BRITAIN:Judas Iscariot was not the betrayer but the betrayed. He schemed to save Christ from being killed and did not commit suicide but lived to old age.
Those are some of the main tenets of a new book, The Gospel According to Judas, written by British novelist Jeffery Archer.
The book, presented as a gospel written by Judas's son, Benjamin Iscariot, an imaginary character, is bound to spark controversy even though Archer wrote it with a world-class Bible expert who once worked for Pope Benedict. "I thought this would not be credible if it were a Jeffrey Archer novel," he said.
"I wanted it to be a gospel, I wanted it to look like a gospel, I wanted it to be in verse, but most of all I wanted it to have credible scholarship."
Indeed, the 22,000-word book, which Archer calls "fiction backed up by scholarly research", looks, reads and feels like a gospel and does not have the authors' name on the cover. It is written in 25 short chapters, each with numbered verses.
He wrote it with Fr Francis J Moloney, who was a member of the Vatican's international theological commission for 18 years and once worked with the current pope when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
It blends real verses and phrases from the four traditional gospels with biblical events which the authors speculate could have been seen by Judas.
The thrust of it is that Judas loved Jesus, believed he was sent by God, but that he was not the Messiah. He loved him so much he wanted to save him from "unnecessary death". So, the Archer-Maloney version goes, Judas conspired with a scribe or Hebrew teacher who said he wanted to save Jesus and whisk him to safety in Galilee. But the scribe was a double agent who was working for Jerusalem's Jewish elders and handed Jesus over to be killed.
The authors, who wanted to write a work in which "not everything was probable but everything was possible", are braced for controversy, something to which Archer is no stranger.
A millionaire author whose thrillers have sold 125 million copies, he was convicted for perjury and perverting the course of justice and jailed in 2001 after lying in a libel trial against a newspaper which said he had had sex with a prostitute.