The "Gospel of Judas" was originally in the New Testament and was conveniently "exorcised," if you know what I mean. That was convenient.

The suspicion is understandable, since canon decisions did involve human beings with interests. But the Gospel of Judas is a particularly bad test case for the conspiracy theory, because the evidence against it is early, public, and awkward for the thesis.

1. No ancient canon list ever included it. Not one. The book appears in no canon list, no lectionary, no early translation of the New Testament. It was not removed from a collection; it was never in one. The four Gospels, by contrast, were being read and cited as authoritative in the early second century, before any council discussed the matter.

2. Its date is far too late. The surviving copy is the Coptic text in the Codex Tchacos, radiocarbon-dated to roughly the third or fourth century, and the Greek original behind it is placed in the mid-second century, about a hundred years after Jesus. That is not a first-hand record by anyone who was there.

3. It was rejected before any council existed. Irenaeus, writing around AD 180, mentions a 'Gospel of Judas' and dismisses it as fictitious history. That is a century and a half before Nicaea. If the book was 'exorcised' by a fourth-century power grab, someone forgot to tell the second-century bishop who was already arguing against it.

4. Its theology is Gnostic, not apostolic. In this text Judas hands Jesus over in obedience, and Jesus is freed from the body, because the material world is a prison rather than a creation. That is alien to the New Testament's claim that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), and John tells believers to test spirits by whether they confess Jesus come in the flesh (1 John 4:2-3).

5. It fails every criterion of canonicity. Apostolicity, antiquity, orthodoxy, and reception across the churches: the Gospel of Judas fails all four, and it fails them on evidence rather than by decree. The criteria were not designed to exclude it; it simply does not meet them, as dozens of other books also did not.

6. The church preserved the text it supposedly suppressed. We can read the Gospel of Judas today because a copy survived, was copied, and was preserved in Egypt. Suppressors do not archive the evidence; they burn it. The existence of the manuscript is a standing argument against the theory that says it was erased.

7. It is anonymous and derivative. Like the canonical Gospels it carries no internal author's name, but unlike them it has no credible link to eyewitnesses and depends on earlier gospel material, which shows it was written afterwards. A document that borrows from the tradition and then reverses its theology is not an earlier, suppressed version of it.

8. There was no fourth-century invention. Manuscripts, quotations, and canon lists appear well before Nicaea. The councils ratified what churches were already using in worship; they did not choose favorites from a shelf of candidates. The process took time and had human dimensions, and honest scholars say so, but the direction of causation runs the other way.

9. Gnostic texts despise the physical world. They teach that matter is a trap and salvation is escape through secret knowledge, which is the opposite of the biblical claim that the world is God's good creation (Genesis 1:31) and will be renewed rather than abandoned (Revelation 21:5). That is a difference in doctrine, not in politics, and it is why these books were disputed.

10. The earlier sources are the connected ones. Luke says he investigated everything carefully from the beginning to write an orderly account (Luke 1:1-4), and Peter insists the apostles did not follow cleverly devised myths but were eyewitnesses (2 Peter 1:16). Whatever you make of those claims, they are the kind of grounding the Gospel of Judas does not even attempt.

To say the Gospel of Judas was 'originally in the New Testament' requires evidence no historian has produced. The dates, the citations, and the theology all point the other way, and the conspiracy has to explain why the supposed cover-up preserved the book it was covering up.

Sources: Michael J. Kruger, The Missing Gospels; Darrell Bock; Craig Evans; Irenaeus, Against Heresies.

Related challenges:
• How can you take the gospels as inspired when they don't even make that claim for themselves?
• Miracle stories were crafted AFTER Jesus died, and then included just to make Jesus look like a Jewish wonder working messianic figure. It’s called messianic fiction.
• There’s no evidence outside of the Bible that indicates the miracle stories about Jesus are authentic!