Jesus, Judas, and the Twelve in the Gospel of Judas

Abstract When scholars talk to nonscholars, they often tell them what they ought to be interested in. That’s not necessarily bad—in fact, it can be very good. Enormous chunks of a scholar’s time are devoted to research into mat- ters that most other people can think about only in passing, in the evenings or on the weekends. But one result is that scholars tend to have different perspec- tives from others and to emphasize different things. Most scholars coming to the Gospel of Judas, for example, will be interested in recondite questions concerning the relationship of this text to other documents from Christian an- tiquity and to the precise character of its form of Christian Gnosticism. Regu- lar readers are more likely to be interested in what the book has to say about its main characters: Jesus, the twelve disciples, and Judas. Both sets of concerns are completely legitimate.