Reading Judas
By Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King
Viking, 198 pp., $24.95

Reading Judas is a small book packed with revelations and information. Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University, and Karen King, a professor of ecclesiastical history at the Harvard Divinity School, have applied their considerable expertise in translating and analyzing the Gospel of Judas.

Their introduction traces the history of the Gospel of Judas, which was written in 2nd-century Greek then translated into Coptic. The National Geographic Society made the gospel's discovery in the 1970s public in 2006. King's English translation, with notes and commentary, fills the second half of Reading Judas; the first half is cogent exegesis.

As with the other gospels, Judas was not written by the disciple named Judas, and King and Pagels are careful always to refer to "the author of Judas," never (confusingly) just "Judas." This gospel's author proposes that Judas-the-disciple was not just loyal, but was, indeed, Jesus' favorite.

Also like the other gospels, Judas was written with an agenda. In "Judas and the Twelve," the scholars explain: "When Christians in later generations told stories of rivalry between disciples, and chose which stories to tell and which to leave out, often they were taking sides in disputes between different groups." Additionally, King and Pagels address the bloody issues of sacrifice and martyrdom in the persecutory time and place Judas was written; and they consider the "divine mysteries," which the author of this gospel claimed Jesus revealed to Judas and no other.

In accessible language, Pagels and King place this newly discovered gospel in context with the canonical gospels and with political and clerical history. In Reading Judas, they present their scholarship as an offering -- not a snowjob -- to help us understand that "the Gospel of Judas ... leads us right into the center of the debates about what Christianity would become."