INTRODUCTION The earliest accounts of the betrayal of Jesus are tantalizingly spare. The Gospel of Mark narrates that Judas "went to the chief priests in order to betray him," but why would Judas do that, and who was this person who turned Jesus over to the authorities? Starting from these earliest accounts, the authors of new gospels, letters, and revelations wrote and rewrote the story of Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus. The Gospel of Judas , recently discovered in the desert but dating from the first centuries of Christianity, adds a striking new voice to this collection. In this gospel, Jesus imparts his true teaching to Judas, and he instructs Judas to hand him over. For the Christians who read this gospel, it was Judas Iscariot who passed down to them the Christian message. As Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King explain, the Gospel of Judas does not tell us who Judas really was. Instead, the lost gospel helps us to see how Christians have always been reading Judas, retelling the story of the betrayal in different ways for different reasons.

But in the history of Christianity not all retellings have been viewed as equal. The bishop of Lyon in the second century condemned the Gospel of Judas as heretical and a "fictitious history." While the New Testament gospels and letters were recopied through the ages, only this one text of the Gospel of Judas has been preserved for us today. What do we get from this new gospel? Why should we read it today? Pagels and King say that the point is not to reopen the Christian canon but to engage with the diversity of ways that Christians have lived and have understood their world. In particular, the Gospel of Judas shows us a group of Christians who reacted against the spread of religious violence in God''s name and who rebelled against what they saw as the false piety of other Christians. The interpretation of the text in Reading Judas brings cutting-edge historical methods and data to bear on a gospel that could otherwise appear deeply obscure. The Gospel of Judas shockingly depicts the twelve disciples as priests committing idolatry by offering human sacrifice, probably an allusion to bishops who exhorted their followers to die as martyrs at the hands of the Romans. Pagels and King explain that in the parlance of the first centuries of Christianity, this story attacked Christian leaders who claimed authority for their beliefs and practices by claiming they had been handed down from the twelve disciples.

By depicting the twelve disciples in such a negative light, the Gospel of Judas reacts against this violence with anger; anyone who encourages others to martyrdom, it implies, might as well offer human sacrifice upon an unholy altar. Such conflict and imagery may still seem far distant from a modern reader, but Pagels and King offer a few ways that we might read Judas today. The full-throated denunciation of the twelve disciples and the churches that honored them shows us how debate and disagreement characterized early Christian communities as much as they do modern ones. Coming out of an experience of religious violence, the anger of the Gospel of Judas is frightening, and it manifests both anti-Judaism and homophobia. In today''s world, when religious violence appears a global phenomenon, the Gospel of Judas shows us the impact of such violence on one community--and shows one Christian response to it: a message of hopefulness in the life of the soul that is the gospel''s conclusion. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Karen L. King is Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard University and the author of four previous books, including The Gospel of Mary of Magdala and What is Gnosticism ?. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Elaine Pagels is Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University and the author of six previous books, including The Gnostic Gospels (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award) and the New York Times bestseller Beyond Belief . She lives in Princeton, New Jersey. A CONVERSATION WITH KAREN L. KING Q. This is the first book you have co-written. How did you come to work together on this project, and how did you go about writing a book with another scholar? Do you have any plans for future collaborations? A. Only a few days after National Geographic Society released the text of the Gospel of Judas, Elaine and I were having breakfast together in Boston. The initial information the Society put out didn''t really get at the core issues, and so we thought, let''s do a book together.

We''ve known each other for years. Elaine was first a mentor to me, now a colleague and friend. Right now, we are both busy with other projects and haven''t talked about any further collaborative work. Q. Even though the Gospel of Judas was lost for centuries, historians knew that it existed at one time, because it was mentioned in an ancient book about heresies. There are surely other books out there that you know existed but have been lost and that could be found again with a stroke of luck. Are there any books you particularly hope might be discovered, and why? A. Over the last centuries, more than thirty early Christian writings have been found that were previously unknown.

Many of these were uncovered in one sensational discovery near the town of Nag Hammadi in 1945, but others continue to come to light. Not only the Gospel of Judas and the other works in the Tchachos Codex, but an unknown gospel called the Gospel of the Savior was published only recently. Given these fortuitous finds, we can almost surely expect that other early Christian writings are yet to be discovered. Is there any book I would particularly like us to find? I would never have dreamed that a gospel attributed to Mary of Magdala would surface--and yet it did. Perhaps we might find other writings written by or attributed to women; these would restore to us yet more of the contributions that ancient women made to forming Christianity. Q. Though people knew this gospel existed, no one really knew what it said. Is there anything in it that particularly surprised you? A.

From the brief mention made by the early heresy-hunter Irenaeus we expected the gospel to portray Judas as the hero. But he is, at best, an ambiguous hero. What was most surprising was the angry condemnation of Jesus'' twelve male disciples, and the reason that they were portrayed that way. The book is not really about the events of Jesus'' arrest and death&mash;we learn nothing new there--but about Christian struggles to understand the meaning of Jesus'' death in the face of Roman persecution of Christians in the second century. The author is furious with Christian leaders who are encouraging believers to die by arguing that God requires sacrifice to atone for sin. Instead, the author argues that people who portray God that way are worshipping false gods. The truth is that the God of Jesus dwells in the heavenly heights beyond this world of chaos and oblivion. Jesus'' teaching leads people to a spiritual relation to God, not to atoning sacrifice.

Q. Do you have a favorite passage from the Gospel of Judas ? Which one, and why? A. There is much in this gospel that I dislike rather heartily--its violence, anti-Judaism, and homophobia. But I do like the way it interprets the name of Eve, which translates into Greek as Zoe, and in both Greek and Hebrew means "life." In the Gospel of Judas 13.1¬-4, Jesus teaches Judas that the lower creator said to his angels: " ''Let us create a human being [ac]cording to the likeness and according to the image.'' Then they formed Adam and his wife, Eve. But in the cloud, she was called ''Zoe'' (''Life'').

For in this name all the races shall seek after it (life)." The translators of the National Geographic version interpret the passage differently, claiming that by Eve''s name "all the generations seek him (Adam)." This makes no sense to me--why would anyone seek Adam with Eve''s name? Rather it is life that they are seeking, and for the Gospel of Judas this higher life of the spirit is represented by the figure of Eve. Although unfamiliar to many readers, this interpretation is not at all unique. It is very close to interpretations of Genesis found in other early Christian literature, like the Secret Revelation of John or the Hypostasis of the Archons (a revelation ascribed to Eve''s daughter Norea), in which Eve is portrayed as the spiritual mother of the living and superior to Adam. These stories let us see that the reading of Genesis that blames Eve--and women generally--for all human suffering and death was not the only meaning that early Christians saw in the creation story. They could also regard her role as "mother of the living" to be primary. Q.

Reading Judas tells the story of early Christians who were left out of the historical record, people who lost in the struggle to determine who would run the Christian church. Why do you believe it is important to bring their story to light, and what can it teach readers today? A. History is always told from the perspective of the winners. Recovering alternative voices that were lost can restore a deeper understanding of the tradition we have by showing the paths that were not taken. In the case of the Gospel of Judas , we learn that some Christians strongly objected to the idea that God desired the death of his son and his followers as a sacrifice. In the end they lost out, and the developing orthodoxies came to center more and more on a theology of sin, guilt, and atonement. I don''t think we s.