THE THIRTEENTH APOSTLE, by April DeConick, is reviewed in BP News:

Prof: Gnostics called Judas demon, not hero

Posted on Nov 6, 2007 | by Gregory Tomlin

HOUSTON (BP)--A new book by a biblical scholar at Rice University refutes the claims of the National Geographic Society in 2006 that a third- or fourth-century fragment of the Gospel of Judas depicted "the son of perdition" as a hero.

In fact, April DeConick, a professor of biblical studies at Rice and author of "The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says," notes that the document actually calls Judas a "thirteenth demon." That translation of the ancient Coptic text conforms fairly well to what biblical scholars have said of Judas for centuries as well as ancient commentaries from the church fathers who regarded Gnosticism as heresy.

[...]

When National Geographic magazine publicized the discovery of the Gospel of Judas early in 2006, the magazine claimed that the document presented a loyal, sensitive and, perhaps, misunderstood Judas. Christ's betrayer, the magazine's experts said, actually may have been a close friend of the Messiah and a man who had been asked to "accept perpetual disgrace" in order to free Jesus' spirit from his body. Judas, too, was described in the text as a "spirit," the magazine's experts said.

But DeConick contends that translators were mistaken. The Coptic word "daimon" is not "spirit," she said.

"Plato used this word to refer to higher powers, divine powers, that controlled human fate," DeConick said. "This is the basis for the National Geographic translation 'spirit.' The problem with this interpretation is that Plato wrote almost 500 years before the Gospel of Judas and within a completely different conceptual environment. In Christian and Gnostic literature, 'daimones' are demons. They are malicious powers or angels who influence human destinies. They are associated with the stars. There are 52 instances of the use of 'daimon' in Gnostic literature, and all of them refer to demonic forces that control the cosmos and human destiny."

[...]

"All we have is the National Geographic Society's transcription of the Coptic, and its translation of that. We can't check the transcription. The situation is comparable to the deadlock that held scholarship back on the Dead Sea Scrolls 15 or 20 years ago. When manuscripts are hoarded by a few, it results in errors and monopoly interpretations. This is not the best way to do scholarship," DeConick said.

[...]

This article also sums up a number of themes that April has been pursuing for some time at her Forbidden Gospels blog.