Ours is an age of alternative versions. Rewritings of classic narratives are increasingly common in modern fiction, including reworkings of scripture. Simon Mawer’s The Gospel of Judas used the discovery of an ancient scroll as the springboard for a thriller; David Maine’s The Preservationist revisited the legend of Noah. CK Stead’s novel My Name Was Judas is a subtly potent revisionist account of the life and death of Jesus.

The narrator, now 70, is known to the world as a Greek trader, Idas of Sidon, but for 30 years he was Judas of Keraiyot, a friend and follower of Jesus. Wryly reflecting on his earlier existence, he entirely contradicts the accounts of his life put out by the sect now called Christian. First, and most obviously, he is not dead: he neither hanged himself on a fig tree nor fell on a ploughshare in a field that became barren. A friend of Jesus since early childhood, he stuck by him despite his doubts, never betrayed him, and took no bribes: he used the 30 pieces of silver to make bookings at Passover. Dismissing the demonised picture of himself, he also repudiates the sacred image of Jesus. A lifelong sceptic, he cannot accept that Jesus was divine or had supernatural powers. Jesus’s “miracles” were purely metaphorical but, carried away by his own eloquence, he came to believe he was the promised Messiah. Convinced he would rise from the dead, he courted arrest and execution but died in apparent despair.

Confronted by this subversive witness, some readers might wonder if Judas will emerge as an unreliable narrator, his apparent rationality merely a cover for malice and misperception. On that reading he would still be a betrayer, but also a self-deluder. The text, though, does not support such a view. Judas seems a genuinely civilised man, a poet, an acute observer of nature, a loving husband and loyal friend. True, he relishes food and drink, enjoys the theatre, and wishes to live. But all this makes him attractively human. So, too, does his distaste for the rhetoric of vengeance, the notion of “some ultimate balancing out of brutalities”. His scepticism arises naturally from his analytical temperament. Hearing the increasingly spectacular stories circulated by the Jesus sect, he subjects them to reason and they all unravel. Did Jesus really feed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fishes? “Was the fish served raw?” Judas wonders. “Was there nothing to drink?” And what of the reported 12 baskets of leftovers — who had brought them and for what purpose? The miracle, it’s suggested, was really one of sharing: a small crowd was inspired to share its sparse supplies and, wonderfully, there turned out to be enough for all. The marriage feast at Cana, the raising of Lazarus and numerous other New Testament stories are similarly demystified.

Judas’s version is seldom dramatic: it does not ignore or flamboyantly invert the established gospel narratives (Jesus is no terrorist or madman or philanderer). Instead, while cleaving to their principal events, it quietly reconfigures them, converting miracle literature into something like realist fiction. This would be congenial to Stead (whose first initial, incidentally, stands for Christian, though he goes by his second name, Karlson). An upholder of realism, Stead has stated: “I would like, where possible, to be understood” — a sentiment attributed here to Judas, who dislikes the opacity of the parables. Yet despite Stead’s clear admiration for Judas, the novel’s hero is still Jesus, a spellbinding orator, charismatic performer and figure of compelling conviction. Judas, for all his humane virtues, his decency and respect for fact, is comparatively unstriking. Committed to “common sense and charity”, he acknowledges that these are not qualities designed to convert or inspire. They “ just happen”, he sadly concludes, “to be the hardest principles to live by”.

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