Judas is hardly mentioned in the Bible. There are even two versions of his death. Essentially, he is a cipher for all things bad rather than a person.
But what if his real role was altogether more significant? What if he was nothing less than the writer of the earliest gospel? And what if fragments of the manuscript were found in what is now Iraq, on the eve of the Western invasion in 2003?
There are two distinct narrative voices in the novel, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST JUDAS. One is a first-person account of Judas’ life from childhood to dotage. It tells of his boyhood friendship with Jesus, of his difficult younger days, how he becomes a disciple of first John the Baptist and then Jesus and finally ends up as a rich merchant in Mesopotamia. It is there he writes the first gospel.
The other voice belongs to Dr Murray Watkins, a biblical scholar and finder of ‘the Judas Texts’ in early 21st Century Iraq, shortly before the invasion of that country. Through a series of “essays” he tells of the finding of the texts, of what they tell us and of the significance of this find.
