The Gospel According to "Judas Iscariot"

by Joseph M. Luguya

Variously referred to as "Inspired by the Devil" and "The Gospel According to Judas Iscariot", Inspired by the Devil: Part I - The Gospel According to Judas Iscariot, like Mr. Luguya's first novel Payment in Kind (Kenya Literature Bureau, 1985), is a very unusual book. But, like the latter which has found itself a "niche" in the libraries of some of America's top universities (even though not sold in North America, Payment in Kind will be found in the collections of Harvard University's Hollis Library, Stanford's Socrates, Yale's Orbis, the libraries at Columbia, Northwestern, Michigan State University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UCLA, the University of Toronto, and is even available at the Toronto and New York Public Libraries), it is not a book that is likely to go unnoticed.

Inspired by the Devil: Part I - The Gospel According to Judas Iscariot is a mega-buster that theology and bible students - and even students of sociology, philosophy and psychology - one and all, perforce, are going to have to thumb through if only in order to discover first hand for themselves what it is like for the world to stumble upon diaries that were kept by, of all people, Adam and Eve! But what theologian worth his or her name is going to walk away from homilies on topics as abstruse as "the workings of grace" by, of all creatures, Diabolos!

This is one work of fiction in which Beelzebub is a full bodied character who delivers stirring sermons one moment, and brags about his role in the downfall of Man the next moment. But it is also about characters as strange as Christian Mjomba, the book's fictitious author who confesses to being a "prisoner of his own imagination". Not at all a bad thing when it turns out that you need that sort of character to cause you to begin to realize that you really aren't so knowledgeable in matters of theology after all because you can't answer (not just off the bat, but even if you had a whole day) simple questions such as: Was the devil making an act faith when he proclaimed that Jesus was the Son of God!

918 pages, Paperback

First published August 31, 2001