Judas
The troubling history of the renegade apostle
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
In this fascinating historical and cultural biography, writer and broadcaster Peter Stanford deconstructs that most vilified of Bible characters: Judas Iscariot, who famously betrayed Jesus with a kiss. Beginning with the gospel accounts, Peter explores two thousand years of cultural and theological history to investigate how the very name Judas came to be synonymous with betrayal and, ultimately, human evil.
But as Peter points out, there has long been a counter-current of thought that suggests that Judas might in fact have been victim of a terrible injustice: central to Jesus' mission was his death and resurrection, and for there to have been a death, there had to be a betrayal. This thankless role fell to Judas; should we in fact be grateful to him for his role in the divine drama of salvation? 'You'll have to decide,' as Bob Dylan sang in the sixties, 'Whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side'.
An essential but doomed character in the Passion narrative, and thus the entire story of Christianity, Judas and the betrayal he symbolises continue to play out in much larger cultural histories, speaking as he does to our deepest fears about friendship, betrayal and the problem of evil.
Judas: the ultimate traitor, or the ultimate scapegoat? This is a compelling portrait of Christianity's most troubling and mysterious character.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In April 2006, scholars announced the discovery of the Gospel of Judas to great fanfare, though the fragmentary text, likely written almost 200 years after Judas Iscariot's death, shed little light on the most vilified of Jesus's followers. In this pedestrian study, Stanford (The Legend of Pope Joan) sheds scant new light on Judas, simply retracing older scholarship on the disciple in order to answer questions about Judas's name's association with betrayal and about whether or not he was an essential part of God's scheme of enacting Jesus's death and resurrection. Stanford moves through the canonical gospels of Mark and Matthew, uncovering the passages in which the writers establish Judas's part in Jesus's story. Stanford then describes medieval images of Judas that present him as Satan's tool, further cementing his reputation as an opponent of Jesus and, later, the Church. Other books, including Reynolds Price's portrait of Judas in A Serious Way of Wondering: The Ethics of Jesus Imagined, provide a more imaginative and complex view of the disciple. Stanford's newest book, unfortunately, doesn't rise above a superficial glance.
