AP
London, Jan 10: Writer and former politician Jeffrey Archer - cast out of Britain's Conservative Party after he was jailed on perjury charges - said he has collaborated on a new novel about the life of another noted black sheep: Judas Iscariot.
Archer, whose best-selling novels include Kane & Abel and Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less, said that The Gospel According to Judas, by Benjamin Iscariot, would be published in March.
"This is the most important book I have ever worked on. It means an awful lot to me," Archer said in a statement on Sunday.
He said the book had been written in collaboration with religious academic Professor Frank Moloney, formerly of the Catholic University of America.
Archer's publisher, Macmillan, said the novel imagines Judas as a politician who betrays Jesus not for money, but because of the belief he is an ineffective leader and not able to challenge the authority of the Romans. In Archer's version of the story, Judas does not kill himself — as opposed to the story in the Gospels — but instead survives and recounts his story to a son — the narrator of Archer's book.
"It's so authentic. It sounds just like the kind of thing someone's son would do to try to rehabilitate their father's name," Tutu said, according to the publisher's statement.
Archer left prison in 2003 after serving two years for perjury and obstructing justice. He had been convicted of lying during his successful 1987 libel action against the Daily Star newspaper, which claimed he had hired a prostitute.
The ex-lawmaker was honored with a life peerage in 1992 for his tireless fundraising for the Conservative Party, but was expelled from the party as a result of his perjury conviction.
In April, an Egyptian Coptic text was made public in Switzerland that portrayed Judas not as a sinister betrayer but as Jesus' confidant, chosen to be told spiritual secrets that the other apostles were not.
Mario Roberty, Switzerland-based Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art, said the document was found sometime in the 1970s in a remote burial cave in middle Egypt.