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CHAPTER 1
What's in a Name?
'Your son, – your dear son, – from whose sweet and open temper you have so much to expect. – Your Billy, Sir! – would you, for the world, have called him Judas?'
Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy (1759)
Iscariot has a curiously harsh ring to it in English, but to talk only of Judas risks confusing the two apostles, both with that same name, reported as being among the twelve chosen by Jesus to be his closest followers. In Luke's gospel, the third of the four in the New Testament, the list of Jesus' inner circle ends with the pairing of Judas, son of James, and Judas Iscariot. And in John, the final gospel of the quartet, in his account of Jesus' 'farewell discourses', he refers to the apostle Judas, and then adds, for clarity, 'this was not Judas Iscariot'.
In chronological terms, Luke and John were written after the gospels of Mark and Matthew. In the earlier two, there is just one Judas – Judas Iscariot. In place of the other Judas, the son of James, Mark lists Thaddeus, and Matthew follows suit. According to the conventional wisdom of biblical scholarship, though, Mark, Matthew and Luke are intimately linked, collectively known as the 'synoptic gospels' because, as the adjective suggests, they share many similarities and even a common source. So why should Luke include a second Judas, the son of James, rather than Thaddeus? In changing the line-up, is he drawing on a different source? Or is he correcting a historical inaccuracy in Mark and Matthew? Maybe they mentioned Thaddeus because they thought to have two Judases in the twelve would puzzle their readers? Or, alternatively, are Luke and John adding a second Judas to make a point that goes beyond straight history?
It's good to raise the possibility of embellishment early, because it crops up at every turn when reading the four gospels that Christianity has deemed to be the official version of Jesus' life. There are so many discrepancies between the four texts, the challenge is to know which to favour, and why. In the case of the confusion between one or two Judases, one common suggestion is that Luke and John were both keener than Mark and Matthew on posthumously heaping blame for Jesus' death on Judas Iscariot. To make their point even more forcefully, they created a 'good' Judas in Judas, son of James (worthy of receiving personal guidance from Jesus in John's gospel), and then juxtapose that 'good Judas' with the 'bad' Judas Iscariot. In other words, it is a narrative device, potentially the first of many in Judas' biography.
Next, there is the name Judas Iscariot. Alone of the twelve apostles, he is identified by his town of origin, just as medieval knights were later to have their Christian names paired with that of their home turf. Judas Iscariot, it has long been held, should more properly be read as Judas, man of Qeriot, a town south of Jerusalem in Judea (is in Hebrew means 'man', hence Judas IsQeriot). That orthodoxy rests on John's version in particular, because he alone adds the clue that Judas Iscariot's father is called Simon Iscariot – or Simon, man of Qeriot.
Like father, like son? Well, up to a point. There is, to this hearer at least, sufficient of a gap between Is-Qeriot and Iscariot to leave room for doubt. Moreover, according to the distinguished historian of first-century Judaism, Géza Vermes, 'qeriot' is probably closer to the word qiryah, 'and since qiryah means "town", it is of little use'.
Modern biblical criticism, with its focus on probing the historical worth of details and words found in the Old and New Testaments, blossomed in the twentieth century, though it has its origins in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And as the process has gathered pace, theories have multiplied, about Judas Iscariot as about every other individual named in the texts. There is a school of thought, for instance, that speculates that the anonymous qiryah or 'town' in question may in fact refer to a bigger town, specifically the city of Jerusalem, the largest town in the whole country. So just as those in the countryside still speak of the bright lights of their capital as 'the city', in this reading of Iscariot, Judas is being labelled as the 'townie' from Jerusalem by the other eleven 'yokel' apostles.
There is certainly no sign of Qeriot on maps of the Middle East today, but the usual explanation is that it was long ago abandoned as a settlement. It is, the mainstream of biblical scholarship insists, a reference – albeit slightly garbled – to Kerioth, once a place with a proud heritage, mentioned in the Book of Joshua, but now itself the subject of claim and counterclaim, with some locating its footprint at Tel Qirrioth in Israel's southern Negev Desert.
Nothing very clear there, then, and certainly no further opportunities for me to walk with any confidence in Judas' footsteps. Yet the alternative explanations for what Iscariot means are hardly more convincing. The most popular is that it is a corruption and/or mistranslation of sicarius, the Latin for a 'dagger-man'. The same root is the origin of our word 'sickle'. The Sicarii were Jewish rebels who terrorised Judea between 40 and 50 CE. Their hallmark was to stage random murderous attacks on Jewish grandees at crowded public events (their first significant victim was reputedly a former high priest), using the short daggers that they kept concealed beneath their cloaks. As with today's suicide bombers, such a methodology had a power to terrify out of all proportion to the actual threat it posed. The Sicarii claimed a political agenda – a Jewish nationalism that sought to expel the Roman overlords who had controlled Jerusalem from 63 BCE onwards – but for some historians they were simply bandits.
Several problems arise with this explanation for Iscariot. First, there is no other suggestion in the gospels of any link between Judas and these assassins, their politics, or their practices. Second, the heyday of the Sicarii postdates the gospel versions of Judas' death in 33 CE. The attribution has, though, had the effect, as a theory, of adding marginally to the otherwise invented thread – commonly argued in more recent times by theologians and church historians – that Judas' real purpose was as a political revolutionary, intent on liberating Israel from foreign overlordship.
Another theory claims as the origin of Iscariot the Aramaic word sheqarya, which equates to 'fraud' or 'false one'. Aramaic would have been the language Jesus and his apostles used. If true, this would mean that the gospel writers were guilty of the clumsiest over-emphasis. All of them, the first time they use the words Judas Iscariot then go on to label him the betrayer. So if Iscariot means the 'false one', they are writing 'Judas the false one' and then calling him the betrayer. Why do both?
An alternative suggestion is that Iscariot is a form of 'Issacharite', as in a member of the tribe of Issachar, one of the original twelve tribes of Israel. Yet it had ceased to exist 600 years before Judas' day, during the Jews' exile in Babylon. And the list of possibilities goes on, no more convincingly. Iscariot has been linked with the Latin word scortea, meaning 'leather bag'. So he is Judas of the leather bag, the same bag that John's gospel has him holding as treasurer of the Jesus movement. Yet the reference in John to Iscariot is applied both to Judas and his father. So was his father 'Simon of the leather bag'? And since Mark, Matthew and Luke make no independent mention of any leather bag, or of Judas having a treasurer role, why would they call him 'Judas of the leather bag'?
A world of Judases
All this mulling over Iscariot is not getting much beyond the word leaving a slightly sour taste in the mouth. The name Judas, though, might offer more by way of clarity. In first-century CE Israel, it would have been about as commonplace as John, Ben or Sam are today. Quite how Judas Iscariot has changed that state of affairs can be judged by the Standesamt, or German registry of births, marriages and deaths, which provides a 'Manual of First Names' containing all those a parent can freely choose for their child. Those wanting to go off piste must apply for special approval. Among those to be avoided, the Standesamt counsels, are product names – so no babies called 'Porsche' – and those with 'evil' connotations. A lengthy legal case was fought recently in this context to get Standesamt approval for 'Jihad'. Those mums and dads tempted by 'Judas' are directed that it will only be allowed if followed by a second name that distances it from Judas Iscariot.
Judas – the Greek form of the Hebrew Judah or Yehuda– comes from the verb to thank, or to give praise. Judah was the fourth son of the Old Testament patriarch, Jacob,and as such was, along with his eleven siblings, the founding father of one of the twelve tribes of Israel, named after him, with its lands based around Jerusalem. Judah and its people were eventually to emerge – through a series of historical events in the lives of the Israelites – as the principal tribe. All the kings of the Davidic line, for example, came from it, and so Judah or Yehuda in Hebrew is closely linked with Yehudi, the Hebrew word for Jew.
As a result there are almost as many Judases liberally scattered through the Bible's Old and New Testaments, and in other histories of the period, as there are Joneses in a Welsh village. The most prominent of the Judases is Judas Maccabeus, one of a band of warrior brothers who in 164BCE joined their father in fighting to regain control of the Temple in Jerusalem from debauched foreigners. 'He put on his breastplate like a giant', it is written of Judas Maccabeus in the Old Testament. His victory is still recalled on the Jewish feast of Hanukkah, and he is celebrated in George Frederick Handel's popular 1746 oratorio Judas Maccabeus.
Equally rebellious was Judas the Galilean (or Judas of Gamala, as he is sometimes called), who was part of an armed uprising against Roman rule in Judea and beyond around the time of the census in 6 CE (the same census that took Joseph and Mary on their donkey to register in Bethlehem). He was part of another dynasty of nationalistic rebels, this time called the Zealots. He even gets a mention as a failed messianic leader in the Acts of the Apostles,the New Testament's official history of the years immediately after Jesus' death. (Some have even tried to link 'Judas the Zealot' with Judas Iscariot, suggesting that Iscariot may – by convoluted logic – be rendered as 'the Zealot'.)
Bland, in comparison, is Judas Barsabbas, also name-checked in the Acts of the Apostles as a leading light in the fledgling Christian community in Jerusalem in 49 CE. And positively opaque is Judas the bishop, one of thirteen to preside in Jerusalem between 106 CE and 135 CE, according to Eusebius who, in addition to his Onomasticon, already mentioned, produced in the fourth-century Ecclesiastical History the first chronologically ordered account of the early years of the church.
So there is plenty of potential here for confusion, and even of conflated CVs, the attributes of the other Judases later being attached to Judas Iscariot. Judas the Galilean, for example, was someone who travelled from that northern province south to make his stand in Judea. The gospel accounts, if Iscariot really refers to Qeriot in Judah (or Judea as it became known in the Roman form of the name), turn that on its head. Judas Iscariot journeys from the southern province north to make his name in Galilee.
And the field only gets more crowded. As well as two apostles called Judas, the gospels also talk of a Jude, sometimes referred to as Judas or Judah, who is described as one of Jesus' four brothers. This quartet of siblings has traditionally been downgraded by official Christianity to stepbrothers (the sons of Mary's husband, Joseph, from an earlier marriage), or to the rank of cousins, in order to maintain the notion, embraced enthusiastically from the fourth century CE onwards, that Jesus' mother was a perpetual virgin. Nothing more is said specifically of this particular Jude/Judas in the gospels, but there is a short, unmemorable and generally neglected Letter of Jude, included in the canon of the New Testament and sometimes attributed to him, which warns Jews who have joined the new Christian Church to beware of false teachers.
The gospels as gospel
If probing Judas Iscariot's name tends to yield only a muddle of theories and characters, then the other details about him in the four gospels of the New Testament provide the building blocks of his biography. They are in short supply, though. Despite the instant recognition that Judas continues to enjoy as a result of three infamous episodes where he looms large in Jesus' story (and a handful of others, less often highlighted), what is written by Mark, Matthew, Luke and John can hardly be said to constitute a rounded portrait.
In part, that is down to the literary style of the gospels themselves. Christianity may be a religion of the book, yet its holiest book contains not a single physical description of Jesus, his mother or any of the apostles. Neither, in the case of Judas, is there a single word about how he sounded, or moved, or about his early years, save for that dead-end reference to his father in John. The gospel writers did not see that as their task. It never crossed their mind to sketch a convincing psychological portrait of Judas, just as they did not seek to provide a biography of Jesus. The gospels are not even strict chronological accounts. They sit broadly somewhere between history and polemics, shaped for their times, but also with an eye to previous accounts (notably the Hebrew Scriptures).
The actual style of the gospels has long been the subject of intense academic debate, but the consensus is that their often terse tone, and the occasional discrepancies between one account and another, were deliberate, the literary convention of the times being that readers should be left sufficient room to use their own imaginations. Even within such constraints, however, the gospel writers do seem to show a particular reserve when it comes to Judas. In terms of name-checks among the apostles, only Peter scores more highly in the gospel texts. Yet, compared to the many insights offered about the future pope (including that he is married), and the passages where he shows very human doubts (denying Jesus three times before the cock crows), there are just twenty-two specific references to Judas in all four gospels combined – a total of roughly 1,200 words.
The writers clearly felt a distaste around mentioning Judas Iscariot at all. They coped with their reluctance by dealing with him as swiftly and damningly as possible. Hence his name is always found at the very end of lists of the twelve, with his card marked as a traitor long before he does the deed, or any deed, showing scant respect for notions of an unfolding narrative. There is no 'show not tell', the basic rule of creative-writing classes. In the gospel authors' view, Judas has to be marked out as tarnished from the start, lest any reader be seduced into extending him the benefit of the doubt.
That, at least, is one way of looking at the background to the gospel texts. Others who have studied them, though, offer a different theory. They suspect the real explanation for the lack of depth in how they treat Judas reveals him as a fiction, a narrative device, invented by the four writers of the gospels simply to furnish readers with a betrayer who precipitates Jesus' death. As the British literary critic, Sir Frank Kermode, wrote in a 1997 essay on Judas (one of several he penned on the subject): 'As for the historical status of Judas, there is of course no saying he didn't exist but, as we know him, he exists only in a form of fiction cultivated in the first century.' It all comes back to how you see the gospels. What exactly are they? If their writers can be accused of making up the 'character' of Judas, what else did they invent? Of all those who feature, only Jesus and the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, are attested to in other historical sources. The Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, in The Antiquities of the Jews, written around sixty years after Jesus' death, includes references to him as a notorious troublemaker. Tacitus, the Roman senator and opponent of the early Christians, gives chapter and verse in book fifteen of his Annals, written around 116 CE, on Jesus' death. 'Christus ... suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius, under one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate'. No independent report of Jesus' resurrection is offered, though, and there is no mention anywhere else in these historical sources, or any other, of Judas Iscariot.
Many contemporary Christians now question the view, handed down from pulpits for many centuries by their church, that every last sentence written in Mark, Matthew, Luke and John is the word of God and beyond contradiction, if only because the four gospel accounts contradict each other continually at the most basic level, for example over places and timings. Yet they would certainly not go so far as to label the gospels a fiction. The truth, for many, lies somewhere in between.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Judas"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Peter Stanford.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
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