Judas: A Biography

Susan Gubar

Retail Price: $27.95 CenturyOne Price: $19.00 You Save: $8.95 (32%) Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours. Format: Hardcover, 453pp. ISBN: 9780393064834 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co. Pub. Date: March 30, 2009 Book Information: Description Reviews About the Author Table of Contents Customer Reviews Find Similar Books Average Customer Review:

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In this expansive cultural biography of Judas, prominent scholar Susan Gubar explores the meaning of Jesus- betrayer over twenty centuries.Who was Judas Iscariot and why did he betray Jesus? Despite the recent recovery of a Gnostic Gospel bearing his name, the centrality of the twelfth apostle has gone largely ignored. Yet, because of gaps and incongruities in his appearance in the Bible, artists throughout the ages have returned to this man, whose treacherous act inaugurates Jesus' death and resurrection.In this comprehensive, interdisciplinary work, Susan Gubar explains that a Jewish Judas was deployed to differentiate Judaism from emergent Christianity and that he therefore reflects ambivalence about a composite Judeo-Christianity as well as changing attitudes toward the body, blood, and money; greed and hypocrisy; suicide and repentance; homosexuality and divinity.

Over twenty centuries, a figure of disgrace turns into a dignitary. Gubar shows how Jesus' most notorious disciple-known for a kiss-has provoked profound reflections on the problem of evil that still resonate today.

A most readable account of the story of the New Testament’s arch-villain and his history over the past 2000 years, Susan Gubar’s Judas links Christian anti-Semitism with Christianity’s attempt to grapple with transcendent evil. The recent discovery of the ancient Gospel of Judas makes Gubar’s book a MUST READ.

—Sander Gilma

If Judas had not existed, God would have had to invent him. The divine script called for betrayal with a kiss, and someone had to be cast in that role. Judas, the intimate friend of the Son, became thus the indispensable collaborator of the Father and a figure of endlessly inviting ambivalence for the Western imagination. Susan Gubar has assembled a tour-de-force collection of Judas-art and Judas-literature and turned it into a Judas biography full of thought, heart, and fascination.

—Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography

Judas is a dark journey through the murderousness of Christian Anti-Semitism, culminating in the mass slaughter of more than a and their associated European butchers. Lucid, study is close to definitive on the fictive figure of Judas.

—Harold Bloom

Susan Gubar (Ph.D. University of Iowa) is a Distinguished Professor at Indiana University, where she has won numerous teaching awards, most recently the Faculty Mentor Award from the Indiana University Graduate and Professional Student Organization. In addition to her critical collaboration with Sandra Gilbert, she is the author of Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (1997), Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (2000), Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (2003), and Rooms of Our Own (2006), and editor of the first annotated edition of Woolf's A Room of One's Own (2005).