Editorial note. This edition shows you what the ancient manuscript actually preserves and where editors have had to fill the gaps. The Gospel of Judas survives in a single damaged Coptic papyrus, Codex Tchacos. Roughly three-quarters of it can still be read — but the damage is very uneven, and that matters for how you read it.
The opening is in excellent shape: the famous first lines, and the early scenes where Jesus laughs at the disciples and singles out Judas, are almost completely preserved. The cosmology in the middle and the closing scenes are another story — the papyrus there is broken and pitted, and in two places about seventeen straight lines are simply gone. Where the manuscript fails, the text has been reconstructed from related writings that share its world — the Secret Book of John (the Apocryphon of John), the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, and other Sethian Gnostic texts. Those reconstructed passages are careful guesses about what the lost lines likely said, not surviving ancient words. The notation below keeps the larger restorations and major gaps visible.
How to read the marks
Plain text is a readable translation of the Coptic as established by modern editors. The papyrus is damaged throughout, so even the best pages carry small letter-level restorations; where the editors judge a reading secure, these are smoothed in silently rather than bracketed, to keep the text readable.
[ Bracketed text ] marks the larger, more visible restorations — light in the opening, heavier in the broken cosmology, where some readings are informed by related Sethian texts.
[— about N lines missing —] marks a gap too large to restore, with the size estimated from the manuscript.