Because that's the title it had in Antiquity.

Scholars do not mean this as a theological endorsement: we are simply using the same title that those who used (or detested) the book in Antiquity used. Irenaeus called it "The Gospel of Judas", the scribe who copied it called it "The Gospel of Judas", we do the same.

When scholars first encounter a new text like the Gospel of the Savior or the Gospel of Judas or one of the Dead Sea Scrolls they call it by the title it had in Antiquity. Scrolls had titles written on the outward facing edge or on little tags that hung down from the scroll, individual works within a book had titles at the end of the document. (Scrolls become awkwardly large when long things are copied into them: too large to be easily stored in a cubby, to heavy to be taken down and replaced easily, to heavy to hold in one hand or roll and unroll with one hand. Most written: works in Antiquity were short, closer to modern chapters than modern books. Although longer works could be divided over several scrolls, then as now we prefer media to be on one thing that can be kept in one place.) This is why the books in the Bible are shorter than a modern book. (Notice that the Iliad or the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are also divided into short books.)

The Codex Tchacos that contains the Gospel of Judas (and three other works) and the volumes of the Nag Hammadi Library are some of the oldest books in the West; the individual works in them are short, the books of the Bible are short ... it took a long time to become accustomed to the idea that a single work could be long enough to fill an entire book. (And then, of course, the book had to be made custom for that work - early Christian works were copies into blank, pre-made books and the copyist payed more attention to juggling the lengths of the included works than in getting a guaranteed set of contents.)

Scholars call these short ancient books by their original titles to avoid confusion: also, since scholarship takes place in languages as diverse as Estonian and Japanese, other scholars at least have some prayer of recognizing these standard titles in other languages - between good library records and transliteration of alphabets I can't read, I at least know after a basic catalog search how many professional articles or books I'd have to send to a translation service. (Although (thankfully) my field tries to stick to European languages and tries to keep it narrowed down to three relatively dominant ones.) Newly discovered ancient works get stuck with monikers very quickly, both in scholarship and the press; if every language chose its own title we'd spend too much time sorting out whether we were all talking about the same thing. When the original title has been lost because the book or scroll is damaged, scholars try to give it a title closely related to what it's about. When scholars get into the business of giving a single work another title, then everyone else forever and aye has to repeat both titles when mentioning the work - and as I've said before, we hate to type that much.

Part of that is because scholars also give ancient texts a numbering system as backup. (This would be something like calling the Gospel of Matthew "NT 1".) Scholars numbered the caves the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in (and the books found in the Nag Hammadi Library), then number each work within that group. It's somewhat arbitrary, but once everyone agrees on this numbering system then the number is always typed after the title. (Along with the line number, or page/section number of the exact sentence you're trying to refer to.) Fortunately books in Antiquity usually had page numbers: bound books were a very new thing, I'm glad they thought of that so soon.

Yes, but why is it a 'gospel'?

We've all gotten used to the four books in the New Testament being gospels. Even scholars were used to them - we knew several other gospels had once existed, attributed to several names but since the New Testament gospels were the ones most studied and read in our culture, we settled into thinking that all the other gospels would look more or less like them. (It didn't help that at the turn of the last century what we had of the other gospels were mostly scraps, partial pages with a parable (a strange parable but very clearly a parable) or a group of things Jesus said - somewhat Sermon on the Mount-ish. These didn't disabuse us.) We also had the Gospel of Mary, which should have been fair warning: most of it is one person talking about very abstruse things (often a theme in apocryphal gospels) - but since many of the familiar Twelve were in the text, I don't know if scholars of the time gave much thought to how GMary should change what we expected from other gospels - if we were ever lucky enough to find them.) In addition to the other gospels known at the turn of the last century, we found four more in 1945 among the Nag Hammadi Library (if you read the fine print, you'll realize we already knew about the Gospel of Mary and that it wasn't found at Nag Hammadi - scholars lumped it in with the NHL out of convenience.) After a century we now have all or part of some 37 non-New Testament Gospels (you can read them either in The Complete Gospels or in The New Testament Apocrypha. Most of them are also online, but these tend to be older translations stripped of any kind of historical introduction or guidance about what the heck you're reading.)

(Note: the Gospel of the Savior and the Gospel of Judas are still such fresh discoveries that they are only found in their own books.)

These discoveries taught us that gospels are a wildly florid genre: the four in the New Testament, the biographical kind, are in fact a minority. All the discovered gospels have to do with Jesus, all have to do with the hope of the Christian message (variously construed, but by and large they all promise salvation and/or immortality to their readers based on what Jesus said and/or did.) Every one agrees that Jesus was someone remarkable; a heavenly figure who taught extraordinary things about God (or at least an inspired human prophet, like those of old) - but some point to his healings, some point to his miracles, most struggle to define just how he was related to God (and most could not conceive of a God who could come anywhere near earth - God was too pure, too holy, too inhuman, too utterly good, or perhaps pure light with no characteristics but Goodness or Silence - to either inhabit a human body, take a human form, or make any woman pregnant (besides, the Greco-Roman gods did that.)

Only a minority of these many gospel texts are interested in Jesus' death (or if they are they make something very different of it.) I turn this over in my mind every time I read them: was it because the Temple had been gone so long, destroyed generations ago? Was it because they were Romans who were accustomed to the philosophical disaffections with traditional Roman religion and its sacrificial system? (And the Romans very, very rarely practiced human sacrifice, it would have struck them as desperate and repulsive.) Were these people who had undergone a conversion and thought any sacrificial system, Jewish or Roman or provincial religion, was unnecessary? Were they Diaspora Jews, who had lived their lives far from the Temple in Jerusalem, to begin with? Were they non-Jewish people who had moved far from the deities of their ancestral city-state, with its temples and sacrifices? I'm a bit surprised the Letter to the Hebrews is in the New Testament, at all - pick it up and read it as if the Temple has been rubble for 100 years (thanks to the legions sent by your government), and you're not even a Jew to begin with, anyway. How does it sound?

Scholarship still sometimes forgets that we may be more familiar with the four New Testament gospels, but that does not mean we should view them with a fisheye lens. To understand what I mean, read Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity - Christianity itself was local, persecuted (Roman provincial officials did not made a distinction between what we would now, retroactively, call 'heretical' and 'orthodox') paper was expensive, professional copyists were expensive, literate people were rare, travel was expensive and hazardous, and the postal system was often a matter of both knowing-someone-who-was-going-that-way and personally knowing one's intended recipient (hopefully one's carrier did, too, since there were no standard addresses...) There were bookstores and libraries - but they didn't have backording or Inter Library Loan - and I can't think of one that had Christian books of any kind. Christians read the books their local congregation had: all of them were attributed to apostles or to respected Christian teachers like Paul, all of them spoke of Jesus and divine things and living a better life. All 37+ of them. There was no Bible, doctrine was often a secret fully imparted only after baptism - and, if so, not told even to other Christians. Everyone who knew Jesus personally had been dead a long time: congregations knew what gospels they and their leaders revered. Even the four gospels we have now were not chosen because of a litmus test for historical authenticity or depth of inspiration: they were chosen because 'four' seemed like a good, round number (honest, read Irenaeus) and they had a set of ideas that one of the better-organized branches of Christianity liked. (Manichaeism was equally well organized, but as a form of Christianity it was late of the starting block.)

The familiar four gospels were not chosen at the Council of Nicea. The list of uniformly agreed upon book in the Bible came together slowly, and no one declaration of which books were better settled the matter for all Christendom, all at once. Lists of which books were best were still being produced and distributed after 600 CE. (I find it interesting that reminders of uniformity were necessary that late.)

There was rhetoric about the quality and authenticity about each of these 37+ gospels and about the dubious spiritual quality of groups that read and used different books. As a historian I try to set aside giving more weight to, as historical evidence, the four gospels I am most familiar with, and the early rhetoric (the Church Fathers) of the tradition and culture I grew up in and I try to step back into the world of early Christians and their neighbors. The strange Gospel of Judas was as familiar to some of them as the Gospel of Mark is to me - and the Gospel of Mark was probably as strange to some of them as the Gospel of Judas is to my eyes. If a scholar thinks the four gospels in the New Testament are better historical evidence for Jesus and Christianity's first years, then by all means argue why, as a historian - after a full survey of all our available sources (many of which have never been sifted for what data they may have on either topic.) But do not, even subliminally, confuse "I personally believe in these" or "I am most familiar with these" with "these are the best sources"; not without an argument about why (that includes an equal facility in all the necessary languages, be they Greek or Syriac or Armenian.) This may read like an attack, to some - all I mean is, when researching a public (or a historical) figure all of the evidence must be gathered up: from official biography, to press release, to Wikipedia entry, to tabloid rumor. (And each worked with for due caution for what it is and how it came to be written and from what sources (if any.)) Even a rumor or an urban legend may say something valuable about a famous person's time and culture, even if it has no verifiable facts to offer.

Judas did not write the Gospel of Judas (we do not know who wrote the four gospels in the New Testament, either ... they circulated at first with no titles or authors attached to them.) Whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas did have something to say about why Jesus was important, what he taught, and how he was related to God - and the author also had something to say about how Judas and the other disciples were portrayed and remembered. It will take a lot of time to sort out how this author worked and how their book was passed around and changed; scholars currently think they invented the whole document, in one sitting and that it had a relatively short lifespan. It does help, always, to have another piece of the early Christian puzzle - and it's so new we don't know exactly where to put it.

-Kushana

Note to self:  Talk about Against Heresies (Adv. Haer.), heresiologists, church fathers and Gnosticism, sources and scholarship (Karen King), the New Testament Apocrypha list of lost gospesl and lost early Chrstian books, Book of Allogenes, Letter of Peter to Philip, (First) Apocalypse of James, scribal practice, codocology, history of the book, history of the scroll, cartonage, Homer, Stoicism, the Berlin Codex (Berolinensus 8502),  the Bruce Codex (Brucianus), the Askew Codex (Askewianus), the Book of Jeu, the Pistis Sophia, the Odes of Solomon, and the papyrus-stuffed crocodiles., apocryphal gospels, non-canonical gospels,  the Freer Logion, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Gospel of Mark (Smith), the Gospel of Bartholomew, the Gospel of James, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Apocrypha in Art, Gospel of Nicodemus, Gospel of Peter (Crossan), Gospel of the Hebrews, Gospel of the Egyptains, Gospel of Matthias, Gospel of The Twelve Apostles, Egerton Gospel, P. Oxy. 840, P. Oxy., Oxyrhynchus fragments of the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of the Nazoreans, Gospel of Truth, The Complete Gospels, Hennecke-Schneemelcher.