Philosophy & Religion

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Friday, May 29, 2009

Judas : a biography

by Susan Gubar. Gubar (English, Indiana Univ.), whose The Madwoman in the Attic, coauthored with Sandra M. Gilbert, changed the landscape of literary and feminist studies when published in 1979, applies her considerable powers to the embattled figure of the apostle who betrayed Jesus. Gubar's approach sidesteps questions of religious truth to focus on the figure of Judas as a mirror for the ever-shifting cultures that used him as a symbol of everything from evil to love to heroism. She brings her penetrating analysis to the dozens of poets, writers, artists, theologians, mystics, and filmmakers who have expressed our ambivalent fascination with Judas. As Gubar reminds us, Judas, as an unredeemed and guilty Jew, gave strength to ancient and modern anti-Semitism, up to and including the nightmare of the Holocaust, while the storm of excited controversy that erupted first around Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and then the rediscovery of the "lost" Gospel of Judas demonstrates our continuing hunger for new ideas about one of our oldest shared stories. An exhaustive, beautifully written cultural history of our favorite wrongdoer, Gubar's work is an immensely rewarding and crucially important book. Highly recommended. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

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