A NEW BRANCH SPRUNG: JUDAS SCHOLARSHIP IN GNOSTIC STUDIES The Nag Hammadi Codex and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (Agrapha) 1 from Middle Egypt are the greatest discoveries of the last century, but the discovery of the Codex Tchacos cannot be disregarded if one is a reader of Gnostic studies from the early Christian centuries. The appearance of the Gospel of Judas has directly or indirectly impacted on faith communities and the scholarly world. The prediction that ‘there will be hundreds of scholarly books and articles’ was not a wrong presupposition. 2 Table 1: A Historical Tendency of Judas Scholarship. 3 1 The Greek means ‘things unwritten’ or ‘unwritten sayings’, in particular, the unknown sayings tradition from the history of ancient Christianity. 2 B. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed, New York 2006, 100. S. Gathercole, The Gospel of Judas: An Unlikely Hero, in The Non-Canonical Gospels, ed. P. Foster, London 2008, 86. 3 This graph is based on data from a personal survey of the books, articles, and reviews that focus primarily on the Tchacos Gospel of Judas. It 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 1970s 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 & 2011 Numbers of publication on Tchacos Codex 33-58