JUDAS, THE HERO At the heart of Jesus’ delusion was his obsessive desire to offer himself as a sacrifice so his ‘Father’ would bring an end to the world with the Day of Judgement. He could not accomplish this alone. So he chose his favourite, the disciple he had given charge of the groups funds: Judas Iscariot, the man judged by history as the quintessential traitor to assist him. History is wrong. They worked hand in glove. A gnostic fragment discovered in 1972 and publicly revealed in 2005, The Gospel of Judas supports this view. But the real story of the partnership between Jesus and Judas is actually contained in the New Testament itself and is revealed with blinding clarity in historian and biographer, Robert Macklin’s pioneering work, THE JESUS DELUSION. ‘Robert Macklin digs into the texts to come up with a complex, indignant and physically unattractive human being who will disturb today’s Fundamentalists almost as much as Jesus upset his fellow Rabbis.’ Phillip Adams