Gospel of Judas has survived in full and so too has a similar, shorter, dismissal of it by Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, dating from the second half of the second century, but from then onwards the text of the gospel itself disappeared — until, that is, some Egyptian peasants chanced upon an ancient copy in a casket hidden in a cave somewhere in Middle Egypt, some time around 1978. The exact details as to how, where, when and by whom this great treasure was unearthed remain obscure. What we do know is that the gospel (bound in a book with several other less valuable ancient manuscripts) somehow found its way to Cairo where it was sold to a dealer (whose name we are not allowed to know) for $2,000. That dealer, unable to decipher ancient Coptic scripts and therefore unaware that the lost Gospel of Judas was among them, clung to his bundle hoping for a trading miracle, only to discover, shortly after acquiring it, that his Cairo flat had been burgled, the Gospel stolen and secretly shipped out of Egypt. A full version of how our mystery antiquarian recovered his property, how he then damaged it by wrapping it in newspaper and leaving it for 20 years in a damp safety deposit box in America, how the work was identified as the Judas Gospel, how it was frozen, unfrozen, secretly photographed, bought with a worthless cheque, squabbled over and finally translated into English, is told with excitable energy by the investigative journalist Herbert Krosney. Krosney is keen to spot the frauds and the gangsters and to lift the lid on low life in the fishy underworld of ancient antiquities and he does all this with contagious enthusiasm; and yet he holds back when it comes to telling his readers about the current owners of the Judas Gospel and how precisely they acquired it. All we are told is that it now belongs to a charity calling itself the Maecenas Foundation, that this body is based in Basel, and is run by a lawyer called Roberty with a passion for archaeology, whose client happened to be the previous owner. Roberty, it seems, is a really nice chap and he promises to donate the Gospel when he has finished with it to the Egyptian government. Curtain falls, happy end. Am I the only one to smell a rat? Published simultaneously with Krosney’s investigation is the complete translated text with footnotes and four related scholarly essays. The gospel itself runs to fewer than 20 pages and, as Irenaeus and Epiphanius pointed out long ago, the text praises Judas as the most knowledgeable and inspired of the apostles who is the closest to Jesus and who, with Jesus’s connivance, hands his master over to the authorities in order that some true gnosis may be fulfilled. Jesus says to Judas with reference to the other disciples, ‘You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me’, while the secret bond between Jesus and Judas is further amplified in Judas’s line to him: ‘I know who you are and where you have come from. You are from the immortal realm of

Barbelo. And I am not worthy to utter the name of the one who has sent you.’ Judas’s Gospel may not be good enough, or even appropriate enough, for late inclusion in the New Testament canon, yet there is no doubting its venerable age. The excitement caused by its discovery has shaken the musty world of Judeo-Christian scholarship in the same way as the finds at Qumran and Nag Hammadi did in the 1940s. Roberty’s Maecenas Foundation has been artful in controlling the release of all its information. He and his team offer much to ponder upon, not least the intriguing blanks in the tale of its discovery and in the text itself. Once the ether’s wackos and conspiracy theorists have had their go, the story will no doubt get a second wind. Both books are riveting in their own right and I look forward to reading all internet appendices with equal relish.

Humanity makes all plain

Richard Ollard

T HE L ETTERSOF S AMUEL P EPYS edited by Guy de la Bedoyère Boydell, £25, pp. 296, ISBN 184383197X ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655

The title of this well edited and interesting book is misleading. First it suggests a complete collection, which would, if it were ever accomplished, require several volumes. Second, the letters, though mostly written by Pepys, include a considerable number of those written to him and even occasional papers which are not letters at all but throw light on incidents that were important to his career.

These are all well chosen and their annotation makes their significance clear to the reader who is not already a knowledgeable Pepysian. Pepys’s letters, though always characteristic and generally well expressed, have not the piercing quality of the Diary . His addiction to long, ramifying sentences, so typical of many 17th-century authors, often challenges the reader’s understanding. Yet just when one thinks, particularly in his official correspondence, that pomposity and formal politeness have obscured the meaning beyond retrieval, a sudden stroke of humanity makes all plain. What then does this collection add to the superb self-portrait for which Pepys will always be known wherever our literature is read? Oddly enough, in spite of the necessary artificiality of much of this in contrast with the heartwarming candour of the Diary , one finished the book with a stronger conviction of his kindness and good nature. There is also in the differing tone and mood of the letters a deeper sense of his awareness of other people than in his brief, sharp delineations of them in his journal. The letters to him also reflect a grateful consciousness that their writers did not think of themselves as items or mere numbers in the crowded mind of a very busy man with a host of interests and relationships besides those of the most effective government servant of his day. This is by no means thanks to the overbenevolence of his editor who though clearly enjoying and appreciating the personality of his subject is also thoroughly alive to his weaknesses. Guy de la Bedoyère is very much at home in the period and generous in his acknowledgment of other scholars, whose occasional and trivial errors he corrects without condescension. His own are few and small. Among the interesting questions that he raises is the source of Will Hewer’s wealth (p. 72). Very likely Hewer did follow the general practice of his day, and certainly that of his master, in enriching himself. But his uncle, Robert Blackborne, who had occupied a similar position to Pepys’s under the preceding regime and passed on to the service of the East India Company, must have been a man of substance.

Flying

(In Memory of M)

You smiled and clenched my hand, tight in your own, the sky pressed on our shoulders as we rose. I felt that I was further now from home than I had ever been. The shrill salvos of seagulls showered the air — below, the crack of rolling ocean, dressed by intimate sky in grey, grey-green and austere black. Your warm hand, soothing, like a lullaby. And then a beach, a silver swan-neck, lay beneath us, when you suddenly let go, allowing me to plummet to the bay and land, unharmed, far, far below, back in my bed, alone with ebbing night, fallen awake in the dreamless early light. Lesley Quayle

THE SPECTATOR13 May 2006 45