Glory - The Gospel of Judas, A Novel

Glory (La gloria) is Giuseppe Berto’s testamentary novel. The first-person narration of the Gospel in the voice of Judas Iscariot constitutes Berto’s closing argument in a life-long debate with Christianity. His interpretation of the gospel story is certainly unconventional, even oppositional. Rather than a rejection of the Christian faith in which he was raised and educated, however, Berto fashions an alternative account to the four canonical gospels that ultimately constructs a competing view of the human condition and of humanity’s prospects for redemption. In Berto’s parodic rendition of the Christian gospel, Judas, after a lifetime of tormented interrogation, decides to embrace the ambiguity of the human condition, which is, as he describes it, a liminal existence played out over a long and trying transition of unknown and unknowable duration, between the original paradise of the Garden of Eden and the final redemption at the end of days—a period otherwise known as history.