work was written around 180 AD by the early Christian writer
Irenaeus, who described the Gospel of Judas as "fictitious history". However, it is uncertain whether the text mentioned by Irenaeus is the same work as that found in the Codex Tchacos.
Rediscovery , . Fresco in the
Scrovegni Chapel,
Padua. Sometime in the 1970s, an Egyptian farmer discovered a limestone box in an ancient tomb. The tomb was located on the east bank of the Nile River, in a village near
Maghagha, Egypt. Inside the box was a leather-bound papyrus codex, written in the Sahidic dialect of the Coptic language. The farmer sold the document in 1978 to an
antiquities dealer in Cairo who went by the pseudonym "Hanna Asabil". The document was stolen from Hanna’s apartment and smuggled into
Geneva in 1980; Hanna subsequently recovered it in 1982. From 1984 until 2000, Hanna transported the codex in a cardboard box back and forth between Europe and the United States, but was unable to find a buyer prepared to purchase a manuscript with such questionable
provenance. During this period, the fragile codex was folded in half and often handled roughly. It was stored mainly in a narrow safe deposit box in
Hicksville, New York, where it was subjected to a humid and unstable climate. By 1999, the manuscript was in very bad condition: its bindings had disintegrated, its pages had been reshuffled and had disintegrated into over a thousand pieces, and numerous sections were missing. Some passages were only scattered words, while others contained many lines. According to archaeologist and Coptic scholar
Rodolphe Kasser, the codex originally contained 31 leaves, each written on both sides. By the time the codex came to the market in 1999, only 13 leaves survived. Individual leaves may have been removed and sold. Antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos purchased the codex in April 2000 and named it
Codex Tchacos in honor of her father, Dimaratos Tchacos. She deposited the manuscript at Yale University's
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where it was examined by experts. Because of its dubious origins (especially the possibility that it had been removed illegally from Egypt), Yale declined to purchase the codex. In September 2000, she sold the codex to Bruce Ferrini, who inexplicably decided to store the codex in a freezer. This dramatically accelerated the degradation of the codex, causing the ink and sap to separate from the fibers of the papyrus, darkening its leaves and making the leaves far more fragile than they already were. Concerned with its rapidly deteriorating condition, Tchacos managed to reacquire most of the codex from Ferrini. In February 2001, she transferred it to the
Maecenas Foundation in
Basel to oversee its restoration, preservation, translation, and publication.
Restoration and publication The existence of the text was made public in July 2004 by Rodolphe Kasser at the International Congress of Coptic Studies in Paris. In a statement issued 30 March 2005, a spokesman for the Maecenas Foundation announced plans for translations into English, French, German, and Polish once the fragile papyrus had undergone conservation by a team of
Coptologists to be led by Kasser, and that their work would be published the following year. Kasser revealed a few details about the text in 2004, as reported by the Dutch paper . Its language is the same Sahidic dialect of
Coptic in which Coptic texts of the
Nag Hammadi library are written. The codex has four parts: • The
Letter of Peter to Philip, already known from the Nag Hammadi library • The
First Apocalypse of James, also known from the Nag Hammadi library • The first few pages of a work related to, but not the same as, the Nag Hammadi work
Allogenes • The
Gospel of Judas On 6 April 2006, the National Geographic Society announced the completion of the restoration of the codex at a news conference in Washington, D.C.. The published manuscript of the first translation of the Gospel of Judas from Coptic to English was unveiled on that day at the
National Geographic Society Headquarters. A two-hour documentary entitled
The Gospel of Judas — which was aired on the
National Geographic Channel — followed on 9 April 2006. In 2007, the National Geographic Society published the "Critical Edition" of the manuscript, which includes images of all the fragments, the reconstructed Coptic text, and English and French translations. The initial translation of the Gospel of Judas was widely publicized but simply confirmed the account that was written in Irenaeus and known Gnostic beliefs, leading some scholars to simply summarize the discovery as nothing new. It is also argued that a closer reading of the existing text, as presented in October 2006, shows Christianity in a new light. According to Elaine Pagels, for instance, Judas is portrayed as having a mission to hand Jesus over to the soldiers. She says that Bible translators have mistranslated the Greek word for "handing over" to "betrayal".
Missing pieces For some 17 centuries, the Gospel of Judas was considered to be a
lost literary work. As of 2025, only one manuscript of the Gospel of Judas has been identified, contained within the aforementioned Codex Tchacos. This manuscript contains many
lacunae, some of which are quite lengthy. Up to a third of the Codex Tchacos is currently illegible, and other pages may yet be loose on the antiquities market. Parts of the codex turned up in January 2006 in New York City. Photographs of these fragments were later made available to
Marvin Meyer and Gregor Wurst, who presented their preliminary translation at
Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in New Orleans in November 2009. ==Content==