Vaika tsy anisany manuscrit hita taminy 1945 ity evanjelin'i Judas ity fa ny rehetra dia milaza taminy 1970 nahitana azy fa taminy 1983 nahitana copie tany Genova.
Until recent years, no copy of the text was generally known to exist. It was not among, for instance, the 46 different apocryphal texts of the Nag Hammadi Library discovered 60 years ago this month in Egypt. Other fragmentary texts, such as the Gospel of Mary, were discovered well before that.
No trace of the fabled manuscript had been known until a Coptic Gospel of Judas turned up on the antiquities "grey market", first seen under shady circumstances in a hotel room in Geneva in May 1983, when it was found among a mixed group of Greek and Coptic manuscripts offered to Stephen Emmel, a Yale Ph.D. candidate commissioned by Southern Methodist University to inspect the manuscripts. How this Codex Tchacos was found has not been clearly documented. However, it is believed that a now-dead Egyptian antiquities prospector discovered the codex near El Minya, Egypt in the neighborhood of the village Beni Masar, and sold it to a Cairo antiquities dealer known only as "Hannah."
Around 1970, the manuscript and most of the dealer's other artifacts were stolen by a Greek trader named Nikolas Koutoulakis, taken out of Egypt and smuggled into Geneva. The dealer Hannah managed to recover the codex, by coordinating with antiquity traders in Geneva, Switzerland. He then showed it to experts who recognized its significance. But it took him two decades to find a buyer who would pay the asking price of $3 million.
