This doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Elaine Pagels at Princeton, is notable for offering a fresh interpretation of this tenebrous Coptic work. The principal concern of the Gospel of Judas is taken, reasonably enough, to be the immorality and illegitimacy of the twelve disciples and consequently of those who stake a claim to be their rightful heirs. The book has four main chapters, on Jesus, the disciples, Judas's version of the Gnostic myth and the Tchacos codex as a collection (where the Gospel of Judas is accompanied by the Epistle of Peter to Philip and the First Apocalypse of James found among in the Nag Hammadi codices, with an unknown Allogenes text, and some fragments of Corpus Hermeticum XIII). Equally valuable are the parallel text and translation, commentary, and catalogue of scribal marks, found in three appendices. Such a work is justified not only on the grounds of the infancy of research on Judas, but also because this is the first monograph to take account of the new fragments published subsequent to the editio princeps.

The rebarbative character of the Gospel of Judas has perhaps rubbed off on its commentator, for the book has the sometimes exasperated tone of one crying in the wilderness against all other interpreters. Previously in scholarship on Judas there has been division over whether the character of Judas should be seen as positive or demonic (or perhaps somewhere in between), with the result that the work's self-proclaimed ‘secret word of apophasis’ has been viewed not just as gospel but also as parodic dusangelion. Jenott's book takes issue with the common assumptions of both approaches, namely that the Gospel of Judas must at least be opposed to an incarnational Christology, a conception of Jesus’ death as atoning sacrifice and a sunny outlook on the material cosmos.

On the first of these, Jenott sees in the two references to ‘the man who carries me about’ and ‘he who carries me about’ (Gospel of Judas 56) a two-natures Christology, citing some parallels from the Timaeus and Philo which refer to the body carrying the soul. While he might be correct to criticise the use of that elusive term ‘docetism’ and to place Judas's Christology on the spectrum of early Christian understandings of incarnation, the reason for the choice of the Platonic parallels over other parallels is unclear and is liable to the charge of arbitrariness. (The parallels also have the word pherō, which might not be the same as the Coptic's use of Greek phoreō, the word employed in Matthew xi.8; John xix.5 and James ii.3 and 1 Peter iii.3 for wearing clothes.) It is also notable that this reference to ‘carrying about’ is repeated at the precise point where the death of Jesus comes into view, and that between them appears the statement that ‘no hand of mortal man will wrong me/fall upon me’. This may mean that undue strain in being placed on the flexibility of the ‘two-natures’ formula.

In the second place, the argument that Judas's understanding of the death of Jesus falls within Aulén's classic view is perhaps vulnerable. While rightly noting that not all Sethian texts are straightforwardly opposed to such a view, Jenott sees a chain of events beginning with Jesus’ forecast of his execution, a series which encompasses the destruction of the demiurge and the salvation of the chosen seed. The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy lurks within this construction, with the links in the chain in question being much more opaquely conjoined in the text itself.

As far as the understanding of the material cosmos is concerned, there is little support for the view that the world is seen in a much more favourable light than in other Sethian texts, with creation even ‘an act of divine providence intended to bring primordial chaos under the control of benevolent heavenly powers’ (p. 97). These powers seem unlikely to be so benevolent, however, since they are the creatures of Nimrod, or Nebro, interpreted by the Gospel of Judas as meaning ‘apostate’, and of Saklas, interpreted by most scholars as derived from the Aramaic sakla, or ‘fool’. There seems to be some tension in Jenott's account, according to which Judas's account of creation is more positive than that of the Nag Hammadi Holy book of the great invisible spirit (or, Gospel of the Egyptians), but also that, two pages later, Judas downgrades Nebro and Saklas from their relatively positive personae in the Holy book and values them extremely negatively (p. 99). If there is a factor which brings coherence to these ideas, I was unable to find it in the discussion.

I do not intend in these criticisms to imply by any means that this monograph is of poor quality. The discussion of the disciples in chapter ii is worked out in convincing detail, and a great deal of profitable detective work has gone into the codicological study in the final chapter. The translation is accurate, and a number of helpful readings are noted in the Coptic text. The value of this book lies not so much in the accuracy of its conclusions, however, but in its pursuit of an interpretation quite at variance to that of everyone else. Even if many of the main contentions are incorrect, they are sufficiently plausible to provoke readers of this elusive text to revisit what may have seemed to them to be obvious upon first reading.