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The gospel of Judas. Coptic text, translation, and historical interpretation of the 'Betrayer's gospel' . By Lance Jenott . (Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum, 64.) Pp. x+259, Tübingen : Mohr Siebeck , 2011. [euro]59 (paper). 978 3 16 150978 0 ; 1436 3003
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This doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Elaine Pagels at Princeton, is notable for offering a fresh interpretation of this tenebrous Coptic work. The principal concern of the Gospel of Judas is taken, reasonably enough, to be the immorality and illegitimacy of the twelve disciples and consequently of those who stake a claim to be their rightful heirs. The book has four main chapters, on Jesus, the disciples, Judas's version of the Gnostic myth and the Tchacos codex as a collection (where the Gospel of Judas is accompanied by the Epistle of Peter to Philip and the First Apocalypse of James found among in the Nag Hammadi codices, with an unknown Allogenes text, and some fragments of Corpus Hermeticum XIII). Equally valuable are the parallel text and translation, commentary, and catalogue of scribal marks, found in three appendices. Such a work is justified not only on the grounds of the infancy of research on Judas, but also because this is the first monograph to take account of the new fragments published subsequent to the editio princeps.
The rebarbative character of the Gospel of Judas