The Sunday Times - Comment

The Sunday Times  (c)	April 09, 2006

Stitched up big time by the Galilee gang
PROFILE Judas Iscariot
There is a detail in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper that requires no decoding by Dan Brown fans. An overturned salt cellar lies on the table in front of Judas Iscariot, signifying the bad luck of spilt salt and branding the disciple who is about to betray Jesus Christ. But after 2,000 years of vilification, Judas’s luck has changed: he’s been exonerated.

Well, not quite. A tattered papyrus manuscript found in the Egyptian desert, hailed as an authentic copy of the lost Gospel of Judas, purports to reveal that far from betraying Jesus, Judas sacrificed himself for his master. Experts are taking the claims with a pinch of, er, salt.

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The ancient Coptic document, dated to the 3rd or 4th century, portrays Judas as the disciple closest to Jesus, singled out to receive mystic knowledge and hand the Messiah over to his persecutors so that he would be freed of his physical form.

According to the 26-page gospel, unveiled last week in Washington by the National Geographical Society, Jesus told Judas: “Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but it will grieve you a great deal.”

Later, before the fateful Passover holiday, Jesus told Judas: “You will exceed them all. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” Convinced scholars believe that Judas emerges as a champion who is envied and resented by the other disciples, eventually becoming a symbol of treachery.

This dramatic reinterpretation is the latest attempt to stand the Bible story on its head. There have been efforts to rehabilitate Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judaea who handed Jesus over for execution, and a raft of fanciful books have persuaded a lot of people that Jesus married, had children and swanned off to live in France.

But if the Gospel of Judas is true, parents will be free to resume naming children Judas, a name common during the time of Christ but anathema to most Christians ever since. Prayers for receiving the Eucharist will no longer mention Judas’s betrayal. And of course the Bible will have to be rewritten.

None of these outcomes is likely. Sceptics point out that the new gospel was apparently written between AD130 and AD170, long after the real Judas lived, whereas the gospels’ account of events, set down within decades of Jesus’s death, have a more authentic air.

The original text appears to be the work of a 2nd-century gnostic sect and echoes its preoccupation with secret knowledge leading to salvation. Most damningly, it was considered for inclusion in the New Testament canon but received the thumbs down in about AD300, when Irenaeus, an early Christian bishop, denounced it as heretical.

Yet speculation about Judas has always abounded, partly because the gospels say little about the circumstances of his calling or his part in Jesus’s ministry. He has served as the perfect scapegoat, caricatured by anti-semites in paintings and literature as the stereotypical Jew with red hair, as in Shakespeare’s Shylock. His treachery for money was regarded as a typical piece of Jewish venality.

Judas was the disciples’ bagman, who carried their money in a purse and kept a close eye on the shekels. It was Judas who objected to Mary anointing Christ’s feet with expensive perfume, which he claimed could have been sold for 300 pence and given to the poor. His professed concern was put in a different light by the Gospel of St John, which stated: “Now he said this, not because he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief.”

The most fertile source of theories about Judas is his surname, Iscariot. A widely accepted view is that in Hebrew this proclaimed him “a man of Kerioth”, a town of Judah, which set him apart from the other apostles, who were all from Galilee. This may have added to their later antipathy.

A more intriguing hypothesis is that Iscariot is a transformation of the Latin sicarius, or “dagger-man”. The Sicarii were a group of assassins among Jewish rebels intent on driving the Romans out of Judaea. So Judas could have seen Jesus as the Jewish leader who would lead a revolt.

It is a theory that appeals to George Austin, the former Archdeacon of York. “Judas may have thought here was a man who was going to be king of Israel and tried to force his hand. He was disappointed and that’s why he threw the 30 pieces of silver away, because it had all gone wrong.”

Austin does not support the idea in the recently published The Jesus Dynasty by James Tabor that Jesus was intent on founding a royal dynasty, not a new religion. “I think the biblical story is true: Jesus was the king of heaven,” he says. 

However, there was reason at the time to believe that Jesus’s intentions were not entirely peaceful. He had made a triumphal entry into Jerusalem, provoked a large disturbance in the Temple and spoken of destroying and rebuilding it in three days.

There was violence in the air. Simmering hatred of the Roman occupation nearly erupted in AD39, when the Emperor Caligula declared himself a god and ordered his statues set up in every temple. Only his death in AD41 ended the disturbance. A full-scale revolt in AD66 lasted seven years until Roman legions destroyed Jerusalem, assaulted the Jewish stronghold of Masada and enslaved or massacred a large part of the Jewish population. It was the first of three large rebellions over 70 years.

Inspired by the Bob Dylan lyric “You’ll have to decide/ Whether Judas Iscariot/ Had God on his side”, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Jesus Christ Superstar depicts Judas as a man driven by fear that the emergence of a new religion will spark a political uprising which the Romans will brutally suppress.

Some scholars favour an alternative notion that Judas was simply a negotiator in a prearranged prisoner exchange that surrendered Jesus to the Roman authorities by mutual agreement, and that the disciple’s later portrayal as a traitor was a fabrication.

However, the gospels are quite explicit that Judas was the villain of the piece, even though they reiterate that Jesus knew Judas’s betrayal was predestined. When John asked who the betrayer was during the disciples’ last supper, “Jesus answered: He it is to whom I shall reach bread dipped. And when he had dipped the bread, he gave it to Judas Iscariot. And after the morsel, Satan entered into him. And Jesus said to him: That which thou dost, do quickly.”

Jesus’s foreknowledge of Judas’s part in his death has raised several philosophical questions. If Judas had no free will and was carrying out God’s wishes, he could not have avoided betraying Jesus. And if Judas was sent to hell, he was not only being punished for helping to save humanity but would suffer for eternity, whereas Jesus only suffered while dying on the cross.

All four gospels agree on the basic facts of the actual betrayal, in which Judas came with a band of soldiers from the chief priests and found Jesus with the disciples. According to Mark, Judas said “Hail, Rabbi” before giving him the traitor’s kiss. Mark adds that Jesus replied, “Friend, wherefore art thou come?” although Luke gives him the words, “Judas, dost thou betray the Son of Man with a kiss?”

Judas supposedly acted out of greed, approaching the priests of his own accord, but after Jesus’s arrest he tried to return his paltry bribe of 30 pieces of silver and committed suicide. Matthew says he hanged himself, but the Acts of the Apostles stated that he “purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out”. This contradiction would make some sense if Judas had been hanging from a tree for some time and when his body was cut down it split open.

The Catholic Church has never officially stated that Judas is in hell. One view is that if he had not committed suicide but repented of his action he could have become a saint. After all, Saint Peter denied Christ three times. Yet according to the Catholic Encyclopedia: “However difficult it may be to understand, we cannot question the guilt of Judas.”

On the other hand, Jesus’s last words on the cross, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do”, must have embraced Judas, too.