Judas Priest

Judas was an alright guy after all, it seems. Two thousand years after the fact, it turns out that we had this guy all wrong. He was a favorite after all. He only ratted his boss out because he was told to. "You will be cursed by the other generations and you will come to rule over them," Jesus tells Judas in the "Gospel of Judas," released earlier this week. Apparently he was only following orders.
This text was found in the 1970's in Egypt and is only now coming to light thanks to the National Geographic Society (and you thought they were only good for pictures of waterfalls and naked natives). This version of the gospel was first mentioned around A.D. 180 by Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon, in what is now France. The bishop denounced the manuscript as heresy because it differed from mainstream Christianity. It was in the 1970's that I discovered my own personal Judas (cue the Depeche Mode here). "Jesus Christ Superstar" depicts a very sympathetic Judas. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber begin their testament with Judas confronting Jesus and questioning his rise to - well - superstardom. Judas' betrayal of Jesus comes at the urging of Caiaphas, and once his holiness is arrested and taken away, the guilt drives Judas to hang himself.
At this point my story diverges slightly from the text with the breathless recollection from my mother about seeing Ben Vereen descending from the rafters in a silver jockstrap. Ben played Judas on Broadway and it was one my mother's peak life experiences to behold thisfieryy spirit unleash his venom on the martyred Christ:

"Every time I look at you
I don't understand
Why you let the things you did
Get so out of hand
You'd have managed better
If you'd had it planned
Now why'd you choose such a backward time
And such a strange land?
If you'd come today
You could have reached the whole nation
Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication"

"Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom," Jesus says to Judas, In the newly discovered Gospel of Judas, singling him out for special status. "Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. The star that leads the way is your star." A Superstar, no doubt, but alas no mention of a silver jockstrap.