In fairness, no expert can tell us exactly what the Coptic said. That is not just because of the terrible condition of the codex; even when the words are there, they are often enigmatic. But, as April DeConick, a professor of Biblical studies at Rice University, pointed out in the Times in 2007, there was a troubling consistency to a number of the mistranslations in the first edition: they improved Judas’s image. If the gospel was truly the earth-shaking document that the National Geographic Society claimed it was—if it promoted Judas from villain to hero—then to have him denied admission to Heaven would be decidedly awkward.
Other scholars have solved the nosalvation problem—Judas’s and ours—in other ways. In “Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity” (2007), Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King, two prominent scholars of Gnosticism, refuse to believe that Judas is not going to be rewarded for his services to Christ. In a retranslation of the Judas gospel, by King, that they append to their book, Judas is told that he’s going to Heaven, and that’s that. There is not even a note to explain this departure from the revised National Geographic translation, which, as the authors acknowledge, they saw prior to its publication.
“The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed” (2006), by Bart D. Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, came out too early to have to deal with the National Geographic team’s second thoughts, but Ehrman, in his writings on the gospel, obviously did worry about the statement that just about nobody would be saved. He claims it’s not true that Jesus said that; then he says it’s true; then he says it’s not true—all on a single page. But never mind, he concludes: “Some of us have a spark of the divine within, and when we die, we will burst forth from the prisons of our bodies and return to our heavenly home . . . to live glorious and exalted lives forever.” I like that quiet “some.” Maybe not most of us, maybe not you or me, but some of us.
Cumulatively, the commentaries on the Judas gospel are amazing in their insistence on its upbeat character. Jesus ridicules his disciples, denounces the world, and says that most of us will pass away into nothingness. Hearing this, Judas asks why he and his like were born—a good question. Jesus evades it. The fact that liberal theologians have managed to find hope in all this is an indication of how desperately, in the face of the evangelical movement, they are looking for some crack in the wall of doctrinaire Christianity—some area of surprise, uncertainty, that might then lead to thought.
The supposedly good new Judas of the Codex Tchacos of course reawakened interest in the bad old Judas of the Bible. Was he really a villain, or just a scapegoat? Susan Gubar, a professor of English at Indiana University, has labored for years in the service of historical justice. With Sandra M. Gilbert, she wrote “The Madwoman in the Attic” (1979) and the three-volume “No Man’s Land” (1989-94), basic sourcebooks for those who, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, were trying to put together a history of women writers omitted from the Anglo-American canon. Since that time, she has written on the literature of the Holocaust and of American racism. Now she has produced “Judas: A Biography” (Norton; $27.95). Refreshingly, the book takes a cold view of the Gospel of Judas. Why all this fuss, Gubar asks, about a positive representation of Judas? There have been many such representations of him, she says, together with negative ones. That winding history is the subject of her book.
In the beginning, Judas had no defenders: as Gubar sees it, each successive Evangelist makes him look worse. By the time of John, in the final Gospel, he is called the Son of Perdition, the same words that Paul had used to describe the Antichrist. Also, John adds what will become a crucial detail: Judas’s professional connection with money. He keeps the “common purse”—the small fund that Jesus and the disciples used for their ministry—and he pilfers from it.
It wasn’t just Judas who was being condemned here. Jesus and all his disciples were Jewish, and they saw themselves as faithful Jews. If they disagreed with the priests of the Temple on certain matters—notably, their belief that Jesus was the Messiah—so did many other Jewish sects of the time. The Christian Jews held to their Jewishness for decades after Christ’s death. Then a change occurred. For a century after the Roman invasion of Judea, in 63 B.C., many Jews believed that this was only a temporary affront. They mounted rebellions against Roman rule, but when the fiercest of these, the Great Jewish Revolt (66-73 A.D.), resulted in a total rout of the Jews, and in the burning of Jerusalem’s Second Temple—which was not only the headquarters of the Jewish religion but also the seat of the Jews’ law courts and the repository of their literature—the people lost heart, and the followers of Christ began to feel that it would be prudent to make friends with the Romans, by disassociating themselves from the Jews. Furthermore, most of their converts were coming from among the Gentiles. Why confuse them by making them think they were joining a Jewish organization?
For these reasons, among others, a small, pious Jewish sect began to claim that it was itself a religion, distinct from—even opposite to—Judaism. Such a decision was, of course, accompanied by considerable anxiety. How to walk away from one’s origins, one’s mother? One way was to identify Judaism with a special, external evil, and this is where Judas came in. In early Christian documents, he is like something out of a monster movie. Here is a portrait of him that has been attributed to Papias, a secondcentury bishop in Asia Minor:
Judas was a dreadful, walking example of impiety in this world, with his flesh bloated to such an extent that he could not walk through a space where a wagon could easily pass. . . . His eyelids were so swollen that it was absolutely impossible for him to see the light and his eyes could not be seen by a physician, even with the help of a magnifying glass, so far had they sunk from their outward projection. His private parts were shamefully huge and loathsome to behold and, transported through them from all parts of his body, pus and worms flooded out together as he shamefully relieved himself.
Judas’s physical repulsiveness was generalized to the Jews—for who were they, as St. Jerome said, but “the sons of Judas”?—and so was the love of money that prompted him to betray Jesus. “Shall I tell you of their plundering, their covetousness, their abandonment of the poor, their thefts, their cheating in trade?” St. John Chrysostom preached.
In the Renaissance and after, Gubar believes, portrayals of Judas become more secular, and more nuanced. Some artists, she says, show Judas and Christ as friends, and more. To make this point, she focusses on two paintings of the Judas kiss, the action by which Judas identified Christ for the police. In Caravaggio’s “The Taking of Christ” (1602-03), she writes, the subject is not so much the betrayal of Christ by his disciple but the victimization of both by the state: “We see Jesus as well as Judas overwhelmed by repressive modes of social control that define both of them as delinquent, criminal, outcast, anathema to the morally bankrupt but highly effective policing authority of the civic state.” What is the state enforcing here? She finds an answer in Ludovico Carracci’s “The Kiss of Judas” (1589-90), a lost painting that survives in a copy by a follower. She calls this canvas “possibly the most startling recreation of the Passion scene,” and it is indeed a surprise: a frankly erotic portrayal, with Jesus, in an off-the-shoulder robe, looking beautiful and dazed as Judas embraces him. The picture sends Gubar into an erotic reverie: “It is Judas’s right hand that gives the picture its extraordinary poignancy, for the fingers hold Jesus’ neck with delicacy, the brush of Judas’s fingertips barely touching Jesus’ skin. . . . I linger on the glamorous lassitude of the ephebe or androgyne and his rapt mate.” Jesus and Judas are “enraptured by distinct visions of excess,” she says. In other words, they are having sexual fantasies about each other. Given this, the arrest becomes an act of homophobia.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Gubar writes, Judas was revised according to the leading political passion of the day. He becomes a revolutionary, bent on throwing the Romans out of Judea. This Judas believed that Jesus had the same intention; that’s why he joined up with him. Then he had to listen to a lot of sermons about love and turning the other cheek. In this reading, Judas betrays Jesus in order to force his hand, get him to launch the revolution. That scenario has been popular with twentieth-century filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, in “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988), based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel.
In the twentieth century, it does notneed to be said, anti-Semitism achieved a climax. Some historians have claimed that the image of Judas in the European mind was central to the Nazis’ decision to exterminate the Jews—that he was, in Gubar’s words, the “muse of the Holocaust.” The Nazis did stress Judas’s Judaism, and tried to forget Christ’s. In 1899, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English writer who eventually married one of Wagner’s daughters and took German citizenship, published a book claiming that Jesus was not Jewish. Galilee, Chamberlain wrote, was inhabited in ancient times by heathen tribes, and Jesus was descended from them. German theologians took to making the same argument, and this made it easier to kill Jews. Gubar believes that the image of Judas as a man who would do anything for money lurks behind Nazi propaganda films, above all the popular “Jew Süss” (1940), a tale of the eighteenth-century German Jewish banker Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, who gained control of the finances of the duchy of Württemberg—the movie shows him leering, pop-eyed, as he pours coins out of a money bag—and was later hanged. This film was screened for the S.S. and for the citizens of occupied towns before special “actions” against the Jews.
By the same token, postwar recoil from anti-Semitism (and, no doubt, the widespread abandonment of faith in the twentieth century) was good for Judas’s reputation. Several distinguished writers—Kazantzakis, Jorge Luis Borges, José Saramago—present him, or seem to, either as a hero, of the resistance-fighter sort, or as a suffering witness. In Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master & Margarita” (1966-67), written before the Second World War, Judas is just a young man, who, after receiving his pay from the Temple, goes off, in sandals so new that they squeak, to rendezvous with a woman. Meanwhile, Pontius Pilate, pained that he washed his hands of Jesus and wanting to punish someone for this, mobilizes his secret police, who get Judas’s lady to lead them to him. They butcher him. Significantly, this happens in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Judas turned Jesus over to the authorities. As the episode ends, Judas’s body lies forsaken in the dirt, but a ray of moonlight shines on one of the dearly bought sandals “so that each thong. . . was clearly visible. The garden thundered with nightingale song”—a scene both poignant and dry.
Between the mid-twentieth century and the present, Gubar’s effort to make sense of the history of Judas representations breaks down, because the evidence is too sparse, and too ambiguous, in the modern manner. But the book hits trouble long before it arrives at the modern period, and I think this is because it is essentially an amateur enterprise. Gubar is a literary scholar. Judas is far less important in literature than he is in the visual arts and, needless to say, theology. Again and again, Gubar fails to see her evidence in its proper context. Renaissance artists, she says, turned away from the “earlier stylized portrayals” of the Judas kiss, and began producing more realistic representations, with closeups and facial expressions. That would be an interesting fact about Renaissance paintings of Judas if it were not true of all Renaissance paintings. Likewise with the hints of homophilic feeling that she sees in Caravaggio’s “The Taking of Christ.” To Gubar, this means that, by the sixteenth century, Judas is being reconceived as Christ’s equal, his lover. But it may mean little more than that the painting is by Caravaggio. Hints, and more than hints, of homosexuality appear in a large number of his paintings. That’s why many scholars believe that he was homosexual—a fact unmentioned in Gubar’s book.
The more Gubar doesn’t know, the bolder she becomes in her interpretations. Looking at Giotto’s “Betrayal of Christ” (circa 1305), probably the most famous painting of the Judas kiss, she decides that this Judas is overweight—a telling fact, she believes. “The plump face of Judas, as well as his corpulent frame beneath the enveloping robe, warns that the kiss might be an incorporating bite.” It’s not enough that he betrays Jesus; he wants to eat him. Neo-Freudianism is what pushes Gubar down that rabbit hole, but normally the source of her caprices is just postmodern politics:
A male Eve, Judas—rejecting or accepting, promoting or curtailing Jesus’ potency—inhabits a decidedly queer place in the Western imaginary. To the extent that Judas stands for the poser or passer—a person who is not what he seems to be—he reflects anxieties about all sorts of banned or ostracized groups, not just Jews. An apostle in an all-male circle, associated with anality and with the disclosure of secrets, Judas retains his masculinity. . . . At other times and in diverse contexts, though, Judas represents a range of quite various and variously stigmatized populations—criminals, heretics, foreigners, Africans, dissidents, the disabled, the suicidal, the insane, the incurably ill, the agnostic. Members of these groups, too, have been faulted for posing or passing as (alien) insiders. Potentially convertible, all such outcasts might be thought to be using camouflaging techniques to infiltrate, hide out, assimilate, and thereby turn a treacherous trick.
Really? The incurably ill are turning tricks? Good for them!
This is shocking nonsense—argument by incantation—but its import is clear: Judas represents all the oppressed, and Gubar is there to defend them.
Yet it is Gubar who raises a crucial question unasked in most of the recent writings on Judas: Why shouldn’t we entertain the idea of an archetypal betrayer? In Gubar’s view, the original, Biblical Judas may have had a bad influence on our politics, but he does represent something true about our lives. He testifies, she says, to the “distressing nature of the human condition,” our “capacity for faltering and sinning” and then for despair and self-hatred—which, somehow, don’t prevent us from faltering and sinning again. Many of us, on many occasions, are not going to love one another. If this widely acknowledged fact is personified by one figure in the New Testament, why shouldn’t it be?
The alternative is to revise the Bible. Some religious scholars think that this is a good idea. Regina M. Schwartz, in her book “The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism” (1997), argues that the Old Testament’s endorsement of violence—the fruit, she says, of monotheism, with its intolerance—has been so destructive that we should delete it from the text and “produce an alternative Bible . . . embracing multiplicity instead of monotheism.” The religious scholar Willis Barnstone’s “The Restored New Testament,” which will be published in the fall, includes not only the canonical Gospels but also three Gnostic gospels: those of Thomas and Mary Magdalene, from Nag Hammadi, and the Gospel of Judas. But, if we’re going to start rewriting the Bible, where will that end? What is the Old Testament except a story about monotheism? And what is the Passion without a sinner to set it in motion? Was Jesus crucified by people who were being good? And, if Judas is let off the hook, surely we have to reconsider the guilt of the Roman soldiers—not to speak of the mob, for they were Jews, surely a group deserving special consideration here.
All this, I believe, is a reaction to the rise of fundamentalism—the idea, Christian and otherwise, that every word of a religion’s founding document should be taken literally. This is a childish notion, and so is the belief that we can combat it by correcting our holy books. Those books, to begin with, are so old that we barely understand what their authors meant. Furthermore, because of their multiple authorship, they are always internally inconsistent. Finally, even the fundamentalists don’t really take them literally. People interpret, and cheat. The answer is not to fix the Bible but to fix ourselves. ♦
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