Judas

November 9, 2015
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.

October 15, 2015
A biography of one of the most reviled men in history, a perpetual scapegoat representing the deepest root of anti-Semitism and, in medieval times, usury. Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph senior features writer Stanford (Catholicism: A Complete Introduction, 2015, etc.) sees Judas at the heart of the embattled early church. The Pauline believers thought Christianity was a new religion altogether, led by St. Paul's writings. Then there were those who felt this doctrine was a new part of the Jewish religion. The latter was reawakened with the 2006 National Geographic film revealing the Gospel of Judas. This gospel was written in Greek at the end of the second century long after the synoptic and more historically reliable Gospels of Matthew, Luke, Mark, and John. Judas' gospel was written about Jesus as seen by him in the last three days of his life, adding nothing to detail or defend Judas' life. While the author does not give many details of the gospel, Jesus comes across as more human than divine. He is short-tempered and generally disagreeable, and he mocks his inner circle and dismisses the Eucharist. In the late fourth century, Pauline orthodoxy really began to grow, and the beliefs and texts of the Gnostics and Judas were dismissed and destroyed. The author argues that the Gospels should be taken seriously, but not literally, accepting Judas as a true figure rather than a manufactured scapegoat. He sees the Judas of the four Gospels as too inconsistent, too human, and too unpredictable to be a mere device. There are still those who wonder whether Judas was doomed or damned. Was he truly a money-grabbing traitor, or was he part of the entire divine plan? A straightforward biography that thankfully avoids preaching. Readers curious about Judas' broad effect on world history will welcome this book.

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January 1, 2016

Religious journalist and author Stanford (The Devil: A Biography) recounts the story of Judas Iscariot (d. 30), the disciple who famously betrayed Jesus, and made Jesus's death on the cross inevitable. Stanford engages the ancient paradox. While Judas is a hated figure, widely depicted as suffering the torments of the damned forever, his betrayal of Jesus was an unfortunate necessity, says the author, an instrument in Jesus's world-saving and self-sacrificing death. Stanford writes with fluency and intelligence; his text is enlivened by alphabetical pullouts featuring smaller cultural oddities and traditions surrounding Judas. VERDICT A well-written supplement to Suban Gubar's Judas: A Biography, Stanford's scholarly account is useful for his account of Judas in popular music, and his informative appendixes.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2015
In medieval lore, Judas Iscariot committed suicide before his Lord died on the cross so that he could penitently await the Master's spirit on the threshold of the afterlife, there to plead forgiveness for having betrayed Him. For Stanford, this surprising addition to the scriptural account of Judas serves as but one thread in a complexoften contradictorytapestry of narratives focusing on the notorious apostle. Stretching from 22 mentions of Judas in the New Testament to C. K. Stead's twenty-first-century novel My Name Was Judas, that tapestry presents strikingly diverse images of an enigmatic figure: son of perdition in the Gospel of John, damned soul in Dante's Inferno, gnostic hero in heretical scripture, anti-Semitic caricature in medieval passion plays, misunderstood revolutionary in Enlightenment and Romantic thought, symbol of Jewish perfidy in Nazi propaganda, conscience-driven loner in Jesus Christ Superstar. A fiend in pious centuries, Judas transforms into Everyman in secular times. Offering no definitive resolution of the contrary perspectives, Stanford embraces Judas' ambiguity as his most irresistibly appealing characteristic.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)