Codex Tchacos

The Codex Tchacos is an ancient Egyptian Coptic papyrus containing early Christian gnostic texts from approximately 300 AD:

• The Letter of Peter to Philip
• The First Apocalypse of James
• The Gospel of Judas
• A fragment of the Book of Allogenes (or the Book of the Stranger, this is different from the previously-known Nag Hammadi text Allogenes.)

The Codex Tchacos is important, because it contains the first known surviving copy of the Gospel of Judas, a text that was rejected as heresy by the early Christian church and lost for 1700 years. The Gospel of Judas was mentioned and summarized by the Church Father Irenaeus of Lyons in his work Against Heresies. This would make the Gospel of Judas older than the codex. It was discovered in, though there is some uncertainty as to whether this reference was explicitly added in a later Latin translation.