The codex was rediscovered near El Minya, Egypt, during the 1970s, and stored in a variety of unorthodox ways by various dealers who had little experience with antiquities. One stored it in a safe deposit box and another actually froze the documents, causing a unique and difficult kind of decay that makes the papyrus appear sandblasted. Scholars heard rumors of the text from the 1980s onward as dealers periodically offered it for sale It was not examined and translated until 2001 after its current owner, Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos, concerned with its deteriorating condition, transferred it to the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Basel, Switzerland. She named it in honor of her father, Dimaratos Tchacos. Roughly a dozen pages of the original manuscript, seen briefly by scholars in the 1970s, are missing from the Codex today; it is believed that they were sold secretly to dealers, but none have come forward. According to National Geographic's website, fragments purported to be from the codex may also be part of an Ohio antiquities dealer's estate. In April 2006, a complete translation of the text, with extensive footnotes, was released by the National Geographic Society: The Gospel Of Judas. The Society also created a two-hour television documentary, The Gospel of Judas, which aired worldwide on the National Geographic Channel on April 9, 2006. A special issue of National Geographic magazine was also devoted to the Gospel of Judas. A critical edition of the Codex Tchacos, including complete, near life-sized color photographs of 26 pages, a revised transcription of the Coptic, and complete translation of the codex was published by National Geographic Society in 2007. The team also hopes to look at the cartonnage in order to find clues about who made the codex and when/where. April D. DeConick has published a book, The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says, questioning both the National Geographic's handling of the Gospel of Judas' publication and the veracity of its translation. She has argued both that National Geographic denied competent scholars access and that the scholars who were granted access to the Codex Tchacos were not able to go about their work properly due to the constraints put upon them, accusations similar to those leveled at the guardians of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most notably, she points out that the first National Geographic translation omitted a "not," reversing the meaning of the text. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, she wrote: The importance of the Codex Tchacos is not in doubt, but work has only begun in understanding its true influence and origin.
