Judas: the gospel

Well, I guess it's only a matter of time before we having to field comments and accusations based on this Gospel of Judas. So it may be worth bookmarking this article which does at least give some helpful context, some of which is the comment from a [note this] Jewish scholar:

leading biblical scholar and translator of the dead sea scrolls, Professor Geza Vermes of Oxford University, said: "The document is of interest for the ideas of the gnostics but it almost certainly adds nothing to our understanding of what happened 150 years before it was written."

The earlier paragraph points out that the gnostics "had different beliefs from the mainstream church".
Later on we are told:

Scholars in Britain pointed out that the document appeared to have been written several decades after the last of the gospels in the New Testament - that of John - and at least a century after the death of Judas Iscariot.

In other words they should be regarded more as a romance using the characters of the canonical gospels in the service of an ideology somewhat alien to the gospels. A bit like the 'Braveheart' is to the actual events it purports to portray: modern notions of freedom being imported into an ideological context that barely recognises the kind of 'freedom' Braveheart promotes. The real issues were other: Braveheart rewrites the story and the aims of the characters in terms of modern political notions that we can get excited about. In reality, battles over which relatively-absolute monarch/dynasty should rule [that is exploit] whom would scarcely get us excited.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Judas: this is what really happened:
Filed in: apologetics, gospel, Judas, gnostic