Ecce Homo

By Mayo Mohs

THE JUDAS GOSPEL by PETER VAN GREENAWAY 240 pages. Atheneum. $6.95.

Lost gospels are in literary fashion.

This spring Irving Wallace parlayed the Gospel according to St. James into a ponderous bestseller. Now comes a man called Peter Van Greenaway with The Judas Gospel. Agnostic Wallace wears a cloying, counterfeit faith on his sleeve in The Word's mawkish denouement, but Van Greenaway has the courage -- and the talent -- to spill his venom straight. The result is a brisk, tough and intellectually provocative novel.

Judas Iscariot is its hero. Glimpsed in old age, he has taken refuge from the Romans in what remains of the religious community of Qumran (where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found), and pauses to put down his last testament before he is killed. Enter, 1,900 years later, a British archaeologist named Mallory, who finds the scroll and takes it back to England for translation. Judas' gospel, as might be expected, contradicts nearly everything the other four evangelists have set down. Mirroring such recent pop events as Jesus Christ Superstar, as well as more serious re cent theories in Jesus guessing (especially S.G.F. Brandon's Jesus and the Zealots), Van Greenaway makes his Judas a fierce political rebel who coz ens the charismatic but ingenuous Jesus into leading an abortive insurrection. Far from being the betrayer, Judas is framed by Peter, the real traitor.

Ubermenschen. Mallory's secret, of course, is not secure. The Vatican learns of the gospel, goes into panic and dispatches a Dominican priest named Giovanni Delia Paresi to buy it from Mallory. Delia Paresi, however, sees his task more as a search-and-destroy mission than a commercial enterprise.

For many Christians, the Van Greenaway Judas will not only seem bizarre but blasphemous: in the Judas gos pel, it is Judas, for instance, who utters (in a somewhat different context) the Eucharistic formula for the Last Sup per. Yet Van Greenaway's anticlericalism is usually witty, and only occasion ally foolish.

The conception of Judas as hero evolves, moreover, with what used to be called a fruitful ambiguity, leaving the reader to ponder the author's real intent. For while Judas begins as a humanist hero and Della Paresi is clearly a villain, it becomes progressively clear just how much Judas, the political revolutionary, and this unscrupulous priest resemble each other. They are both, in fact, unpleasant Ubermen-schen who see themselves as saviors of mankind but scorn all other men and other men's laws. Judas and Della Paresi agree that the meek will never inherit the earth.

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