The Judas Tree (ballet) official website, this ballet is about "betrayal and guilt, individual and communal". The plot references the biblical betrayal story of the Kiss of Judas, which leads directly to the arrest of Jesus and his later crucifixion. In this same source it is said that MacMillan was also thinking of contemporary "instances of betrayal, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989." Since the protesting students demanding democratic reforms were taken down by the Chinese army, "in spite of politicians’ assurances that there would be no violence". The Royal Ballet website describes it like this: "The Judas Tree is MacMillan's final
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth Muslim may have influenced his writing as he found the picture of Jesus in "Zealot" seems more like a failed version of the Prophet Muhammad than the figure depicted in the Bible. However, Prothero agreed that biographies of Jesus citing alternative sources are often controversial since "outside of the Bible there's not enough historical evidence to write about a modern biography of Jesus", while Darrell Gwaltney, dean of the School of Religion at Belmont University, concurred and commented "Even people who were present in the life of Jesus couldn't make up their minds about who he was... And they were