JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN review a new Gospel of Judas book by Elaine Pagels and Karen King in the Washington Post:

Embracing Judas
A recently translated gospel argues that betraying Jesus was the right thing to do.

Reviewed by John Dominic Crossan
Sunday, April 1, 2007; Page BW11

READING JUDAS

The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity

By Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King

Viking. 198 pp. $24.95

The Christian Gospels are surprisingly ridden with conflict. Each one -- whether officially part of the New Testament or not -- contains a sometimes acrimonious debate about faith or practice, theology or authority, this leader or that one.

In the recently published Gospel of Judas, for example, that archetypal traitor becomes the only true believer, the one who "lifted up his eyes . . . saw the luminous cloud and . . . entered into it." The gospel was discovered sometime in the 1970s along with some other texts in a papyrus book in Egypt. The original 2nd-century Greek text had been translated into Coptic -- the Egyptian language using the Greek alphabet -- in the 4th century. This version was stored inadequately, protected irresponsibly and bartered greedily for maximum profit. Finally, last year, the badly damaged gospel received expert preservation, scholarly restoration and public presentation by the National Geographic Society.

In their slim but excellent Reading Judas, Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King rightly focus on the text's ancient and provocative theology rather than on the codex's modern and tortured history, with King also providing a new and very well annotated translation of this early Christian document.

[...]

Once again, there is no acknowledgment that the Judas-as-a-good-guy interpretation of the text is strongly contested by some specialists.