Monday, January 08, 2007
Gospel of Judas books galore
In On Not Being a Sausage Deirdre Good has a useful round-up on the New Books on the Gospel of Judas and it is a surprising number. She mentions the extraodinary news that broke at the weekend in The Sunday Times that Jeffrey Archer has a book due out on Judas, co-written with Frank Moloney, this March (Archer writes Gospel of Judas), already mentioned by Jim Davila on Paleojudaica. I first heard of the story on Andrew Marr's Sunday AM on BBC1. What interested me was the general surprise with which Marr and Ann Leslie greeted the idea of rehabilitating Judas, a useful reminder that however much we might think that the media has been saturated with stories about Judas over the last year or so, that is a pretty jaundiced, religion students' perspective. It had clearly completely passed by educated and intelligent readers like Marr, and required a recognisable tag like "Jeffrey Archer" to deem it noticeable.
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2 comments:
Thanks for the mention, Mark! My point was also to note how many publishers are jumping on the bandwagon of Judas. Its going to be fascinating to see how many people actually buy these books.
Supposing the newly-published fragment was from the 'Gospel of Nicodemus' or something, the public interest would be only 1% of what it has been. The ideology which the public is longing to have confirmed (and some of the less scrupulous who should and do know better have been encouraging them in this) is that Judas is much more interesting because he is a bad guy and anyway he (like Satan) has had a bad press.
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