The back nine of gospel is Old English spel "story, message." This word has faded from English in this sense, but it survives as the verb spell "name the letters of." The original verb was Old English spellian, which meant "to tell, speak." The meaning "write or say the letters of a word" emerged c.1400, from the notion of "to read letter by letter, read with difficulty" (c.1300).

Spell also developed a dark side, which emerged in the modern noun meaning "set of words with magical powers, incantation, charm." This evolved in the 16th century out of an earlier more innocuous meaning "story, speech." As "Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore" notes, "The term 'spell' is generally used for magical procedures which cause harm, or force people to do something against their will -- unlike charms for healing, protection, etc."

The verb spell that means "indefinite period of time" is of uncertain origin and relationship to the other word. It goes back to Old English spelian "to take the place of," and perhaps is related to spilian "to play" (related to German spiel).

The whole of gospel is a translation into Anglo-Saxon of Latin bona adnuntiatio, which is itself a translation of Greek euangelion. When the first missionaries reached the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms from Rome or Ireland, in the 7th century, they had to find equivalent words in the native language for the complex concepts of Christian theology. In some cases, a native word readily presented itself: sin, for instance. Or gecyrren for convertere.

In other cases, a native word could be pressed into use with a slight twist of meaning: For "savior" the early Christian writers in England used the Anglo-Saxon noun hælend, which literally means "healer." The Latin word for "prophet" is glossed in Old English by witga, which is related to wit (though not then in the Oscar Wilde sense).

In still other cases, however, there was no word in the English tongue for the idea in question. Often the boastful Anglo-Saxon warrior culture lacked even the concept in question. To get things started, the Christians simply formed a new word. In the Mercian hymns, Latin humilitatem is glossed by Old English eaðmodnisse, which you could render today as "smooth-moodness." Not an exact rendering of the idea in "humility," but close enough to it to get the conversation started.

Sometimes the Latin-speaking Christians formed new compound words from native components that corresponded to the elements in the liturgical Latin word. One of them was the word for the "parables" in the New Testament. This first appeared in Old English as bispell which would mean "a saying beside," from the same root that survives in gospel. The German equivalent, Beispiel, still is in use and means "example."

Latin conscientia sometimes was nativized in Old English as inwit. Old English lacked pity, so the evangelists came up with mildheortness, literally "mild-heartness," as an exact loan-translation of Latin misericordia (pity arrived later, in Middle English, from France, and sent mildheortness packing).

In the Anglo-Saxon translation of the tale of the Good Samaritan, when the Samaritan finds the robbed man lying in the ditch, he is mid mildheortnesse ofer hine astyred: "stirred with mild-heartness for him." He then props the wounded man up on his donkey and takes him for medical assistance -- to a læcehuse ("leech-house"). You have to feel for that fellow in the ditch. This just wasn't his day.

Greek euangelion (the ancestor of our evangelist) is itself a compound of eu- "good" and angellein "announce" (angelos, source of angel, means "messenger").

The "Gospel of Judas" is what is known as a Gnostic work; the adjective Gnostic was applied to various early Christian sects that claimed direct personal knowledge beyond the Gospel or the Church hierarchy. The word comes from the Greek adjective gnostikos "knowing, able to discern," which ultimately springs from the fecund Proto-Indo-European root *gno- "to know."

Other descendants of this ancient word include English know (Old English cnawan), and, via Latin or Greek, gnomic, cognomen, diagnosis, ignorant, ignore, physiognomy, and prognosis.

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Robinson Jeffers, one of the most overlooked American poets of the 20th century, took his own view of the Judas story in the long poem "Dear Judas" in 1929. The son of a Presbyterian minister and a church organist, raised a strict Calvinist, Jeffers felt his way into the core of the betrayal story armed with the language of Yeats and the stylistic shield of Japanese noh drama. He discovered a Judas who loves Jesus and understands him better than any of the other disciples do. But in Jerusalem Judas finds his master grown too fond of power. Judas betrays Jesus, hoping that the punishment meted to him will be a day or two in prison, in a bid to save Christ from the fate of being seized as a revolutionary and killed.

It's been pointed out that this is pretty similar to the plot in "Jesus Christ, Superstar," but I don't know if there's an actual borrowing involved.

But my favorite revisionist treatment of the myth comes in "Tres versiones de Judas" (in English, "Three Versions of Judas"), the 1944 story by Borges, about a fictional pious Swede named Nils Runeberg who, like Jeffers and DeQuincey, plunges into the puzzling story of the betrayal of Christ and comes out in a strange place. Like the best Borges, it is written in the voice of an encyclopedia -- not the bland modern thing that goes by that name, but the vital dance of fact and sure prose of an "Encyclopedia Britannica" from the 1920s or '30s, when articles were ghostwritten by geniuses, not educrats.

To suppose an error in Scripture is intolerable; no less intolerable is to admit that there was a single haphazard act in the most precious drama in the history of the world. Ergo, the treachery of Judas was not accidental; it was a predestined deed which has its mysterious place in the economy of the Redemption. Runeberg continues: The Word, when It was made flesh, passed from ubiquity into space, from eternity into history, from blessedness without limit to mutation and death; in order to correspond to such a sacrifice it was necessary that a man, as representative of all men, make suitable sacrifice. Judas Iscariot was that man. Judas, alone among the apostles, intuited the secret divinity and the terrible purpose of Jesus. The Word had lowered Himself to be mortal; Judas, the disciple of the Word, could lower himself to the role of informer (the worst transgression dishonour abides), and welcome the fire which cannot be extinguished. The lower order is a mirror of the superior order, the forms of the earth correspond to the forms of the heavens; the stains on the skin are a map of the incorruptible constellations; Judas in some way reflects Jesus. [Translated by Anthony Kerrigan]

"Runeberg's" version comes closest to that of the freshly translated gnostic story. But that is just the beginning. Borges' Runeberg (names matter: Borges, a student of Anglo-Saxon, would have known that Germanic *run- is a word of magic and power) follows his intuition into a stunning secret history more explosive than "The Da Vinci Code."

The general argument is not complex, even if the conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, lowered himself to be a man for the redemption of the human race; it is reasonable to assume that the sacrifice offered by him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by omissions. To limit what he suffered to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is blasphemous.

And if you think I'm going to spoil the ending for you, you've got the wrong guy.