Judas Iscariot, long reviled as history's quintessential betrayer, was actually the best friend of Jesus and turned him over to authorities only because Jesus asked him to, according to the Gospel of Judas, a long-lost document revealed Thursday.
The manuscript, which scientists date to the year 300, is an account of conversations between Jesus and Judas in the last week of their lives -- conversations in which Jesus is said to have shared religious secrets not known by the other disciples.
The document is a copy of the Gospel of Judas, written in Greek about 140 years after Jesus and Judas died. It was thought that all copies were destroyed, though references to it survived. It had been declared heretical by early church leaders because it conflicted with the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
The manuscript lay hidden in the Egyptian desert for nearly 1,700 years. It was discovered by looters in the 1970s and taken out of the country. An antiquities dealer locked it away in a safe-deposit box in New York, where it rapidly deteriorated. It was sold in 2000, and restoration efforts began soon after.
The National Geographic Society, which helped with efforts to save the manuscript, made its contents public Thursday in Washington. Many consider it the most important archeological find since the Dead Sea Scrolls were unearthed in the 1940s.
The authentication and translation of the document will produce "a short-term sensation," said Father Donald Senior, president of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, but its "impact on the lives of ordinary believers is going to be somewhat minimal."
Many biblical scholars, however, hailed the newly revealed text because of the insight it would provide into the exceptionally turbulent period when competing ideologies sought to stake their own claims to the story of Jesus, battling with oral stories and written texts until a single faction won out.
The document's publication "makes available a significant text in our cultural heritage," said biblical scholar Marvin Meyer, director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute at Chapman University in Orange. "It has been saved from destruction and is now offered to the world for further examination and study."
The current manuscript is a copy of the original Greek text translated into the Coptic language by a professional scribe in a group known as the Gnostics.
