LADIES AND gentlemen of the jury, the case for the defence can be summed up in three words: Judas was innocent. He was not just misunderstood, he was framed.

This was a stitch-up, jurors; Judas was a scapegoat, an innocent victim of religious persecution, racial prejudice, political animus, wilful mistranslation and mistaken identity. So far from being the traitor of myth, my client was a man who simply did what was asked of him. The charges against him are hearsay: circumstantial, illogical and frankly unbelievable.

For 1,967 years, Judas Iscariot has stood convicted of the most heinous crimes: betrayal of the Son of God, an accessory to state murder without trial and accepting blood money. My client cannot defend himself in person because he is currently serving a sentence of eternal damnation in the seventh circle of hell, having his head gnawed off by a three-headed monster.

But first, the evidence for the prosecution, flimsy as it is. It is alleged that my client, a disciple of Jesus, conspired with the chief priests of the temple to have Jesus arrested for blasphemy; that in exchange for 30 pieces of silver he led an armed band to said Messiah and identified him with a kiss; that having received his payoff, wracked by guilt, he killed himself.

The story does not quite add up. If Jesus was such a public danger, why did the priests need him to be identified? Jerusalem had a small population; the man claiming to be the Son of God was surely known by sight to just about everyone; plus, it was dark, and he was wearing a halo.

There are other inconsistencies: why did the other apostles not react when Judas was identified as the traitor at the Last Supper? The accounts of his death are flatly contradictory: either he hanged himself or he fell over and exploded in a field purchased with his ill-gotten gains, which sounds most unlikely. The myth that he had red hair (playing on anti-redheadism) and wore a yellow cloak (the mark of cowardice) are later additions. St John’s Gospel further claims that Judas was a thief who, as the apostles’ treasurer, had stolen from the others, an allegation uncorroborated elsewhere. It is even doubtful whether silver was common currency at the time.

Over the past 20 centuries no one has come up with a convincing motive for the actions attributed to my client. Some have suggested that, because Judas suggested money spent bathing Jesus’s feet with precious ointment should have gone to the poor, he was some kind of social revolutionary, or even a member of the Sicarii (hence, perhaps, Iscariot), a terrorist group fighting the Romans; under this fragile scenario, Judas dobbed in Jesus because he was insufficiently radical.

Judas is accused of “betraying” Jesus. Yet the Greek word paradidomi has another, less pejorative meaning: to “hand over” or “surrender”. Here I call as defence witness Professor William Klassen, a Canadian scholar at the École Biblique in Jerusalem. Klassen points out that the word paradidomi is used 59 times in connection with Christ’s death: 27 times it is translated as “hand over”; but on the 32 occasions the word is used in relation to Judas, it becomes “betray”. Biased translators deliberately bolstered preconceived assumptions.

If Judas merely handed over Jesus, that places his actions in a very different light. If Judas identified the Messiah, as alleged, he certainly did not know Jesus was going to be passed on to the Romans to be killed; he may simply have been acting as a go-between. The evidence certainly suggests a level of collusion with Jesus. “Friend, do what you are here to do,” Christ tells him, according to St Matthew. “The prophecies must be fulfilled.” Did Jesus plan his own martyrdom and have Judas help him to carry it out? If so, this is not treachery, but a faithful follower carrying out the painful duty that his master, his God, and historical destiny required of him. If Judas had not followed his appointed role by handing over the Son of God, there would be no Christianity.

The “only following orders” defence is not one we wish to over-emphasise in this court, for there is one final, even more compelling reason to acquit the defendant, and that concerns the identity of Judas; or lack of it.

I put it to you, members of the jury, that Judas did not exist. He was nothing more than an invention fabricated to fulfil a need by the early Church to differentiate Christians from Jews. I call the late Catholic scholar Raymond Brown, who wrote that anti-Jewish writers and artists exploited Judas, “depicting (him) with grossly exaggerated Semitic features and generalising his love of money”. Judas is the Greek spelling of Judah, the ancient Jewish kingdom; Iscariot may indicate he came from the village of Kerioth in Judea, making him the only Judean in the band of Galileans, and thus the more strictly observant Jew.

The chronological progression of the allegations is crucial. St Paul, the earliest Christian writer, never mentions Judas. The Gospel of St Mark (finished in about AD79) devotes just 169 words to him; St John’s Gospel, however, written at the end of the first century, when Christianity and Judaism were at bitter loggerheads, portrays him as a demonic criminal, in 489 damning words. Christianity needed a Jewish hate figure, a symbolic Jew rejecting Christianity, on which to hang the crime of crimes: Judas fitted the bill, and was duly fitted up.

The Judas myth helped to shape 2,000 years of anti-Semitism. It remains illegal to name a child Judas in Germany. Judas was simply in the wrong century at the wrong time.

In summation, the time has come to undo this monumental miscarriage of justice. Judas must be exonerated. As my late colleague Johnnie Cochran (of O. J. Simpson trial fame) would have put it:

Judas ain’t our enemy
He’s the fall-guy of Gethsemane.

Thank you. Next week I shall be outlining my client’s compensation claim.

Times Recommends

• Hysteria alert: Fab One tour starts
• Whodunnits? A cultural religion
• Prison works. So why won't we admit it?