Pagels went on to write a series of acclaimed books about early Christianity and, along the way, recounted her own personal tragedies - her young son's death after a long illness and, just a year later, her first husband's death in a hiking accident. That book, which won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, was later chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century. A Princeton historian of religion, she wrote the 1979 bestseller 'The Gnostic Gospels' - the book that launched the popular fascination with the Nag Hammadi manuscripts found by Egyptian peasants in 1945. More than any other scholar, Pagels has brought the lost texts of early Christianity to public attention. Finally, the manuscript was acquired by the National Geographic Society, which hired Pagels as a consultant to study it.

She assumed there was nothing of significance.

Pagels herself was once asked by a dealer in Cleveland to examine it, but he only showed her the last few pages, which revealed little more than the title page. We now know that the manuscript was passed around the shadowy world of antiquities dealers, at one point sitting in a safe deposit box in a small town in New York for 17 years. Early church fathers called it a 'very dangerous, blasphemous, horrendous gospel,' according to historian Elaine Pagels. Rumors about the gospel have circulated for centuries. Or is it? The newly discovered Gospel of Judas suggests that Judas was, in fact, the favorite disciple, the only one Jesus trusted to carry out his final command to hand him over to the Romans. If there's an arch villain in the story of Jesus, it's Judas Iscariot. As almost every child knows, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus, selling his life for 30 pieces of silver.

Reading Judas by Elaine Pagels