Introduction


A few years ago, right after I finished writing The Sixth Station, the first novel featuring New York City reporter Alessandra Russo, I flopped down on a couch in a house my husband and I had owned for twelve years.

I spotted a book in plain sight on the bookshelf, which for reasons I can’t explain, I’d never seen before. It must have been left by the previous owners, or even the ones before that, I thought, because the book, I, Judas by Taylor Caldwell, had been published in 1977!

I picked it up and read it, fascinated. It was a novel based on the idea that Judas had been more a misguided believer than a traitor.

Three days later, my daughter and I were browsing a bookshop in Princeton, New Jersey, on our getaway girls’ weekend and there on the front table of the shop was another Judas book, Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity by Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King, which I immediately bought. This nonfiction book interpreted and explained—as much as possible—the esoteric teachings that Jesus had—according to what was left of the rotted manuscript—imparted to his most trusted disciple, Judas (he had been Jesus’ “treasurer,” after all).

I had now gotten two messages about or maybe from Judas in one week!

But it wasn’t until I began digging into the history of the Gospel and the journey that Judas’ nearly two-thousand-year-old codex had taken from the time of its discovery by peasants in an Egyptian cave in the 1970s to its final rediscovery in New York in the year 2000—that I really freaked out.

The long-lost, once-pristine papyri—after three decades of having being roughly passed around, lost and found again on the black market—had ended up in a safety-deposit box in a Citibank branch in Hicksville, Long Island.

Why did that set my hair on end? Because that was the very same bank branch where I’d had my first bank account; the same one in which my parents had banked!

To quote Rick in Casablanca, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

There are literally uncountable numbers of bank branches in the world, and for the pages of Judas—written by the man whose name had been haunting me for days—to have ended up in my own teenage-era bank? Insane. And it was believed that some of the pages had gone missing during those decades.

So, the universe had spoken, and damn! I had no choice but to send my protagonist, Alessandra Russo, on her second great quest—this time to discover what those lost pages of Judas contained.

It was a journey I took with her to Israel and into places not seen by Americans before. Such as a three-thousand-year-old burial chamber underneath a private home in the desert and a tunnel cut deep underground into the bedrock of NYC, which was closed to the public.

Those places, which were opened to me, were just a tiny part of the adventure, which I took with Alessandra, and with Judas. It’s one that I hope you will take with me as well.

The story is fiction, but the truth that’s been hidden for two thousand years isn’t.


Copyright © 2017 by Linda Stasi