Customer Reviews
Scapegoat? - By: Paul de Lappe, 30 Sep 2008 
Idas the Greek gives us the story of his life. We come to know he is actuallly the Judas so reviled in the Gospels. Idas welcomes a blind traveller Ptolemy & his retinue. He keeps his true identity concealed from Ptolemy (his old friend Bartholomew by any other name, & a man who has his own secrets) in order to debate the Christian stories with him.
I'll say no more, but this is a very easy read, with a very intriguing "What If...?" proposition at its heart. Some may find the theories controversial but i would recommend this to anyone with even a passing interest in the subject matter.
A secular humanist take on the Gospels - By: Ralph Blumenau, 11 Mar 2008 This take on Judas Iscariot (here Judas of Kerayot) begins intriguingly with him now callling himself Idas of Sidon, now aged seventy & being a follower of Greek rationalist thought. He tells us of the friendship between him & Jesus from the time when they were six or seven years old. Stead is wonderfully inventive & utterly credible about their childhood together & about what they experienced of the Roman occupation of their land. After their adolescence, Judas lost touch for a few years with Jesus, who had gone to study with the Essenes at Qumran. The forty days he spent in the wilderness were part of the apprenticeship the Essenes imposed on a candidate who wanted to become a full member of the community: he met the test but refused to join, having found in the wilderness his mission to preach to the world. When he returns to Nazareth, Judas, grief-stricken by the loss of his young wife & solaced by Jesus, follows him - & from that point onwards we compare this Judas' account with the one given in the Gospels. For a while, as Jesus works as a healer, it beautifully embroiders on the Gospel story. Those he healed included Lazarus, whose cure was described metaphoricallly as being raised from the dead. Other `miracles' recounted in the Gospels, like walking on water, are also the result of metaphors being transformed in the telling into literal events.
Graduallly Judas' account diverges increasingly from that of the Gospels, in fact, feeling & interpretation. Jesus is shown as positively hostile to his mother, whose mere presence is enough to turn him from preaching peace & harmony to saying that he brought not only peace but the sword. Mary Magdalen is conflated with the unnamed sinner who washed Jesus' feet. Quarrels & competition between the disciples became part of their daily lives, & Judas was especiallly resented because he showed that he did not surrender so entirely to Jesus' charisma. His rational mind did not much care for Jesus' parables. The other disciples already regarded as a betrayal his lack of total belief in the claims Jesus was now making. Judas feels increasingly uneasy at Jesus' increasing militancy, at his threats that fire & brimstone would consume unbelievers, at his insistence that salvation could come only through him. Judas began to worry about Jesus' sanity, and, with the terrible example of the death of John the Baptist before him, he was worried about the danger to which Jesus was exposing himself & his followers.
In Judas' account of the Last Supper, there is no reference to Jesus pronouncing that one of the disciples would betray him; & in the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane there is nothing that could suggest that Judas could have betrayed Jesus to the Romans.
And there is an ingenious explanation for the empty tomb.
Judas was present at the foot of the Cross. It was the disciples who fled who invented the various stories of Judas' guilt & disgusting end. The Judas who lived to hear the news of the destruction of the Temple by the Romans mourns for Jerusalem & for the Jewish people; but if ever he had any faith in God, he has long since lost it. He does not, however, need God to believe in the compassionate & humanistic teaching that Jesus preached at the beginning of his mission, before he preached hellfire & came to believe in himself as the Son of God. A secular humanist will certainly find this beautifully written story about Jesus & Judas more acceptable & more credible than the Gospels.
A surprising read - By: SJSmith, 18 Jan 2008 
I picked this book up by chance unsure whether I would like it. I did. In fact I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's short enough to read in one sitting & I felt this did it more justice. When I had finished it I spent the rest of the evening reflecting on what I knew about Judas & Jesus & it does through different points up for debate.
As the book says "we alll know the story of Jesus told by Matthew, Mark, Luke & John, but what about the version according to Judas?" You have to imagine that Judas has never died, in fact that was a big part of the story as told by Gospels & Judas is telling his tale in his seventies. It is an interesting tale as well. I found it sad & moving as well as being enriching. I opened the covers with scepticism expecting to not enjoy it & no matter how hard I tried I didn't succeed. It is well written & extremely engrossing. You don't have to be a believer in Jesus to enjoy the novel as everyone of that faith, practising or otherwise, knows his story.
Choose it, you might be surprised.
A surprising read - By: SJSmith, 18 Jan 2008 I picked this book up by chance unsure whether I would like it. I did. In fact I thoroughly enjoyed it to the point of 4.5 stars. It's short enough to read in one sitting & I felt this did it more justice. When I had finished it I spent the rest of the evening reflecting on what I knew about Judas & Jesus & it does through different points up for debate.
As the book says "we alll know the story of Jesus told by Matthew, Mark, Luke & John, but what about the version according to Judas?" You have to imagine that Judas has never died, in fact that was a big part of the story as told by Gospels & Judas is telling his tale in his seventies. It is an interesting tale as well. I found it sad & moving as well as being enriching. I opened the covers with scepticism expecting to not enjoy it & no matter how hard I tried I didn't succeed. It is well written & extremely engrossing. You don't have to be a believer in Jesus to enjoy the novel as everyone of that faith, practising or otherwise, knows his story.
Choose it, you might be surprised.
A gripping and subtle challenge - By: K Mansfield, 04 Jan 2007 This book is beautifully written, utterly engaging & brilliantly clever. The challlenge it presents to Christianity is fascinating in its subtlety and, as a previous reviwer said, stealthy subversiveness. One one level a gripping page-turner & on another a deep, reflective & gentle theological argument. It should be on every thinking person's reading list & every school syllabus.
