The Gospel of Judas opens with Jesus laughing at his disciples’ prayers, exposing them as worshipers of a lesser god. The twelve cannot stand before him — only Judas can, though he turns his face away in shame. Jesus tells Judas that he alone will understand the mysteries of the kingdom, though his role will bring grief and the hatred of generations.
The text then shifts to visions. The disciples see themselves as corrupt priests, sacrificing people in error, while invoking Jesus’s name in vain. Jesus interprets this as a revelation of their true condition: blind guides serving the wrong god.
Judas, however, receives secret teaching. Jesus unveils a cosmic drama: the unknowable God emanates divine beings, while ignorant powers such as Yaldabaoth and Saklas fashion the material world and trap souls. Judas’s vision shows him persecuted by the other disciples, but set apart by his star. Jesus tells him he will become the “thirteenth” — cursed by others, yet elevated through knowledge.
The climax comes when Jesus explains that Judas will “sacrifice the man who clothes me.” In one influential reading, this betrayal is a kind of liberation — by handing Jesus over, Judas separates the divine Jesus from the mortal body that clothes him. Other readings take Judas’s role as more ambiguous, even damning.
The gospel ends abruptly. Judas agrees with the authorities, receives money, and delivers Jesus into their hands.
***The opening of the gospel and the betrayal at its close survive in good shape. The cosmology in the middle is another matter — the single surviving manuscript is badly broken there, and parts of it have been reconstructed from related Gnostic texts. Where the damage materially affects the reading, this edition marks it, so you can see the larger restorations and the unrecoverable gaps.