The Gospel of Judas has sort of fallen off the radar screen for most people, and it's a pity. Ehrman traces the history of the gospel in modern times - where it was found, what happened to it, how he came to be part of it - and then traces the history of Judas through the gospels, both canonical and apocryphal. He compares the standard traditions of Judas with the story in the Gospel of Judas, and analyzes the meaning of different traditions about Judas. He asks who was Judas? Why did he betray Jesus? His answers are anything but conclusive, but with the evidence available, how could it be anything else? Well written and lucid, as I have come to expect from this author. ( )

I'm giving this book four stars because of a few key points. First, Ehrman makes a good argument for the Jewish origin of gnosticism and shows lots of links between the gnostic Gospel of Judas and early Jewish writings. Second, he presents a plausible reconstruction of why and how Judas betrayed Jesus, and this explanation makes sense of a lot of the puzzling points of the sketchy and differing gospel narratives. On the other hand, Ehrman, as always, repeats himself a lot, but here even more than usual. Listening to the audiobook as I was, there were several times I was afraid I had accidentally skipped back to a previous section. I hadn't. It was just Ehrman approaching the same subject from a slightly different angle and repeating a lot of the same supporting evidence. If this book had been better organized, it could have been much shorter and, I think, still have the same impact. In the end, of course, this new gospel is no more a tale of what actually happened than much of what is in the canonical bible; rather, it is a story that sheds more light on the varieties of Christianity in the 2nd Century. Like gnostic re-conceptions of the meaning of Genesis, which turn the story on its head by making the creator god evil or incompetent and Adam and Eve's eating from the Tree of Knowledge a necessary step in discovering their divine spark and connection back to the one true god, the Gospel of Judas turns the story of Jesus' ministry on its head to show that Jesus preached gnosticism and that Judas was the only one who really understood--and sacrificed himself to free the divine Christ from his earthly body. If this theme sounds a bit familiar, perhaps you have read "Three Versions of Judas" in Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. With the discovering of the Gospel of Judas, the idea of Judas being a necessary element in the story of Jesus, and perhaps being a man who understood the role he had to play and the eternal infamy it would earn him, seems to go back to the almost the beginnings of Christianity. ( )

A mixture of religious overview of the text and a brief look at the scummy world of artefact trading in how it was found and sold. Ehrman goes does very brief versions of material better covered in his other books (Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, Forged, Lost Christianities) as background to interpreting the new gnostic text about Judas. The text itself is not covered in full, but is analysed with excerpts. The figure of Judas is analysed through a gnostic lens, traditional christian lens as well as the historical lens.

This book is a jack-of-all-trades and has seemingly disappointed a lot of people, but as comparative religious studies it's excellent, covering a wide swath of context to better understand the significance of the find. ( )

When I picked up this book I was expecting a lot of "this is exactly what the Gospel says" and I didn't get that, which I was pleased about. What I found was a very entertaining and thought provoking look at what it is like to "discover" one of these lost works. The book begins with the author's introduction to the text, then dives deeper into parts of the text compared to writings that were included in the Bible. Quite a bit of what you read deals with Gnosticism compared to Christianity, as the Gospel of Judas Iscariot is a Gnostic work. An important item that is pointed out is that this is the book OF Judas, not ACCORDING TO Judas, which helps you put this historical writing (and all of the others) into an even better perspective. The author's writing style is both entertaining and educational and I felt this was an excellent introduction into the study of religious text and written history. I plan to seek out more works by this author on any subject available. ( )

not sure how to rate this book. i liked the style that he gave the information. it was a fairly easy read. it was very clinical which is what i was wanting but to be honest i didn't completely finish it. by the time i got half way through this lost information i was done. you must keep in mind that this wasn't written by judas and that it was written in the mid-3rd century but it was written by gnostics for gnostics and although most of it just doesn't ring too it does get to a point that i decided it became blasphemous enough i had no desire to continue on.

If you are a fan, and I am, I think you are going to like pretty much any book Ehrman writes.This was written shortly after Ehrman was one of the first 3 scholars to get a look at the Gospel of Judas when National Geographic was considering purchasing it in 2004. Ehrman starts by telling the interesting story of the Gospel's discovery and how it made its way into National Geographic's hands. He then goes on to examine how Judas was portrayed in each of the 4 canonized Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John), what we knew about the Gospel of Judas before its discovery (thanks, Iraneaus), and how and why the "Gnostic" sect of early Christian's probably used it. He concludes by postulating his own theories about the historical Judas and how the myth of Judas that was crafted by the Orthodox church came to be.Very little is said about the actual text, instead Ehrman gives us the gist of its message. That's ok, because I believe you can still download it for free from National Geographic's website and make your own conclusions. (I downloaded it a couple years ago when the National Geographic TV special on the Gospel of Judas came out -- I highly recommend watching that, too!) ( )

I feel like I've been reading this book forever! I started it several months ago, when the Gospel of Judas was mentioned in a papyrology course I was taking, and I was really enjoying it at first. But it seemed to drag a bit in the middle (despite being a pretty short book), and I more or less put it down for a couple of months. Fortunately, it was easy to pick up again; Ehrman writes clearly and explains everything thoroughly, so I didn't feel lost at all. The flip side of this is that the book is pretty repetitive; he emphasizes things and makes sure his point is clear by saying the same thing over and over. This was effective in its way; I feel like I learned a lot from this book and am likely to retain that knowledge. It did make for a slower than necessary reading experience, though.

On the whole, I'm glad I read this book; especially as someone with a limited knowledge of Christianity, I found it very informative. People who are more familiar with Christianity in general and early Christianity in particular might find it too simplistic and repetitive, but it worked for me. It's definitely very accessible. ( )

The Gospel of Judas caused quite a stir a few years ago, when it got thoroughly translated (as best as the mishandled fragmentary pieces could be, anyway) and National Geographic made a documentary about it all. It's definitely the most important document for Christianity found in decades.

Nobody is claiming that Judas Iscariot *actually* wrote this gospel; it was probably created in the second century. But it reveals the prominent strains of Gnostic thought in early Christianity, before our orthodox views became quite so dominant. The Gospel of Judas reveals that Judas alone was privileged enough to be "in" on Jesus' plan to die. None of the other disciples were strong or understanding enough to be a part of it, so Judas plays a crucial role in salvation.

It's interesting to see how some early Christians were thinking about Judas, undoubtedly Christianity's most reviled figure (well, second to Satan). Even within the canonical gospels, going chronologically, Judas goes from being scared to greedy to possessed to Satan himself - and that's just within the space of 60 years, it gets worse through medieval times. So the Gospel of Judas shows that not everybody was vilifying him quite so thoroughly, and maybe Judas was given more of a chance by early Christians than we give him today. ( )

Bart Ehrman is such a fascinating writer. His knowledge of early Christianity, and what we have found out about it with discoveries of previously lost texts, makes for interesting reading. In this book he talks about the Gospel of Judas Iscariot, which has been recently translated from its original Coptic. The text itself seems to have been written in the second century.

It is not, of course, a document giving the facts of Judas' life, and certainly not written by him. It is a text that shares the secrets of Gnosticism, that the material world is evil, created by an inferior god, and that Jesus came to bring the secret of how some souls can escape the evil material plane and enter the purer realms. Judas, according to this text, was not Jesus' betrayer, but the only one of the disciples to understand Jesus and do what was necessary for Jesus to escape the material world.

The importance of the work lies in a fuller understanding it gives of the history of the early Church, which had an astonishing variety of beliefs and sects. Ehrman talked more about this variety in his book Lost Christianities.

One of Ehrman's more interesting points in the book is on the nature of oral cultures, which, given a literacy rate of about 10 percent, the ancient world was. "In oral culture there is not a concern for what we in written culture might call verbatim accuracy. In oral societies it is recognized that the telling of a story to a different audience or in a different context or for a different reason calls for a different version of the story. Stories are molded to the time and circumstance in which they are told....This is the case with the Gospels of the New Testament. Even when one of the authors used another of the authors as the source for his stories - for example, when Matthew copied some of his stories from Mark - he changed the stories. Why would he do that? Because he lived in an oral society where hardly anyone thought there was a problem with changing the stories. Of course the stories were to be changed when the audience, the occasion, or the situation had changed. The widespread notion that stories never should be changed but should be repeated without alteration every time is an innovation of modern written cultures. Before the creation of the printing press this was not a widely shared view." (p. 36). This seems important to me because I've felt for a while that the writers of much of the Bible never meant for the text to be taken literally, and Ehrman confirms that this was just not a major concern of oral cultures.

Ehrman is an excellent writer in that he is a scholar able to write to a lay person's level of understanding. I've enjoyed all the books of his that I've read. ( )

Interesting, but probably crap ( )