According to the estimate in this book, we now possess 85 or 90 per cent of the so-called Gospel of Judas; the manuscript is therefore not so lacunose as a number of the theories that purport to elucidate it. One, which is shown here to result from the false ascription of editorial rubrics to Irenaeus himself, affirms that the text was produced by an obscure sect called the Cainites, or else that the Fathers invented the sect to impugn the authenticity of the Gospel. Another, which has captivated the popular press, insinuates that the Gospel of Judas offers a truer depiction of its protagonist than the canonical accounts when it makes him perform his betrayal at the behest of Christ. This view would also require us to suppose that the Gnostic cosmogony which is revealed in the course of the Gospel was an element in the teaching of Christ himself. Gathercole also notices, but dismisses, the conjecture – which, if true, would give the lie to this Gospel and its orthodox cognates – that the handing over of Christ was no betrayal, and that Judas is a fictitious personification of Jewish malignity. Against those who maintain the antiquity of the Gospel of Judas, he points out that certain phrases are best explained as developments of synoptic matter, and that it presupposes a eucharistic cult which was unknown to the Apostles. He reasonably concludes that if the canonical texts are the oldest, it is unlikely that they owe their triumph solely, as Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman have averred, to the political machinations of their advocates. While his argument seems to me the more cogent of the two, it is not hard to imagine what might be said against it. Those who consider Gnosticism a ‘system of thought’ (as Gathercole glibly styles it on p. 2) are apt to hold that it antedates the time of Christ, and would therefore not concede that the presence of Gnostic elements vitiates the claim of the Gospel of Judas to be at least as old as the biblical narratives. Such partisans would note that, even if Gathercole argues well for the priority of Matthew, he says little to vindicate that of John, in whose work many would see the strongest tincture of Gnostic teaching and the most suggestive evidence of Christ's complicity in his own betrayal. It is reasoning in a circle to urge that a high theology of the eucharist is unattested before the second century (pp. 139–40), for if the Gospel of Judas is earlier, it may itself be the first attestation. As for Judas himself, we may be sure that, whether God or the evangelists gave him his eponym, the early Church regarded his secession from the twelve as an ironic counterpoint to the secession of the northern tribes from Israel. For all that, a discussion so free of error and sustained misrepresentation stands in a league of its own among the books inspired by this alluring but protean gift of the Nile.