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The Gospel of Judas  (Get the original documents from National Geographic Click Here)

In his homily at the Mass of the Lord's Supper, Pope Benedict XVI assured the faithful that the mystery of Judas consists precisely in his rejection of God's love.

Judas Iscariot personifies "treacherous man," for whom money, power and success are more important than love and he does not hesitate to sell Jesus, the Pope said at the Mass on the evening of Holy Thursday.

The Holy Father's comments came in the wake of the recently divulged "Gospel of Judas," an ancient document that puts the apostle and his betrayal of Christ in a positive light. It describes Judas, in fact, as obeying a divine ordinance in handing over Jesus to the authorities.

Lost for nearly 1,700 years, the Gospel of Judas came to light within an ancient, crumbling, leather-bound papyrus manuscript that was discovered in Middle Egypt during the 1970s and bought in 2000 by a Zьrich antiquities dealer. Tim Jull of the University of Arizona, tested its age using carbon-14 dating. Results indicate the papyrus dates to A.D. 280, plus or minus 60 years. It is only one of many texts discovered in the last 65 years, including the gospels of Thomas, Mary Magdalene and Philip, believed to be written by Gnostics.

The Gnostics' beliefs were often viewed by bishops and early church leaders as unorthodox, and they were frequently denounced as heretics.

The text's existence has been known since it was denounced as heresy by Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyon in A.D. 180, but its contents had remained an almost total mystery. Irenaeus was a hunter of heretics, and no friend of the Gnostics. He wrote, "They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas." Some two centuries later, Epiphanius, Bishop of Cyprus, criticized the Gospel of Judas for treating the betrayer of Jesus as commendable, one who "performed a good work for our salvation."

Unlike the four gospels of the New Testament, the Gospel of Judas describes conversations between Jesus and Judas Iscariot during the week before Passover in which Jesus tells Judas "secrets no other person has ever seen." In this version, Jesus asked Judas, as a close friend, to sell him out to the authorities, telling Judas he will "exceed" the other disciples by doing so.

The other apostles pray to a lesser God, Jesus says, and he reveals to Judas the "mysteries of the kingdom" of the true God. He asks Judas to help him return to the kingdom, but to do so, Judas must help him abandon his mortal flesh: "You will sacrifice the man that clothes me," Jesus tells Judas, and acknowledges that Judas "will be cursed by the other generations."

Unlike the accounts in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the anonymous author of the Gospel of Judas believed that Judas Iscariot alone among the 12 disciples understood the meaning of Jesus' teachings and acceded to his will. In the diversity of early Christian thought, a group known as Gnostics believed in a secret knowledge of how people could escape the prisons of their material bodies and return to the spiritual realm from which they came.

Cardinal Albert Vanhoye a Jesuit Scripture scholar, and former secretary of the Pontifical Biblical Commission,  discussed the newly published document in an interview with the I Media news agency. Cardinal Vanhoye said “the newly published document is interesting insofar as it testifies to the spread of Gnostic theories.” But those theories, he noted, were "purely intellectual speculations, with no relationship to concrete life." The cardinal added that the Gnostic heresy was thoroughly condemned by St. Irenaeus in the 2nd century. Gnostic beliefs, he said, are "completely foreign to the faith." Today, however, the "Gospel of Judas" should clearly be recognized as "a thing of the past". While the discovery of an ancient document is interesting to historical purposes, "it is not of any real interest for our lives." Cardinal Vanhoye conceded that some readers will probably be excited by the "Gospel of Judas," just as many have been caught up in the excitement of The DaVinci Code. Elaborate new theories that dispute the teachings of the Church always exercise a special fascination on some readers, he said; in some circles those theories-- no matter how labored-- are "always preferred to the traditional doctrine of the Church."

The preacher of the pontifical household forcefully condemned the "pseudo-histories" of Jesus Christ that have recently gained public attention, during the commemoration of the Passion on Good Friday in St. Peter's basilica.

Father Raniero Cantalamessa said, "One hears a lot about the treason of Judas, without noticing that we are involved in it. The fundamental error behind these new theories, the preacher said, is that they accept the apocryphal writings of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, rejecting the clear message of the Gospel writers. It is "incredible," he said, that popular writers today find praiseworthy ideas in these writings, and claim that the Church has suppressed those ideas.

Father Cantalamessa urged Catholics to react against these popular theories. "We cannot accept a situation in which the silence of believers is taking as embarrassment, and the good faith (or perhaps foolishness) of millions of people is grossly manipulated by the media,"

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