The National Geographic Society announced the restored text on 6 April 2006, with an edition by Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer and Gregor Wurst and commentary by Bart Ehrman, and a documentary days later. The presentation was that the text portrayed Judas as the one disciple who understood, chosen to perform a necessary act and set apart for the holy generation. That framing travelled worldwide within days.
April DeConick of Rice University challenged it in 2007, in a book and a New York Times piece, on textual grounds. Where the edition rendered a Greek loanword as "spirit", she argued that in this literature daimon means demon, and that Judas is being called one. Where the edition had Judas set apart for the holy generation, she read the text as separating him from it. Where it had Jesus tell Judas he would ascend to that generation, she read a negative in the damaged line: that he would not. And the description of Judas as the thirteenth she took not as an honour but as a mark of the thirteenth realm, the domain of the world-ruler.
Specialists in Sethian literature, among them Louis Painchaud, John Turner and Einar Thomassen, reached similar conclusions independently. The National Geographic editors replied that the disputed points were flagged in the footnotes of both editions, and the 2007 critical edition altered some renderings, leaving daimon untranslated. Meyer continued to defend a qualified positive reading. The net position now is that the text is a polemic against the apostolic church rather than a rehabilitation of Judas. Even on the harsher reading he is not the villain of the canonical accounts; he is an insider who knows the truth, performs the act that frees Jesus from the body, and is damned by it.
Irenaeus, writing around 180, describes a group who produced a fictitious history called the Gospel of Judas, holding that Judas alone knew the truth. He does not call them Cainites; that label comes from later heresiologists. Whether the work he had heard of is the work in Codex Tchacos cannot be shown, and the surviving text does not venerate Cain. The connection is plausible and usually assumed, but it is an assumption.