The translation of The Gospel of Judas, due to be published on Thursday, contains no reference to the resurrection, according to the UK Mail on Sunday newspaper.

The controversial publication just a week before Easter, when the resurrection is celebrated by Christians, is sure to fuel a new round of hot-tempered debate around these age-old questions.

The manuscript is said to have been discovered in a limstone tomb in Eqypt in the 1970s, and is not part of the Gnostic haul recovered from Nag Hammadi in 1945. It represents a new perspective on the position Judas played in the Jesus story. In the Coptic Gospel, Judas appears as a hero, not a villain and is Christ’s favored disciple. In betraying Christ, Judas was fulfilling a divine mission, it claims.

American theologian, Bart Ehrman, says that in the Judas document there is no account of Jesus’s death because “his death isn’t what really matters”. What does matter to Judas is not that the body is going to come back to life but that “the body is going to die and the spirit is going to live on”.

This mystical view was eliminated from the Romanized version of Christianity in the 4th century, and subsequently reinforced by the French Bishop, Irenaeus, whose choice of four edited Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, has defined Western Christian thinking ever since.

However, there is strong evidence that the early Christians, including Jesus himself, were far more mystically-inclined than the materialist, political Roman church has allowed us to believe for 20 centuries. A large part of the spirituality of the Jesus story has been written out of history as if it never existed. The Gospel of Judas reveals much of this strand of early Christian thought.

National Geographic, the publisher of the translation, insists that it’s an authentic and plausible Christian text. Tests show it to be a 4th-century copy of a manuscript written in Greek in AD 187. National Geographic’s Herbert Krosney describes how in the text Judas is the only disciple who had the courage to stand before Jesus. He is told “to step away from the others”, for he will exceed them by “sacrific[ing] the man that clothes me”.

This last statement bears much comparison with the descriptions of nirvanic experiences described here on Spiritual Nirvana.

This is sure to be a controversial week for all of us interested in genuine spiritual matters so, for the other side of the argument, let’s turn to Charles Hedrick, an American historian: “I believe [this] is a copy of a document known as The Gospel of Judas that was originally written in the 2nd century by the Gnostics, a sect denounced by the early Fathers of the Church like St Irenaeus as heretics for trying to vindicate Judas. Timing the publication of this for Easter is dramatic stuff but my prediction is that after the initial uproar it will have no impact whatever on the future of Christianity”

The Mail on Sunday quotes a “Vatican scholar” as decrying the project as “dangerous”, and a “high-ranking Church of England figure” commenting: “Saying that Judas was a hero is not a generally accepted chain of thought”.

These ideas have been around a long time. They are not going to go away now. Books like The Da Vinci Code will see to that.