In this comprehensive, interdisciplinary work, Susan Gubar asks who Judas Iscariot was and why he betrayed Jesus, exploring the meaning of Jesus' betrayer over twenty centuries. Despite the recent recovery of a Gnostic Gospel bearing his name, the centrality of the twelfth apostle has gone largely ignored. Yet artists throughout the ages have returned to this man, whose treacherous act inaugurates Jesus' death and resurrection. Gubar explains how Judas came to stand for the Jewish people and how he personifies a composite Judeo-Christianity that illuminates ambivalent relationships between Christians and Jews as well as changing attitudes toward the body, blood and money; greed and hypocrisy; suicide and repentance; and, homosexuality and divinity. Gubar shows how Jesus' most notorious disciple has provoked profound reflections on the problem of evil that still resonate today.