The Gospel of Judas, written in the mid-2nd century and discovered in the 1970s, was recently reconstructed into a full text that has been popularly translated to describe Judas as “a friend and soul mate” of Jesus. Not so, according to April D. Deconick, author of The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says. “I started to question whether Judas really was a good guy in this text,” says Deconick, and in the course of her own scholarly translation she found that Judas “was as evil as ever.”