The Dark Disciple: Judas Iscariot and the Mystery That Has Haunted Christianity for Two Thousand Years (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798196771613)

Who was Judas Iscariot really?

For two thousand years, he has been remembered as the ultimate traitor - the disciple who sold Jesus for thirty silver coins and sealed his fate with a kiss in the darkness of Gethsemane. But behind the familiar story lies one of the greatest mysteries in religious history.

Was Judas driven by greed, political fanaticism, disappointment, or something far more complex? Did he betray Jesus - or did he believe he was forcing the arrival of God's kingdom? Why do the Gospels themselves disagree about his motives and death? And why has every generation, from the early Church to the modern world, reinvented him in a different image?

Blending rigorous historical research with vivid narrative storytelling, The Dark Disciple takes readers deep into the turbulent world of first-century Judea: a land under Roman occupation, filled with revolutionary hopes, apocalyptic expectations, and fierce struggles over faith, power, and identity. Drawing on the New Testament, apocryphal gospels, Church Fathers, and modern scholarship, this book explores Judas not as a flat villain, but as one of the most tragic and psychologically complex figures in the history of Christianity.

A journey through betrayal, politics, theology, and myth, The Dark Disciple challenges everything we think we know about the man whose name became a curse.