Nice book but contains very serious errors - Rated 
I will not repeat information about the book which has been covered by other reviewers. If you are thinking of purchasing this attractive looking and reasonably priced book you need to be aware there is now a scholarly consensus that the original team made some very serious errors of translation and completely misrepresent the figure of Judas in this gospel. This makes this book virtually worthless if you want to understand what the Gospel of Judas is about. For more information I would suggest you look at DeConick's "The Thirteenth Apostle".
Words of God - Rated 
The National Geographical Society, along with the Waitt Institute for Human Discovery and an unparalleled collection of scholars on early Christianity, are to be commended hugely for their roles in bringing "The Gospel of Judas" to us. Be sure to read the Publisher's Note at the end of this book to appreciate fully their contribution.
I haven't found in one place so clear an introduction to Gnostic Christianity or as much evidence of an early Gnostic Christian response to Jesus. Whereas traditionally the disciples other than Judas have been presented as understanding Jesus well, in this gospel we find "Jesus said to them. 'How do you know me. Truly I say unto you, no generation of the people that are among you will me.' What are we to make of this?
As noted by the publisher, scholars seem certain this gospel is not a fake. That doesn't mean it speaks for all Christians but it does seem to represent an early teaching of Sethian Gnostic Christianity.
The commentaries tell about the recovery of the text and its message. Bart Ehrman writes: "For Gnostics a person is not saved by faith in Christ or by doing good works, but by knowing the truth - the truth about the world we live in, about who the true God is, and especially about we ourselves are." Reading this gospel, however unsettling it may be in light of your current understanding of Christianity, can give you a good appreciation of what that knowledge is.
This is challenging material. In his commentary, Wurst notes: "Characters from the Jewish Scriptures such as Esau, Korah, and the Sodomites - regarded by orthodox tradition as immoral and as rebels against the will of God - are considered here to be the servants of the one true God, the 'superior higher power.' It is difficult not to feel that divisions in the understanding of God have persisted from the earliest times of Christianity and even before as Jewish intellectuals wrestled with the different presentation of Jehovah in their scriptures.
Due to the finding of this text, it seems more likely that Gnostics were active before 180 A.D. and also not unlikely they were active much earlier. Bauer's hypothesis that Gnosticism may have dated back to the earliest formative years of Christianity, seems better supported. Due to the questions raised by Jesus' life and teachings and our knowledge of human nature, it does not seem unreasonable to believe that during the very life of Jesus some people were understanding his life and teachings in a way consistent with "The Gospel of Judas" and the Nag Hammadi texts. Those responses seem most spiritually important and not which texts turn out to have been written first. Otherwise why not have stopped with the Old Testament?
The commentaries by Kasser on the recovery of the text, by Ehrman on the vision presented in this gospel, by Wurst on the reaction of Iraneus to the Gnostics, and by Meyer on Sethian Gnosticism seem excellent. Most of all I appreciate the painstaking and gifted effort of Florence Darbre to recover this text from the damaged document.
The "Gospel of Judas" may be a once in a lifetime opportunity to be so close to important religious discovery. With it and the Nag Hammadi texts it may now be possible for some to find a place in Christianity, as modern day Gnostic Christians, that they had thought previously did not exist. For others, this gospel may let you appreciate the diversity of authentic religious responses.
A Gnostic-Christian text rediscoved - Rated
The New Testament portrays Judas as the corrupt disciple who betrayed Christ, and this negative portrait of him, with additional hateful characteristics, has prevailed for centuries. Only in recent times has the figure of Judas been seen in the context of very ancient Hellenic cults in which gods have to be killed by a `sacred executioner' to be reborn, after which this sacred executioner is disowned by and driven out of the community.
These ideas were then incorporated into the teachings of the Gnostics, where the god becomes a Saviour figure who would descend from the Realm of Light into the Realm of Darkness to redeem mankind and then to return to the Realm of Light. Such and similar Gnostic ideas had an influence on certain groups of pre-Christian Judaism and then on early Christianity also.
So far these influences have been deduced by comparing parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls and parts of St John's Gospel with Gnostic works; but the rediscovery of the Gospel of Judas gives us a text that is so explicitly Gnostic that it actually wholly subverts the message of the Gospels in the New Testament. As a result it was of course declared heretical by Bishop Irenaeus in 180 and suppressed. Its text was lost until a manuscript of it in Coptic, dating to around 300 AD, was found in Egypt in around 1978; its fragments, making up 85% of the original, were painstakingly reassembled; and the work was finally published in 2006. The book under review gives us a translation of the reconstituted text, followed by four illuminating essays of explanation and commentary. That by Bart D. Ehrman gives a lucid account of the basic teachings shared by the various Gnostic schools; and a more difficult chapter by Martin Meyer links the teaching of the Judas Gospel with other Gnostic texts, notably the Secret Book of John, in which some of the ideas of the Judas Gospel are more fully developed.
The basic and most startling feature of the Judas Gospel is that Judas was the only disciple who really understood Jesus. Jesus chastizes in the most forthright terms the other disciples for worshipping a false God. This false God - the God of the Old Testament - is the Demiurge (this Gospel refers to his helpers Nebro, the `rebel' and Saklas, the `fool') who created this very imperfect world - an idea basic to Gnosticism. The true God is not a Creator God, but a (male) Spirit with a female emanation called Barbelo and a Self-Generated emanation who is Jesus. The Jesus emanation is pure Spirit but appears on earth in a human envelope, so that he only appears to be human (a doctrine known as docetism); but he needs to be free from this envelope, and he tells Judas that it is to be the latter's mission `to sacrifice the man that clothes me'. It is in obedience to this command that Judas hands over Jesus to his enemies.
Jesus has told Judas that humans are divided into those who also have a spark of the divine in them - and they, like Judas, will live on after death - and those, like the disciples and others who worship the false God, who lack the divine spark and will not live on after death.
All this is mixed up with a complex cosmology which owes something to Plato's linking of individual souls with individual stars.
Gnosticism is an interesting attempt to explain that the existence of imperfection in the created world by attributing this creation to an inferior deity. By proscribing Gnosticism (and, later, Manicheism), Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, was left with the problem of explaining how a Creator God could have created such a flawed world.
Christians, rejoice - Rated 
Christians all across the denominational spectrum can breathe again! This ancient text is certainly not going to undermine the Faith. It makes fascinating reading, certainly, with the controversial Judas Iscariot as the pivotal character, and unlike some recent novels this is a genuine fourth century translation of a second century text. But one has only to contrast this "Jesus" with the Jesus of the New Testament to see immediately why Irenaeus trashed the gnostics and why their philosophy only ever appealed to a snobbish minority. The "Jesus" of the "Gospel of Judas" is unfeeling and elitist, only interested in people like "Judas" who have the immortal divine spark in them. The other "disciples" do not and so are excluded from immortality - a level of predestination undreamed of even by Calvin. (One wonders why this "Jesus" bothered with them in the first place when his attitude to them is mocking contempt!)Here is no Good Shepherd seeking the lost sheep; here is no Good Physician healing the mad and diseased; here is no compassionate judge giving the penitent the chance to "go and sin no more". Here, in effect, the God of Love is not. This is not the Incarnate Lord, but a divinity pretending to be human. No Christian in his / her right mind will be attracted to this! This is a "Jesus" for the fascist or the neo-Nazi. But like all heresies, it probes a lacuna in the Orthodox tradition: was there collusion between Jesus and Judas over the betrayal ? Was Judas the most intelligent of the disciples who understood him best ? Is Judas damned ? (Dante said yes; Julian of Norwich said no; Irish mythology gives him time off) Christian thinkers have speculated about this for generations, and this "Gospel" will not add much to help those speculations. The text ends with the betrayal; it includes neither the Crucifixion nor Judas' messy end (suicide or intestinal rupture.) - One is tempted to ask - frivolously - where Judas found time to dictate this tract among all the activity of Maundy Thursday). For the scholar seeking to fill out the picture of the development of early Christian ideas, this will be priceless and repay much close study. For the ordinary Chritian, or the ordinary seeker after Christ, it will provide a useful comparison to show what the real Christ Jesus is like.
Fascinating ancient text and useful background articles - Rated
This book provides a translation of the recently discovered Gospel of Judas. After a short introduction we are straight into the text, assisted by numerous footnotes. Some of the writing is very powerful - in a key passage Jesus tells Judas, "'you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.'" other sections are more obscure, assuming an understanding of Gnostic concepts. Fortunately the subsequent articles provide these extra details, so that by the end of the book you will want to re-read the original text now with a much better understanding of the concepts being used.
For a broader appreciation of alternative early Christian writings - such as the gospels of Thomas and Judas - I would recommend "Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas" by Elaine Pagels which shows that a key difference between so-called Gnostic writings and those of more orthodox Christianity is the discovery of truth. In books like the Gospel of Judas Jesus is represented as teaching that the kingdom of God is within us, and we must search within ourselves to discover the truth. In orthodox Christian books such as the Gospel of John the light of truth is not to be found in ourselves but in Jesus, who alone is the Way to God.
So alternative early Christian writings such as the Gospel of Judas present a more open and pluralistic way to God, as opposed to the more exclusivist dogma of traditional Christianity.
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