FOR 2,000 years, his name has been synonymous with treachery and deceit, but Judas may finally have received some divine justice.

A papyrus manuscript discovered in the Egyptian desert was hailed yesterday as an authenticated copy of the lost Gospel of Judas — revealing that, far from betraying Jesus, Judas Iscariot sacrificed himself for his master.

The ancient Coptic manuscript, dated scientifically to the 3rd or 4th century, was unveiled as the only known surviving copy of Judas’s Gospel and one of the most important finds in biblical archaeology.

Having been conserved and translated, it is said to offer a radical new insight into a man whom history has painted as the ultimate villain. Unlike the accounts in the New Testament gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, in which Judas is portrayed as a traitor, this gospel portrays him as the disciple closest to Jesus.

Having studied the rediscovered gospel, experts said that its text suggested that, by helping Jesus to get rid of his physical flesh, Judas had helped to liberate the true spiritual self.

They pointed to a passage in which Jesus tells Judas: “You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.”

Elsewhere, Jesus warns Judas that he will be despised for his actions: “You will be cursed by the other generations.”

The manuscript has divided scholars and church leaders, although most of them have yet to see it. Craig Evans, Payzant Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, said: “The Gospel turns Judas’s act of betrayal into an act of obedience. The sacrifice of Jesus’s body of flesh in fact becomes saving. And so for that reason, Judas emerges as the champion and ends up being envied and even cursed and resented by the other disciples.”

Marvin Meyer, Grist Professor of Bible and Christian Studies and director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute at Chapman University, California, said: “The text provides the opportunity to evaluate, and perhaps re-evaluate, the historical role of a figure who has been much maligned within Christianity and has been a prominent figure in the development of anti-Semitism.”

But Simon Gathercole, a New Testament expert at the University of Aberdeen, said: “The so-called Gospel of Judas is certainly an ancient text, but not ancient enough to tell us anything new. It contains religious themes which are completely alien to the 1st-century world of Jesus and Judas, but which did become popular later, in the 2nd century. An analogy would be finding a speech claiming to be written by Queen Victoria, in which she talked about The Lord of the Rings and her CD collection.”

James Catford, chief executive of the Bible Society, said: “It may yield some interesting insights, but there’s nothing here to undermine what Christians have believed throughout the centuries.”

He added that academics generally believed that the four gospels included in the Bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were all written within decades of Jesus’s death and that the Gospel of Judas was written between 130 and 170, “long after the real Judas lived”.

The rediscovered text is thought to have been copied down about AD300, but the first known reference to a gospel of Judas was about AD180, when Irenaeus, an early Christian bishop, denounced it as heretical. He declared that, of the many gospels circulating at that time, just four should be recognised — those of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The Coptic manuscript of the Judas gospel has deteriorated so badly over the past 30 years that it took many years to conserve and translate its text. The National Geographic Society, the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art and the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery have been part of an international effort to restore and authenticate it.

The story of the Gospel of Judas will be told by the National Geographic Channel on Sunday, April 9

FOUND IN TRANSLATION

Six years ago it was bought by by Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos, an antiquities dealer in Zurich

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