Judas and the Gospel of Jesus: Have We Missed the Truth about Christianity?
FRONT FLAP I am writing this little book to make three points. First, this new "Gospel of Judas," while a spectacularly interesting archaeological find, tells us nothing about the real Jesus, or for that matter the real Judas. In particular, it doesn't (as some have claimed) "rehabilitate" Judas over against either the charges laid against him in the New Testament or the anti-Jewish use that was made of the Judas tradition in the Middle Ages. Second, the enthusiasm for this new "gospel" lays bare the real agenda which has been driving both what we might call the scholarly "Quest for an Alternative Jesus" and also the popular eagerness for such sensational material that we find in books like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Third, the specific teaching of the "Gospel of Judas" only serves to highlight certain features about first-century Christianity that need to be drawn out more fully than is sometimes done.  BACK FLAP Tom Wright is the bishop of Durham in the Church of England. Recently named by Christianity Today as one of the top five theologians in the world, Wright has taught New Testament studies for twenty years at Cambridge, Oxford, and McGill universities. He is the author of The Original Jesus, What Saint Paul Really Said, and The Challenge of Jesus.