The Gospel According to Judas Iscariot, 3rd Revised Edition, 917 Pages, Author: Joseph M. Luguya, Published March 2007, Original Books Imprint {Inspired by the Devil Series, by Joseph M. Luguya}.
The Devil professes the Roman Catholic faith! That well kept secret of the Evil One ceases to be a secret when Christian Mjomba, a member of the seminary brotherhood, is tempted to do the unthinkable. He is tempted to use the Evil One as his mouthpiece for expounding on some of the most abstruse doctrines of the Church and turn in a winning theology thesis thereby, and he falls for the bait!
The Gospel According to Judas Iscariot is a story about one man’s journey to hell and back. It is also about the devil’s desire to have his due.
Christian Mjomba, a Catholic seminarian who has been nicknamed “Judas Iscariot” by his fellow seminarians because of his liberal views, is a “prisoner of his own imagination”; and he thinks he can do with a helping hand from Old Scratch of all people. He believes that he can employ the Ruler of the Underworld as his mouthpiece for enunciating the dogmas of the Church, and be able in that way to turn in a winning thesis!
The fact is that, in selecting the topic for his theological thesis, Mjomba was influenced by one thing above all, namely the role that is traditionally played by the so-called Devil’s Advocate in the canonization process in Rome. Mjomba reasons that if it is fine for a cardinal – a Prince of the Church – to step in the shoes of Diabolos and not merely play-act, but represent the Prince of Darkness in a matter of such gravity as the canonization of a saint, there couldnt be anything wrong with a seminarian heading off into the library and bringing himself up to date on everything that had been written about Beelzebub, and then stepping into the shoes of the accursed one and using him to do what he hated to do, and that is work for the salvation of souls instead of their damnation! Actually, Mjomba’s plan is to have the devil reveal his dirty secrets in what he hopes will be the equivalent of Satan’s “State of the World Address”!
But the student soon finds out that it is the devil using him instead of the other way round.
Employing the platform he is offered freely by the unwary seminarian, the Ruler of the Underworld soon enough is comfortably ensconced as the Defender of Truth, and even making the successors to the apostles look verily like neophytes! He pontificates on a slew of subjects as the seminarian obediently commits all to paper. Beelzebub’s sermons on such daunting subjects as the workings of divine grace and damnation will blow you away! The devil takes the position that the Church of Rome is the one, true and apostolic Church founded by the Deliverer, and he musters arguments to prove it – and he has some very convincing arguments in his arsenal!
By happenstance, not long before, a group of Canadian tourists, trudging through a valley near the Dead Sea, had stumbled on scrolls containing a mine of information that not only corroborated the four gospels and the Acts of the Apostles in many respects, but also included a biography of Judas Iscariot. The “Canadian Scrolls” as they are called completely support the position of the Evil Ghost on the Catholic Church!
But that is not all. At about that same time, copper miners in the Mountains of the Moon in Western Uganda had unearthed parchments that turned out to be diaries that the first Man and the first Woman who had ever walked the earth had apparently kept! Known as the Rwenzori Prehistoric Diaries, the parchments, undoubtedly Archaeology’s rarest find, were embedded in molten rock inside a cave.
Other evidence found suggested that the cave had provided shelter to Adam and Eve for a prolonged period, perhaps as long as ten years. Archaeologists from Uganda’s Makerere University, the University of Addis Ababa, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, and other eminent institutions of learning from around the globe speculated that the volcanic eruption occurred several generations after Adam and Eve had passed on, and that the fossilized human remains found nearby likely belonged to Adam and Eve’s great grand children.
The scientists also stunned the world with their announcement that the evidence had buried, in one fell swoop, the long held notion that humans had evolved from primates. Using new and experimental genetic dating methods, they had revised the dates for the appearance on Earth of homosapiens to sometime between three hundred thousand and four hundred thousand years ago.
The Canadian Scrolls and another remarkable archaeology find in Alexandria, Egypt, that occurred at about the same time and that corroborated the contents of the former and vice versa, along with the Rwenzori Prehistoric Diaries, had turned the world of evangelists and preachers completely upside down.
The Gospel According to Judas Iscariot is a worthy meditation on good and evil. At times, the devil teaches more than the Christian. But overall, the material makes for reading that, as the Midwest Book Review notes, is “hellishly delicious” and guarantees “sheer devilish delight” for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.
Joseph M. Luguya is the Author of Payment in Kind (Kenya Literature Bureau, 1985). A native of Uganda, the author is a graduate of the University of Nairobi, and he is also a former Stanford-Sloan Fellow.
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