Codex Tchacos

The Codex Tchacos is an ancient Egyptian Coptic papyrus, which contains early Christian gnostic texts from approximately 300 AD: the Letter of Peter to Philip, the First Apocalypse of James, the Gospel of Judas, and a fragment of the Book of Allogenes (or the Book of the Stranger, this is different from the previously known Nag Hammadi text Allogenes).

The Codex Tchacos 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. The Gospel of Judas was mentioned and summarized by the Church Father Irenaeus of Lyons in his work Against Heresies. This would make the Gospel of Judas older than the codex.

The codex was rediscovered near El Minya, Egypt during the 1970s, and stored in a variety of unorthodox ways by various dealers who had little experience with antiquities. One stored it in a safe deposit box and another actually froze the documents, causing a unique and difficult kind of decay that makes the papyrus appear sandblasted. (Archivists can do nothing to remedy this damage since it is caused by the outer layers of the papyrus flaking off—taking ink with them.) Scholars heard rumors of the text from the 1980s onward as dealers periodically offered it for sale (displaying portions of the text or photographs of portions of the text in the process.) 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.

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