“Judas didn’t start out a monster. The earliest extant biblical writings don’t mention him at all (but then they don’t mention the resurrection either). Paul doesn’t even seem to have heard of him, writing only that Jesus ‘was betrayed’.” Yet over the course of 2000 years, Judas has been portrayed as “the anomalous apostle, the treacherous pariah, the ‘homophilic’ kisser of Christ, the rash Zealot and the unhappy fall guy for the salvation of mankind” – and, most harmfully, as “the monstrous, anti-Semitic totem figure of the Judas-Jew.”