The most mysterious and scandalous manuscript, written two thousand years ago, was discovered in the last century. It is called "The Gospel of Judas", and it speaks of one of the most hated people in the history of mankind - the apostle who betrayed Christ …
This ancient Gospel presents us with a completely different interpretation of the events of the last days of Jesus' life and casts doubt on the veracity of the traditional portrait of Judas Iscariot. Are the decrepit pages of an ancient manuscript capable of rehabilitating this man in the eyes of the entire Christian world?
A mystery covered by the sands
Science owes the discovery of the Gospel of Judas to a simple Egyptian peasant, who, while digging in the ground, accidentally stumbled upon a stone casket. Sand and drought helped the ancient documents survive 16 centuries.
The manuscript came to an Egyptian antiquarian. There is no information how much the businessman paid for the find, but he tried to sell the historical documents for three million dollars. Potential buyers were not satisfied with the exorbitant price for those times, but rumors about the Gospel began to spread. The rarity disappeared from the black market for several years.
Only in 1991, an Egyptian antiquarian handed it over to one of the collectors, leaving it in a cell in a New York bank.
The American scientist Charles Hedrick managed to familiarize himself with the text and secretly photograph the ancient manuscript.
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He even managed to persuade a certain Norwegian millionaire to buy the document, but on the appointed day the meeting did not take place. The manuscript was on the market again. The case was decided by the Dutchman Michel Van Rizn. A highly suspicious art historian on an Interpol warrant, Reesn hunted down smuggled antiques dealers on assignments from both the FBI and Scotland Yard. Thanks to him, the mysterious gospel, with financial support from the US National Geographic Society, was in the hands of the Foundation for the Preservation of Ancient Art.
The manuscript consists of 62 sheets of old papyrus wrapped in leather. It has been authenticated using five different methods, including radiocarbon dating, ink analysis, and spectral analysis. Previously, it was necessary to clean the manuscript from dirt and glue a thousand scattered pieces. The text on the rock - a dialect of the ancient Coptic language - was not within the power of few. The most authoritative Coptologists worked on it. It took the efforts of pas-pyrologists and restorers from different countries to make at least 70 percent of the unique monument of early Christianity suitable for reading and translation. The work on the manuscript was carried out in complete secrecy. And now, for the first time in many years, the Gospel of Judas can be read.
Pages not included in the Holy Scriptures
In the text, the image of Judas is interpreted in a different way than in the four canonical Gospels - he betrays Jesus not out of greed or anger, but allegedly at the will and direction of Christ himself, helping the Teacher to offer the sacrifice for atonement for human sins. He allegedly convinced Judas that only through his crucifixion and suffering on the cross could he renounce everything human, manifest his divine essence and atone for all human sins. Moreover, Judas, according to the document further, better than anyone else, understood the true purpose of Christ, and therefore it was his Son of God who chose from all his disciples-apostles for a special mission. The key point of the document is the phrase attributed to Christ, in which he confirms the chosenness of Judas: "You will surpass all others, for it is you who are destined to sacrifice a person in whose mortal body I am imprisoned."Thus, Christ speaks of his desire for his release from the human body to be accomplished not by an enemy, but by a friend.
It also became clear from the Gospel that Judas kissed Christ at the moment when he brought the soldiers to him, in order to show descendants the purity of his intentions and love for Jesus. In this text there is not a word about the torment of the cross, the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ, who announced this, as the canonical Gospels testify, to his disciples, but here suddenly a "light-bearing cloud" appears, into which Judas enters. It all ends with the message that Judas "received the money."
Thus, as is clear from the text of the manuscript, Judas is the central figure and the main character of this "sacred story", staged according to the "script of Jesus." There is something like a castling with the Teacher, whom this “faithful disciple” “rescues”, freeing his spirit from the captivity of matter, from the prison of flesh. Now he himself becomes the main initiate in the "mysteries of the kingdom", turning his self-serving betrayal into a sacrificial feat of service and voluntarily taking upon himself the burden of the centuries-old curse of mankind, stagnant in ignorance. In addition, the manuscript is silent about the resurrection of the Savior.
It would seem that the layman, expecting sensations that he understands from science, will be completely satisfied with this - all the canons of a historical detective are observed: a secret manuscript with a romantic history, “genuine” information about Christ hidden by the Church, a slandered hero, justice to whom it is time to restore justice. Could this find shake Christendom?
Mystical interpreters
In fact, the recovered fragments of papyrus represent a Gnostic text (these are texts created on the basis of the Old Testament), which the Church knew about at the dawn of Christianity and which it rejected as apocryphal (not included in the biblical canons). Gnostics are one of the directions of Christian teaching, the adherents of which believed that salvation could only be achieved through secret revelations told by Christ to the closest circle of the elect. Only with this knowledge, the Gnostics believed, "a person can free himself from the prison of his material body and return to the real, spiritual world to which he once belonged."
During the first century after Christ's death, Jerusalem was a site of powerful religious fermentation: Judaism, Roman cults, and Christian groups all vie for followers. But one religion is already ready to get ahead - Christianity. This period of early Christianity was not what most people imagine it to be. The Bible did not exist yet. Instead, different versions of the story of Christ were passed orally from one Christian to another. In the end, these stories were recorded as the Gospels, but not earlier than 30-60 years after the death of Christ. And today, most scholars believe that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John died long before their gospels were written. There is another strange twist in this history of the faith of early Christianity: there were not four Gospels, but more than 30. During the first 200 years after the death of Christ, literally dozens of different and sometimes conflicting versions of his life and messages circulated. One of these versions was the Gospel of Judas. The early Christian church fathers fought against the Gnostics. Therefore, they rejected the Gospel of Judas, along with thirty texts of the Gnostics, without including them in the New Testament.
Jug with manuscripts
The discovery of gospel legends that were not included in the New Testament is by no means an isolated phenomenon. On October 4, 1946, the first of 13 manuscripts from the Nag Hammadi library, discovered a year earlier by a peasant 80 kilometers from Luxor, came from the Egyptian Department of Antiquities to the Cairo Coptic Museum. While wielding a hoe, the fellah stumbled upon a sealed red clay jug. He split the vessel and found in it a pile of papyri, 25x15 centimeters in size. A local Christian priest, seeing ancient Coptic books in front of him, bought one for 250 pounds. It was this 70-page code that entered the museum, and the French Egyptologist Jean Dores recognized it as a collection of translations of the New Testament made in the 4th century, among which is the previously unknown Gospel of Thomas, the only complete text of the Gospel of Philip.apocrypha of the Apocalypse and the Acts of the Apostles. The discovery had a bombshell effect on the community of historians and theologians. This collection, totaling some 1,200 pages, is currently housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. Today, the heated controversy around the ancient texts still continues, and their analysis continues to cause fierce controversy among scientists.