Quite a few papers and news websites, today, are covering the "discovery" of a so-called "Gospel of Judas". Of course, the actual discovery happened about thirty years ago, and what has happened now is a translation, but that's not as punchy, so "discovery" it is. And we have a ton of apocryphal gospels, ranging from the Gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalene to the Gospel of Kevin the Temple Pool Cleaner and the Gospel of Shep, Peter's collie.
Anyway, when it comes to the Christological significance of the discovery, I'm more than moderately certain that the text will show all the usual nonsense that will flag it as a second-century-onwards Gnostic creation (reference to hidden knowledge not imparted to the masses is the obvious one) from the sort of people who today write Da Vinci Codes.* As such, it will tell us something about how people saw the events of the gospel period by the time a couple of centuries had passed (and at a time when the Synoptic gospels, in particular, were coalescing into their final form), what narratives were seen as credible at the time and so on. How it retells known events will tell us a lot more about Judaic and Gnostic mysticism at the time. It probably doesn't contain much new information about the actual historical events (though one cannot rule out some sort of interesting transmission of snippets and background).
What interests me is the treatment of Judas. I've never bought the whole Judas Iscariot story, which smacks, to me, of post-facto rationalisation. I mean, look at it: you have Judas, following around after a man who is healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, physically resurrecting dead people. You've been close-knit, travelling together for hundreds of miles up and down Galilee, and now he's got the capital alive, abuzz. And we're supposed to believe that he just decides to turn state witness one day?
More than that, he betrays Jesus, supposedly, by identifying him to the cops. Now, call me daft, but this is 1st century Jerusalem, with a five figure population. And someone has been going around, not just vaguely suggesting (and refusing to deny) that he is the anointed one, the long-awaited Messiah and so on, but backing it up with regular miracles. I am not sure that in order to find out what he looks like you need to infiltrate his twelve closest followers. Everybody knows what he looks like.
And it doesn't hang together with what went before. It doesn't make sense. In a story-telling culture, where little nuances, expressions, even jokes and teasing on occasion, have been picked up and transmitted to us, Judas' volte-face comes out of nowhere. We're not even told he was getting a bit awkward. Just Bang! Straight into a Cash For Kisses row. The most notorious kiss-and-tell ever.
And yes, once we get into unsupported, mad conspiracy theories, I am vaguely uncomfortable that the post-Pauline Christian world, increasingly gentile in character after a struggle between the two traditions represented in the writings of Peter and Paul, passes on to us a story where a man called Judas, the Greek form of Judah, the name of Jewish land itself, is the betrayer. If I hadn't read Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, I would be indulging in some moronic logic myself.
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* In all fairness, I should note that the average 3rd century Gnostic gospel-producer was capable of considerably better writing than is dreamt of in Dan Brown's philosophy. They were also far more knowledgeable about, oh, 14th century Catholicism for starters...