The Gospel of Judas is an account of conversations between Jesus and Judas in the last days before Jesus was crucified and it suggests they were best friends, contrary to received wisdom, and that Judas turned him in because Jesus asked him to. The idea that Jesus could have been

Many islands have been candidates: Malta, Favignana, Stromboli, Isole Li Galli, Corsica, Jerba, and, of course, various Ionian islands on the west coast of Greece. Ogygia Calypso’s Ogygia has proved hard to find. All that is known about it is that it was an island near the edge of

Pantheistic worlds like the one in the Odyssey barely survive today beyond India -- the Hindu religion has many gods (albeit manifestations of Brahman) and many fables. The Jewish religion’s distinctive difference was in installing just the One God, which suited a people who wished to differentiate themselves from the

The Lady is a lonely and doomed figure and Tennyson used her in several poems and plays, just as he used Fair Rosamond. The famous painting above of The Lady is by John William Waterhouse in 1888. The Lady resembles Calypso or Circe, or even Penelope, trapped in her unreality,

Although attributed to the poet Homer, who may have lived around 700 B.C.E., the Odyssey was forged into its brilliant form by oral storytellers over many hundreds of years. Then it was written down and reshaped again and again. Set in a time when a pantheon of gods

Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca after 19 years. Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad asks: would Penelope want him back? Is marriage an outdated institution, better suited to the days when people died in their 40s and 50s after raising children? With longer life-spans do we become bored with

Over the centuries the Sirens have resisted easy definition. In the Odyssey, Book 12, when Circe is warning Odysseus about them, they are just creatures with a bewitching song. He has himself bound to the mast while all his crew have their ears blocked, and he gets past them unscathed.