This beautifully presented book purports to be a "gospel' written by Benjamin Iscariot, the son of Judas Iscariot, and seeks to set the record straight about Judas' involvement with Jesus Christ.
As it turns out, Judas was a faithful disciple of Jesus who believed for a while that Jesus was indeed the promised Messiah of Israel. As the ministry of Jesus progresses it becomes clear to Judas that Jesus is a prophet, a man of God certainly, but not the promised Messiah and certainly not divine.
Judas' participation in the death of Jesus is a tragic accident as Judas is fooled by a Scribe into betraying Jesus. In fact, Judas' intention all along was to save a "man of God' from a tragic and unnecessary death. Amidst rumours of a resurrection, Judas retires to the Qumran community where he helps to build a library of scrolls beside the Dead Sea. Eventually Judas is arrested by the Romans and is crucified. Fortunately, he has a last meeting with his son, where the documents that form the basis of this "gospel' are recorded.
This "gospel' is the result of a collaboration between a storyteller and a scholar. The storyteller, Jeffrey Archer, is well known for his best selling novels. The scholar is the Australian Jesuit, Frank Moloney. The press release accompanying the review copy tells of their meeting at a restaurant named (ironically?) the Two Thieves in Rome where it was agreed that there must be nothing written that couldn't have happened. In Moloney's words, "Not everything in this book can be regarded as probable. But everything must be possible.'
Perhaps this outline is enough for readers to judge for themselves the value in spending their time reading this work. But there is more going on here than a simple piece of historical imagination. While there is no question that this is a work of fiction, it implicitly claims to be more. Along with books like The Da Vinci Code, the effects of such blurring of the lines between fiction and non-fiction for people's understanding of the Christian faith can be readily seen.
The book itself is presented in A5 format, with gilt-edged pages, faux-leather cover, red letter text interspersed and even a ribbon page marker. At 22,000 words it is comparable in length to the canonical Gospels. In short it looks and feels like a Bible or at least a Bible portion. The red letters indicate places where the Biblical text has either been quoted or (more often it seems) paraphrased. Throughout the book are a series of markers indicating endnotes that record historical and other scholarly reflections on various aspects of the text.
Archer attempts to attain a biblical style of prose, which appears to be in his mind plodding and wooden; would that one of the evangelists had been invited to edit with their flair for narrative. Overall, the style is uneven with narrative occasionally giving way to mini-lectures on aspects of first century religion and culture that jar. The additions and paraphrases of the biblical material are uneven. I had a particular problem with the statement of John the Baptist in John 1 that Jesus was the "Lamb of God' being consistently rendered as "a man of God'.
Judas is, of course, an enigmatic and fascinating character. His appearances in the New Testament are fleeting and tragic. There is little reflection on the motivation for his actions and the horror of the magnitude of his betrayal of Jesus has its own fascination. The account of his death is also a puzzle, prompting questions about the compatibility of the various Biblical accounts. There is plenty here to work with and the delving into Judas' motivation and thought processes is interesting in its own way.
Many readers will be recalling the musical Jesus Christ Superstar and his starring role there. There have also been a series of more recent scholarly attempts to probe the Judas stories and even to rehabilitate his reputation. Most of these studies are doomed to be read by those "in the field'. The difference with this volume is that it is plainly pitched at the popular market. Again in the press package, Francis Moloney speaks of his delight in being able to make more widely available the fruits of contemporary biblical scholarship.
Herein lies the problem.
The narrative itself is a kind of extended reflection on the process that some see occurred in writing the canonical gospels. Bits and pieces of the canonical Gospels are interweaved with the reminisces of Judas, relocated and blended into a coherent eyewitness narrative. Through Judas, the story does convey well how difficult the outrageous claims of Jesus must have sounded to first century ears, especially his apparent consciousness of being the Messiah of Israel who would die.
One could argue that this is Judas' account and the possibility that there is another "true' story to be told, especially in regard to the resurrection, is left open. However, the overall effect of the book is to cast doubt on the reliability of the canonical Gospel narratives. This is then reinforced in the accompanying endnotes. These are a mix of interesting historical detail and the "assured results of biblical scholarship'.
We are told for example that no serious New Testament scholar accepts that Judas was paid 30 pieces of silver. We are also told that Jesus never walked on water or changed water into wine. All of these stories are early church inventions either to justify the developing understanding in the early church that Jesus was the Christ and Son of God, or to further blacken Judas' name.
The argumentation for these claims feels a little like "trust me I am a world-class scholar and there is a majority with me'. This is at least disingenuous as Professor Moloney will be well aware of scholars who do take the biblical accounts at face value, are aware of the issues they pose and will maintain that they are trustworthy accounts, on good historical grounds.
Written for a generation for whom just about anything is possible, the accumulated weight of presentation, style and scholarly apparatus moves the narrative into the realm of the probable, with the attendant damage done to trust in the reliability of the biblical accounts and therefore to trust in the Jesus Christ of the canonical Gospels.
I suppose their hope is that reading this work might drive some back to the biblical Gospels for the "real story' with no reason to take seriously the historical claims of those texts, having been inoculated by the footnotes. It is hard to see this doing anything other than confirming existing prejudices: biblical scholarship appears to destroy Christian faith on the one hand; there is not much reliable in the New Testament accounts on the other; and whatever opinion you have about Jeffrey Archer as a writer in the middle.
In this "gospel' Judas cannot believe what Jesus appears to be claiming in word and deed. His claims and actions are just so counter-cultural and without precedent. And there, it appears, is the problem for the storyteller and the theologian as well. But what if these claims were to be judged on the basis of reading not one but four accounts based in eyewitness testimony? And what if they were true? Now there would be a story worth telling and reading.
