Found 'Gospel of Judas' paints alternate portrait of Jesus' betrayer

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- A gnostic writing long thought to have been lost, the Gospel of Judas, was put on display April 6 at the National Geographic Society in Washington. The document, a third-century Coptic translation of what had originally been written in Greek before 180 A.D., paints Judas in a more sympathetic light than his well-known role as Jesus' betrayer in the canonical Gospels. In it, Jesus said Judas would "exceed all" of the other disciples, "for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me" -- a reference to Judas' impending betrayal of Jesus. It is also an allusion to gnostic belief that held the spirit in higher esteem than the body, and that, through the liberation of Jesus' body, his spirit would be freed. The Gospel of Judas was mentioned in a book condemning heresies that was written by St. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, France, in 180 A.D. The find was touted at an April 6 press conference as one of the three most significant discoveries of sacred writings of the past century, along with the Dead Sea Scrolls, thousands of fragments of biblical and early Jewish documents discovered between 1947 and 1956, and the Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of 50 texts found in Egypt in 1945.

source: http://www.americancatholic.org/