In Search of Judas and His Reasons

Judas is the New Testament’s dark angel. The Gospel of John puts him in the shadows, an appropriate place for a figure who’s a smudge of dirt on the luminous story of the New Testament. He’s also a bundle of contradictions: Fierce and menacing, he sent his savior off to execution with a kiss, so willing was he to trade reward in the hereafter for cash in the here and now. Yet no single depiction explains who Judas was or why he betrayed his teacher, though people have long been seeking an answer.

Perhaps he was a patriot seeking to throw off Roman control, which Nikos Kazantzakis depicted in “The Last Temptation of Christ”; or he was in love with a woman, maybe even Mary Magdalene, which weakened his loyalty to Jesus; or perhaps Judas was a necessary part of God’s plan for salvation, as an early Gnostic Christian sect believed.

“Judas fascinated the authors of the Gospels,” Kim Paffenroth writes in “Judas: Images of the Lost Disciple.” “And he has continued to captivate authors, artists, composers and filmmakers throughout 20 centuries of Christianity.”

The choices are endless because so little is known about him and so much is left up to our imaginations. Paffenroth has compiled many of the myths, legends and stories (albeit with some important omissions) that have gathered around this sulky figure as he has wandered through the centuries. Some students of the Bible are sure to object to Paffenroth’s approach, arguing that, in fact, we do know much about Judas. After all, the Gospels tell us about the 30 pieces of silver, the kiss and how he bought a piece of land with the money and died there.

But, as Paffenroth reminds us, the evangelists were as heavily engaged in storytelling as Kazantzakis. In Matthew’s account of his death, for example, a remorseful Judas hangs himself; in Luke, an unrepentant Judas dies in a field after his guts swell and burst. Mark and John, on the other hand, are silent about his death. What really happened?

Paffenroth cites numerous inconsistencies and biblical allusions, all to show how the evangelists manipulated and invented the material of their stories. And the Apostle Paul, he points out, whose letters are the church’s earliest documents, never even mentions Judas, leaving some doubts about his actual existence.

“[A]ll the details of his life had been lost, or, more accurately, they had yet to be created,” Paffenroth explains. “Later storytellers looked at Judas ... shaping him into the kind of man or monster that their individual stories needed.”

Leaving aside the perennial debates over fact versus fiction in the Gospels, what’s more fascinating about Paffenroth’s study is his presentation of how storytellers have shaped and invented new versions of Judas through time. The behaviors and social mores of a writer’s era stick to Judas like iron fibers to a magnet, telling us much about our past and about the highs and lows of human invention.

As the world moved into the medieval period, passion plays highlighted Judas’ villainy as a money-handler and Christ-killer, an image that thrived in a growing atmosphere of European anti-Semitism. Late-medieval stories portray him in a more heroic light, fated to betray Christ like a figure in Greek tragedy. Such stories, Paffenroth explains, “caused their audiences to sympathize with him deeply and invited them to see the fatefulness of his life reflected in all of ours.”

In fact, as Judas moves into the 19th and 20th centuries, one finds more sympathetic portraits. He is certainly not exonerated (anti-Semitic portrayals still persist), but more complexity is added to his actions. In these, Judas seems more practical and even, to a small degree, justified. By betraying Jesus, the 19th century essayist Thomas De Quincey wrote, Judas prods him out of his Hamlet-like hesitation and forces Jesus to become a man of action.

To other artists, Judas is responding to some type of tyranny. In Robinson Jeffers’ poem “Dear Judas,” Jesus is too proud and imperious in his ministry, causing Judas to turn against him. More recently, “The Knifeman,” a novel by William Rayner, presents a Cold War scenario in which a secret policeman forces Judas to inform on Jesus by threatening to harm his loved ones.

As this study shows, more modern attempts to give Judas deeper motivations for his crime seem similar to the efforts of attorneys, psychotherapists and other experts to find the parental abuse, the broken home or the gene that turned someone into a murderer. Betray the Son of God? There has to be a better reason, they seem to argue, than 30 silver pieces or the cliche that “the devil made him do it.”

In gathering his materials, however, Paffenroth overlooks the work of important novelists such as Reynolds Price, Sholem Asch, Jose Saramago and Norman Mailer, which makes his book feel incomplete. And elsewhere, his selection of subjects seems a bit odd: Why discuss the movie version of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” as he does, but not the book?

Yet Paffenroth still manages to show how modern stories of Judas bring him closer to us. These stories provoke our sympathy and even prick our conscience. Aren’t we all a little like Judas? Haven’t we all sometimes betrayed our beliefs to pursue the status or wealth that we don’t have?

This makes Judas an apt figure for our gossipy age. His weakness, more than the doubts and denials of the other Apostles, strikes a modern nerve. Judas is a haunting reminder of the dark potential in all people to reject what’s truly good for them. That may be why his story has persisted in the imagination for centuries, and perhaps why it always will.

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Nick Owchar is an assistant editor of Book Review.