THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JUDAS by Benjamin Iscariot, recounted by Jeffrey Archer with Professor J Moloney

Macmillan £9.99

So, Lord Archer, what first led you to write a vindication of a man who has been “branded a traitor, a thief and a man willing to accept bribes”?

Of course, it may be quite unfair to suggest that his lordship was driven to concoct this “gospel” (and, incredibly, to persuade a Vatican theologian and Desmond Tutu to sign up to it) by a pathological need to project his private sense of grievance onto a larger stage. It is just as possible that he was driven by a purer motive — the desire to relieve a gullible public of as much money as possible.

The success of The Da Vinci Code has shown that there are big bucks to be had in blurring fact and fiction for the benefit of a public whose brains have been turned to mush by conspiracy theories. This is territory that Lord Archer of Chutzpah was born for, and in the pre-launch publicity he has played the part of snake-oil salesman to perfection, promising “revelations” that will shed remarkable new light on the life of Jesus.

The main “revelation” is that Judas did not betray Jesus, or if he did (Archer and his collaborator are confusing on this crucial point) it was not for money, but out of political conviction, because he realised Jesus was not going to lead a Jewish uprising against the Romans. Never mind that this claim is pure fiction. The important thing is that if it is surrounded by enough authentic material (surely only Archer would have the nerve to lift large chunks from the Gospels and then plaster his copyright over the result) people will be bamboozled for long enough to fork out their cash.

From Borges to Bulgakov, writers have been fascinated by the moral and theological ambiguities of Judas. (From one perspective could he not be said to be the hero of the Gospels, being the agent of Jesus’s redemptive destiny?) And within the last couple of years a fascinating second-century gnostic text, The Gospel of Judas, has come to light which casts a genuinely historical and subversive light on the significance of Christ’s crucifixion.

But all this is beyond Archer, whose talent for the mind-numbing cliché (“Israel was facing its moment of truth”) is as unerring here as in his novels. In fact, the picture he presents of Judas fits well within the old Christian tradition that sees him as the exemplum of the Jews’ betrayal of Christ. As Professor J Maloney, Archer’s collaborator from the Vatican, has summed it up: “Judas was disenchanted with Jesus. He is a hardline Jew who believed he should restore the throne of David by military means.” In emphasising Judas’s Jewishness, Archer’s simple commercial nous has joined hands with something darker and altogther less innocent.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £9.49 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist