If you're talking about the Gospel of Judas, that isn't from the Dead Sea scrolls, but was its own distinct finding.

The Dead Sea scrolls are a collection of texts of a cult based around a messianic figure, rooted in Judaism, but dated between the 3rd and 1st century BCE, discovered in the 1940s.

They do not mention Judas, but are interesting in that the actual messianic figure himself seems to have written some of the texts, that he uses some of the same verses and stories from the Torah to identify himself as the Messiah that would later be used by (attributed to being used by) Jesus, that some of the texts were written by others of the same cult after his death, and show how they theologically cope with their Messiah seemingly failing his own prophecies and claims.

...

The Gospel of Judas, on the other hand, is dated to the 2nd century CE and was ....well, the story goes it was found in Egypt some point prior to the 1970s, then got traded around by black market antiquities dealers, spent about a decade in a safe deposit box, nearly totally disintegrated, and was eventually shown to a proper academic expert in greek and coptic, leading to it being painstakingly reassembled, radio carbon dated, linguistically verified as not being a much later forgery, and translated, first publicly widely available in English in 2006.

...

The actual story in the Gospel of Judas is stunningly bizarre:

You start off with Jesus literally mocking and laughing at all his disciples other than Judas for seemingly not understanding anything he's ever said.

Later, privately, Judas confronts Jesus saying that he does understand Jesus... that Jesus is from the immortal realm of Barbelo.

Jesus then goes on to describe that yes, he was making fun of the other disciples because they think he is the Messiah of Yahweh / The God of Judaism, when in actuality Jesus is a human incarnation or avatar of a completely different divine entity, that Yahweh is actually Saklas / Yaldebaoth, a mad, malformed demiurge descended from a long line of other, superior, more wise and beneficent divine entities in an elaborate and historied pantheon (which Jesus admits his own knowledge of is not total and complete), that Saklas / Yaldebaoth falsely believes himself to be the supreme God of all reality when in fact he only has domain over the Earth, which is basically an innately evil realm, and that all humans were accidentally created with a tiny bit of the pure divine spark in them but are all here trapped and cursed to suffer as basically slaves and playthings of Saklas.

The fragment ends with Jesus explaining that basically his master plan for saving all of mankind involves sacrificing himself to help more people realize their true inner divinity, and that he only trusts Judas, his wisest disciple, to make that actually happen.

...

To me, it reads like someone took acid or shrooms and wrote a fan fiction drawing from the 4 more mainstream gospels. Its truly wild.

The 'Judas was actually a good guy' part is basically a footnote compared to how totally out of left field everything else is.

IIRC, Saklas or Saklos basically transliterates to 'The Blind One', which is a name you'd expect a Lovecraftian entity to have.

https://www.gospels.net/judas

There's a fascinating idea that Judas was the one who committed the ultimate sacrifice. That god chose him to be his human incarnate, to truly experience humanity and guilt by committing an ultimate betrayal and becoming the villain of biblical history. All allowing him to finally understand and forgive humanity's sin, by committing one himself. It follows that this is supposedly maddening knowledge as it breaks the illusion of Christ's sacrifice.

I'm definitely butchering and ad-libbing the original idea, but I think this makes for a grander story than the traditional "birth myself to sacrifice myself to myself to forgive everyone else" interpretation.

I mean, in the Bible it's explicit that Jesus knew Judas would betray him and didn't do anything about it whether he told him to or not. Not much explanation for that except that a martyr story is a much more powerful message.

Even taking out instruction by Jesus, which would be controversial, the story would not have played out correctly without the betrayal of Judas. He had a pivotal role.

A more friendly interpretation would be that Jesus knew Judas would betray him from the beginning and allowed it to happen, because it was God’s Will.

That's the gospel of Judas, and it's considered part of Gnostic doctrine, which is basically the one thing all Christians agree on, in that they all agree it is absolute heresy.

Like basically considered pagan in terms of how "Christian" it's seen as.

I actually have an idea for an althist based on if the core gospels were instead replaced with the Gospels of Thomas, Mary, Phillip, and Judas, leading to Christianity developing as a wildly more mystical sort of religion, and possibly even less tolerant of old faiths since Gnostic doctrines, of which all four of those gospels are apparently heavily steeped in, believes everything material and old testament related is literally made by satan, would need to actually research that one lol.

Which makes sense in the context of the story and its religious implications because Jesus could not be the savior of humanity if he wasn’t crucified.

In what way does the last part make sense? Just asking because it only really does if you buy the whole inherited sin idea and the idea that sins can somehow be transferred to another and the idea that death somehow absolves someone of their sins even without the eternal punishment part that comes after in the rest of the belief system. The term fractally wrong comes to mind, no matter how many of the ideas you exclude from scrutiny and treat as a given, the rest still doesn't make sense.

I just want to say that this has been the most thoroughly enjoyable conversation I've come across in a long time. Nearly every comment and response has been really interesting. I spent a lot of time upvoting.

Apothrical books of the Bible are a fun rabbit hole! Was it this video?

https://youtu.be/fryITDxUyHA?si=-ROuyoiDy0g_VXJU

5:20 is when they discuss it.

There was also a deleted verse where Judas shouted "IT WAS A PRANK BRO" to Jesus after he came back from the dead.

Yeah but in the lore he chose to let himself get killed so he could flex his resurrection spell.

Betrayal grindset and Judas-pilled

Depends on which story you believe. Matthew says he hung himself. Acts says he fell and busted his head open in a more accidental way. And then there's a few other accounts that aren't in the biblical canon.

Personally I only accept Korean Muscle Jesus as my lord and savior

They're not "religious" by their own definition, but it's not the definition the rest of the world uses, so it's meaningless. But as long as they're not assholes they can believe what they want!