Quotes from Peter Stanford

Judas' hair has a copperish hue, the artist picking up on a long tradition in Christianity of portraying him as a red-head which, according to medieval writers, was the sure sign of a moral degenerate. Shakespeare, in As You Like It, likens Orlando's hair to Judas' red mop, describing it as 'the dissembling colour' and one that reveals 'a deceiver from head to toe'.

Theologians have long been troubled by Jesus' willingness to allow Judas to be there at this key event for the future life of his church. This is, after all, an apostle who he knows is about to betray him.

The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume summed up the dilemma succinctly when he wrote of God: 'Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then

And Judas Iscariot's name continues in the twenty-first century to represent a crushing rebuke, a despicable traitor, as in the controversialist Lady Gaga's 2011 single, 'Judas', about being in love with a bad 'un. 'Jesus is my virtue', she sings in a promotional video bursting with religious imagery, 'and Judas is the demon I cling to'.

Because Judas is the only one of the twelve with two names, Judas and Iscariot, and that second name most obviously suggests he had come from afar to the Galilean hills, he is implicitly being cast from the very start as the outsider. That