To the non-religious, the Gospel of Judas is just another non-canonical book of the Judeo-Christian lineage excluded from the compiled Christian Bible. There’s a lot of these, to be clear, many of which are readable on InfoBooks. We’ve got Old Testament Apocrypha and New Testament Apocrypha. We’ve got Gnostic texts like the Gospel of Judas and non-Gnostic. We’ve got the formerly church-sanctioned Apocrypha that was actually included in the original 1611 King James Bible, like the books of Tobit, Esdras, Esther, The Wisdom of Solomon, Bel and the Dragon, and more, per the King James Bible Online. Meanwhile, other gospels include the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Ammonius, and books like the Epistle of Barnabas, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Shepherd of Hermas, and more.
Much like these other books, some question whether or not the Gospel of Judas is a forgery. Live Science goes into detail about the text’s ink and papyrus, and how the papyrus warped and crinkled over time. The Gospel of Judas comes from Egypt, after all, the land of papyrus-making masters. Microscopist Joseph Barabe of McCrone Associates in Illinois confirmed its authenticity by comparing it to other Egyptian papyri in the Louvre and confirmed that it dates to the third century C.E., about 100 years after St. Irenaeus of Lyons first mentions it in 180 C.E. Believers and non-believers alike can take such facts into consideration when coming to their own conclusions about the text.
