The Gospel according to Judas
In love and in war everything is allowed: to love and to betray. And this is obviously also true of faith.
Europe has weathered both the World War and the Cold War and is rapidly moving towards the millennium, which in history has always moved the stagnant orders. However, the Catholic clergyman Leo Newman was by then no longer a shining representative of the dogmas of his native Rome. He has gone through a consuming love affair with a married woman who was unavailable to him not only because of his priestly status, and his relationship with the faith is now rather lukewarm. Even in the media close to the Vatican, Leo's "apostasy" is discussed, even though his literary creator Simon Mawer attests that he found and still finds more Christian grace for the errant Mary Magdalene than his episcopal representatives. In fact, everything indicates that the Holy Church itself has an idea to whom it would be appropriate to entrust a certain highly tricky scientific mission.
When Leo, as a specialist in ancient Greek, is called to examine the linguistic authenticity of a portion of the papyri from En-Mor on the Dead Sea, probably dating from the first century AD, he makes a stunning discovery. As the fifth and oldest gospel of Jesus' life, it was probably written by a renegade from the apostolic company, Judas Iscariot, who betrayed his teacher before his crucifixion. In particular, the preview of Christ's resurrection included in the scrolls would have shaken the convictions of hundreds of millions of believers. And so the hero is faced not only with the question of whether to tell the world at all, but also learns a surprising truth about himself in the course of his investigation...
The fifth novel by the British author of The Glass Room or Prague Spring has a distinctly Czech, or more precisely Moravian, trace. In his imaginary manuscript for the third millennium - originally published on January 1, 2000 - Mawer shows that far from everything on which we base our starting points in life is true.
They wrote about the book:
The groping priest, whose faith took hold in the century after Nietzsche, is a very familiar figure in Western literature. The novelist Simon Mawer nevertheless found a refreshing and eloquent depiction of her.
- The Atlantic
The poetic language exquisitely captures the extent to which the clairvoyance of the Vatican is at odds with the burning passions of ancient Jerusalem, which remains a true holy city. In Pilgrimage to the Roots, [the author's] saga does not offer an easy reading journey, but it takes us through remarkable turns of love and faith.
- Daily Express
A religious mystery, a love affair, and an identity mystery all mixed into an amalgam make for a delightfully suspenseful read.
- Kirkus Reviews
Simon Mawer
(1948-2025) After studying zoology at Oxford, the British novelist and world traveler made a living as a biology teacher in England, Cyprus and Malta, which is also reflected in his writing. Since 1979 he has lived permanently in Rome. His literary debut, Chimera, was not published until he was in his early forties, when he was awarded the McKitterick Prize for the best debut novel in the island. The high expectations were fulfilled by the exquisite ballad Mendel's Dwarf, which recalls the legacy of the naturalist Johann Gregor Mendel partly in Brno realities. It was followed by the blasphemous novel The Gospel According to Judas, which even has a Moravian heroine, and The Fall. A writer who likes to use motifs from our valleys and basins in his work, he achieved his greatest success with the Czech public with his prose novel The Glass Room (nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2009) about the Brno Villa Tugendhat, which was also the basis for the film of the same name (directed by Julius Ševčík, 2019) with a top-notch cast. Mawer returned to the modern history of our state in his novel Prague Spring (2018). His World War II espionage diptych The Girl Who Fell from Heaven and The Ropewalker were also published in Czech not only in books but also in our audio versions, as well as his literary testament Anatomy of a Family (English 2022).
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| Code: | AK1I220 |