Rome, Italy - Judas Iscariot was not the betrayer but the betrayed. He schemed to save Christ from being killed and did not commit suicide but lived to old age.
Those are some of main tenets of a new book, "The Gospel According to Judas", written by British novelist Jeffery Archer.
The book, presented as a gospel written by Judas' son Benjamin Iscariot, an imaginary character, is bound to spark controversy even though Archer wrote it with a world-class Bible expert who once worked under Pope Benedict.
"I thought this would not be credible if it were a Jeffrey Archer novel," he told Reuters in an interview.
"I wanted it to be a gospel, I wanted it to look like a gospel, I wanted it to be in verse, but most of all I wanted it to have credible scholarship," he said.
Indeed, the 22,000-word book, which Archer calls "fiction backed up by scholarly research," looks, reads and feels like a gospel and does not have the authors' name on the cover. It is written in 25 short chapters, each with numbered verses.
He wrote it with Father Francis J. Moloney, who was a member of the Vatican's International Theological Commission for 18 years and once worked with the current Pope when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
It blends real verses and phrases from the four traditional gospels with Biblical events as well as those the authors speculate could have been seen as by Judas.
The thrust of Archer's gospel is that Judas loved Jesus, believed he was sent by God, but that he was not the Messiah.
Judas loved Jesus so much that he wanted to save him from "unnecessary death" in Jerusalem. So, the Archer-Maloney version goes, Judas conspired with a Scribe or Hebrew teacher who said he wanted to save Jesus and whisk him to safety in Galilee.
BIBLICAL DOUBLE AGENT
But the Scribe was a double agent who was working for Jerusalem's Jewish elders and handed Jesus over to be killed.
The authors, who wanted to write a work in which "not everything was probable but everything was possible", are braced for controversy, something to which Archer is no stranger.
A millionaire author whose thrillers have sold 125 million copies, Archer was convicted for perjury and perverting the course of justice and jailed in 2001 after lying in a libel trial against a newspaper which said he had had sex with a prostitute.
"In the Church there is an extreme right wing and there is an extreme left wing and they will not like it for two totally different reasons," Archer said.
Moloney added: "People on the extreme left wing won't like it because we are not sufficiently radical...the extreme right wing that will say 'how dare you even tamper with these texts.'"
Archer said the idea came to him some 15 year ago and stressed it has no relation to the so-called "Gospel of Judas", a controversial second century text which was the subject of a National Geographic documentary last year.
"Writing this was a tremendous challenge because I'm used to going off in any direction I choose at any time I choose," he said.
Moloney called it "a very intense working relationship" and suggested that at times he had to rein in Archer's imagination.
"Time and time again Jeffrey wanted to write dramatic Jeffrey Archer conclusions, which would make great reading but I had to continuously say 'Jeffrey, that is not possible in terms of 1st Century Judaism and Christianity'," Moloney said.
The audio version of the "gospel" is read by Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.