Metropolitan Bishoy, leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church, dismissed The Gospel of Judas as "non-Christian babbling resulting from a group of people trying to create a false 'amalgam' between the Greek mythology and Far East religions with Christianity," according to BP News.

The Metropolitan added, "They were written by a group of people who were aliens to the main Christian stream of the early Christianity. These texts are neither reliable nor accurate Christian texts, as they are historically and logically alien to the main Christian thinking and philosophy of the early and present Christians."

Headlines around the world are announcing the publication of a "long lost" and "suppressed" ancient document, known as The Gospel of Judas. The National Geographic Society announced the publication at a major media event April 6, just in time to boost publicity for its special on the National Geographic Channel on April 9.

The document purports to be written by Judas, even though it certainly was written at least 150 years after Judas's death. It was written by a group called the Gnostics, a group that tried to high-jack orthodox Christianity in the early centuries of the faith.

The concept of secret and mysterious knowledge was central to Gnostic sects. The Gospel of Judas purports to reveal conversations between Jesus and Judas that had been kept secret from the rest of humanity. The Gnostics prized their secret knowledge, and taught a profound dualism between the material and spiritual worlds.

Simon Gathercole, a New Testament professor at Aberdeen University, defended the text as authentic, but relatively unimportant. "It is certainly an ancient text, but not ancient enough to tell us anything new," Gathercole explains. "It contains themes which are alien to the first-century world of Jesus and Judas, but which became popular later," BP News reported.

The basic premise of the text is that Judas was performing a service to Jesus by betraying Him to those who would then crucify Him, liberating Jesus from the physical body and freeing Him as spirit. As the editors of The Gospel of Judas indicate in a footnote, "The death of Jesus, with the assistance of Judas, is taken to be the liberation of the spiritual person within."

While the Gospel of Judas is something new and amazing to the National Geographic Society, the existence of the document has been well-know to Christian scholars. Writing about the year 180, Irenaeus, a major Christian figure among the early church fathers, identified the text now known as The Gospel of Judas as heretical.

R. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky, said, "Extravagant claims about the theological significance of The Gospel of Judas are unwarranted, ridiculous, and driven by those who themselves call for a reformulation of Christianity."