If Judas Told His Story ...(Review)

If Napoleon had won the battle of Waterloo, the French emperor would have made peace with Britain, ensuring that France dominated the Continent, Russia stayed out and the Germans remained meek and loyal Napoleonic subjects. Or so suggested British historian George Trevelyan in his prize-winning essay "If Napoleon Had Won the Battle of Waterloo," written just before World War I. That was an early example of "what if" or "counterfactual" history, but now the genre is hotter than ever. In "What If?," a recent collection of essays, military historians not only revisit the possibility of a victorious Napoleon but also contemplate a successful Mongol invasion of Europe, and the failures of everything from the American Revolution to the Allied invasion on D-Day. "Virtual History," edited by British historian Niall Ferguson, examines an England without Cromwell and a United States without the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Academics aren't the only ones rewriting history these days. The fiction category has so far been dominated by "Fatherland," the 1992 best seller by Robert Harris about a Europe living with the consequences of a Nazi victory. Now there's a powerful new entry: "The Gospel of Judas," by Simon Mawer (330 pages. Little, Brown).

Mawer, a Rome-based British novelist, has taken on nothing less than the core beliefs of Christianity. His what-if premise is the discovery of a fifth Gospel, written by Judas. It portrays the death of Jesus as the product of a power struggle between ordinary mortals, and provides incontrovertible evidence that no bodily resurrection took place. Mawer's eloquent novel, steeped in the atmospherics of today's Rome, raises-and, to a large extent, answers-the inevitable questions about how the Vatican, Israel and others would react to such startling news. But, as he says, his real interest is in "how this would affect my characters as much as what dramatic effect it would have on the church or the world."

A sound instinct, since counterfactual fiction works only if, as in this case, the characters are compelling and the story is riveting. At its center is Father Leo Newman, a Roman Catholic priest and expert in Koine (ancient Greek) who is dispatched to Israel to decipher the incendiary scroll that turns out to be the Judas Gospel. In Rome where he lives, Leo is already undergoing a crisis of faith and falling in love with a British diplomat's wife. He feels ...