The Bible recounts two possible endings for history’s most famous traitor, Judas Iscariot. The Gospel of Matthew says he hanged himself after returning his 30 pieces of silver. The Book of Acts says Judas used the money to buy a field, then fell down and busted his gut.

Recently, though, artists and intellectuals, disturbed by what Jesus’ foreknowledge of the betrayal says about free will and spurred on by the release of the “Lost Gospel of Judas,” have taken some liberties. Now two of them have wound up in court.

In a twist that should send your ironic Geiger counter ticking, both novelist Guy Michaels and playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis put Judas in a courtroom, pleading his case that he should be admitted into heaven. In Michaels’ “Judas on Appeal,” Solomon himself presides over Iscariot’s trial in a fictional World Court of Religion at the federal courthouse in New York’s Foley Square, according to Courthouse News Service.

In Guirgis’s play, which was directed by Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, the venue is Hope, a place in purgatory, according the CNS.

Last month, a federal judge ruled that Guirgis’s play does not violate Michaels’s copyright. Some stories, it seems, belong to us all.

h/t: Religion Clause.