Decoding the Gospel of Judas

Dr. Marvin Meyer’s Key Role in Bringing One of Biblical Archaeology’s Greatest Discoveries to Light

By Mary Platt

n the chilly darkness of the Washington, D.C. evening, the lights of Capitol Hill glittered with a brittle intensity, and the handsome pillared façade of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, shining with a softer glow, was reflected in the black waters of the Potomac. Inside the Kennedy Center, Dr. Marvin Meyer had just finished his lecture—a talk on Coptic papyrus and parchment discoveries—in front of the elegant crowd attending a symposium sponsored by the Egyptian Embassy. Descending from the podium, the professor—known worldwide as a specialist in the ancient Coptic language and early Christian gospels—shook hands with members of the audience and greeted friends from the Embassy.

At first he didn’t notice the man and woman who were watching him intently from the side of the room. Then, suddenly, they were there at his side, shaking hands, introducing themselves in low voices. They handed him their business cards. “We find your work very interesting, Dr. Meyer. We’ll be in touch,” said one of them cryptically, before they both vanished into the crowd.

Amid the swirl of the departing audience, Dr. Meyer studied their cards, and felt a premonitory buzz of anticipation as he noted the organization they represented. Something was definitely afoot. He wondered what it possibly could be.

If you think the paragraphs on the preceding page read like a scene from the bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, they’re just the beginning of a real-life adventure that has more intrigue, thrills and mystery than anything Dan Brown could ever write. How Dr. Marvin Meyer, Griset Professor of Bible and Christian Studies at Chapman University, landed a key role on the international team of scholars that brought to light one of the most important documents in the history of biblical archaeology; the makings of the global event that announced the discovery to the world; and the incredible story of that discovery itself—with all the twists, turns and complexities of its recent history—all of this seems the stuff of novels rather than nonfiction. But real it is, and the story continues to unfold.

The man and woman in that Washington, D.C. audience were officials from the National Geographic Society, and Dr. Meyer heard from them again—in almost as cryptic a fashion—a few weeks later. They wanted him to work, they said, on a project that the Society was engaged in, but would not elaborate until he signed a non-disclosure agreement. “But we can promise you that you won’t be disappointed,” they added. That piqued Dr. Meyer’s curiosity. “I thought, ‘Why not?’ and signed the agreement,” he says. “Then they talked—and wouldn’t stop talking.”

The National Geographic Society, they told him, needed an English-speaking Coptologist (an expert in Coptic, the written and spoken language of the early Christians living in Egypt) who knew something about the mystical and Gnostic texts of those peoples. In September 2005, they brought Dr. Meyer to the National Geographic’s headquarters in Washington, put him in an office with a laptop, and gave him a Coptic text to translate.

It was then that Dr. Meyer got his first glimpse of a document that he had heard of—within the small community of scholars that studies Coptic and the history of the Gnostics— but had never seen: the legendary, long-lost Gospel of Judas.

Serious religious scholars had known of this text—though they had little inkling of its actual content—for many years. One of the early church fathers, Irenaeus of Lyon, had written of it in 180 A.D. in his five-volume refutation of various Christian heresies, railing against the Judas gospel for depicting the last days of Jesus from the perspective of his betrayer. But from the time of that mention, the text itself had gone missing for more than 1,700 years. It finally turned up again in the 1970s when a peasant, poking around in an old tomb in Middle Egypt, found the ancient codex (a bound book of papyrus pages) and carted it off, hoping to sell it on the antiquities market. After that, the codex had pretty much disappeared once more, lost in the shadowy world of the antiquities market.

The National Geographic’s rules of secrecy were strict. “I was told I was never to leave this text in an unlocked office, and that if I had to leave or even go down the hall, I had to take the laptop with me or make sure the office door was locked,” Dr. Meyer says. “They were very concerned that this be dealt with in a discreet kind of way. I spent a week with this document, and I realized almost at once that it was something very, very special. There were some phrases in it—‘the immortal realm of Barbelo,’ the name ‘Autogenes’ — that I recognized right away. The text comes very specifically from the Sethian Gnostic viewpoint, and I’ve been chasing the Sethians around the world of late antiquity for a long time. I thought, ‘I know these guys!’ and I immediately felt right at home.”

When he emerged from the locked office at the end of the week and “some very long nights,” Dr. Meyer reported to an excited group of National Geographic officials that the ancient document was, in fact, a “brilliant Gnostic gospel” and was undoubtedly the real thing: a Coptic, second-century A.D. version of the original Greek text of the lost Gospel of Judas.

Other distinguished scholars, including Dr. Rodolphe Kasser, professor emeritus of the University of Geneva, and Dr. Gregor Wurst of the University of Augsburg, Germany, were working on the text in Europe, but the National Geographic needed an English-speaking expert who could translate the codex into eloquent and understandable English. It didn’t hurt that Dr. Meyer, who has appeared many times as an expert on TV biblical-history documentaries, is eminently telegenic, with a resonant voice and a viewer-friendly manner that immediately conveys his infectious enthusiasm for his subject.

So he was in. “And the rest, as they say, is history,” Dr. Meyer grins. He collaborated with Drs. Kasser and Wurst to produce the mass-audience hardcover translation of The Gospel of Judas, which at press time ranked #3 on The New York Times’ nonfiction bestseller list and #20 on USA Today’s list of all bestsellers. He flew to Egypt to film an appearance on the two-hour National Geographic TV special, offering historical exposition in front of the Corinthian columns of Hermopolis, examining documents in Cairo’sCoptic Museum, tramping through the desert near Qarara in search of the cave where the Judas codex was discovered. (He calls that latter sequence a “visual metaphor”—since the cave he was guided to was not the actual codex cave, but “one very like it”— although he says that the excitement in his voice, upon discovering Coptic potsherds and fabric fragments around the site, was very real.)

On April 6, 2006, the National Geographic Society, in what it termed a “global event,” announced the translation of the Gospel of Judas, released the May issue of its magazine with a cover story on the project, and launched a deep, comprehensive Gospel of Judas Web site (www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/gospel), complete with photographs of the codex pages and their English translations, plus commentary from Dr. Meyer and the other scholars involved in the project. Dr. Meyer serves on the National Geographic Advisory Board for the Gospel of Judas project, along with Drs. Kasser and Wurst, Dr. Elaine Pagels of Princeton University, Dr. Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina, Dr. Stephen Emmel of the University of Munster, Germany, and several others. Since the announcement and the airing of the TV special, he has served as a media spokesman for the project in the U.S., Europe, Mexico and elsewhere, and has been quoted in virtually every major newspaper and magazine in the world.

Controversy, of course, follows the project at every turn. “The very title is provocative,” Dr. Meyer says. “The Gospel…of Judas? People ask me where we got this title. But that is the ancient title — it’s right there on the papyrus. To some people, though, that constellation of terms is mind-boggling. Some have said, ‘Are you asking us to re-think our beliefs, to re-think the Bible?’ But from what we have heard, most people find it very interesting and do understand that this is a second-century text that illuminates a previously little-known aspect of early Christianity.”

And that, says Dr. Meyer, is what he hopes will be the primary impact of the Gospel of Judas. “Early Christianity, we are coming to find, was not a monolithic set of beliefs and practices. The discovery and translation of this gospel gives us another important window onto the history of the early Christians and the wide diversity of their beliefs.”

More than anything, through all of his Gospel of Judas adventures, Dr. Meyer says, “what has tickled me the most is seeing the name of Chapman University listed right there alongside the universities of Augsburg, Geneva, Munster and Princeton. I have to admit, that gives me great pleasure.”