Codex Tchacos

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The Codex Tchacos is an ancient Egyptian Coptic papyrus document from approximately the year 300 C.E., containing early Christian Gnostic texts:

It is important because it contains the first known surviving copy of the Gospel of Judas, a text that was rejected as heresy by the early Christian church, and lost for 1700 years before this rediscovery.

The codex was discovered near El Minya, in Egypt, during the 1970s, and stored in a variety of unorthodox ways by various dealers who had little experience with antiquities, including one who stored it in a safe deposit box and another who actually froze the documents (causing a unique and difficult kind of decay). It was not examined and translated until 2001, after its current owner, Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos, concerned with its deteriorating condition, transferred it to the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Basel, Switzerland. She named it in honor of her father, Dimaratos Tchacos.

Roughly a dozen pages of the original manuscript, seen briefly by scholars in the 1970s, are missing from the Codex today; it is believed that they were sold secretly to dealers, but none have come forward.

In April 2006, a complete translation of the text, with extensive footnotes, was released by the National Geographic Society: The Gospel Of Judas (ISBN 1-4262-0042-0, April 2006). National Geographic, which played a large part in the restoration and conservation of the codex, has also created a two hour television documentary, The Gospel of Judas, which aired worldwide on the National Geographic Channel on April 9, 2006.