Was Judas just fulfilling prophecy, implementing the plan of God for
Jesus to die for our sins, doing what Jesus told him to do?
The Secrets of
Judas
by James
Robinson
Judas
Iscariot is, if not the most famous, then surely the most infamous,
of the inner circle of Jesus' disciples. He was one of the Twelve
Apostles who stuck with Jesus through thick and thin to the bitter
end, until the night of the Last Supper when he led the authorities
to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Was Judas just
fulfilling prophecy, implementing the plan of God for Jesus to die
for our sins, doing what Jesus told him to do? Why else would he
identify him with a kiss, all for a measly sum of thirty pieces of
silver? What do the Gospels inside the New Testament -- and then
what does The Gospel of Judas outside the New Testament --
tell us about all this? . . .
A Gospel? By Judas?
The Gospel of Judas
was composed after the canonical Gospels were written, at about the
same time as the Nag Hammadi Gospels were written. No doubt, like
them, The Gospel of Judas made use of the title Gospel to
accredit itself over against the canonical Gospels that had
popularized the title in their own quest for accreditation. As a
result, we assume not only that The Gospel of Judas was not
written by Judas -- after all, he had been dead for over a century
-- but may not be what the public assumes a Gospel would be -- a
collection of the stories and/or sayings of Jesus. For the four
Gospels among the Nag Hammadi Codices have shown that the honorific
title could be ascribed to works which we today would never call
Gospels, if that title had not been attached to them in the
tradition. The Gospel of Judas will in all probability teach
us a lot more about the Gnosticism of the second century, than about
the public ministry of Jesus, or sayings of Jesus, or Holy Week, or
the like.
How has Judas been understood
down through the centuries, after the New Testament presented him as
giving Jesus over to the Jewish authorities, and The Gospel of
Judas somehow vindicating him?
In antiquity, to fall on one’s
sword when one’s leader is slain is considered a noble death. Should
not Judas’ suicide after Jesus’ crucifixion be accorded this
distinction of being a noble death? Apparently it was first Saint
Augustine who decided that Judas’ suicide was in fact a sin.1
Listen to the way Augustine put it: 2
He did not deserve mercy; and
that is why no light shone in his heart to make him hurry for pardon
from the one he had betrayed.
And so, irrespective of what one might think of Judas giving Jesus
over to the Jewish authorities, as implementing God’s plan of
salvation, or as a traitor betraying his friend, he cannot be
forgiven for his suicide!
The most generous that early
Christian monasticism could be to Judas was to suggest that Jesus
forgave him, but ordered him to purify himself with “spiritual
exercises” in the desert, such as they themselves practiced.
In the seventh century, the
Bible commentator Theophylact thought Judas had not expected things
to turn bad once he arranged a hearing between Jesus and the Jewish
authorities, and in anguish at the outcome killed himself to “get to
Hades before Jesus and thus to implore and gain salvation”:
3
Some say that Judas, being
covetous, supposed that he would make money by betraying Christ, and
that Christ would not be killed but would escape from the Jews as
many a time he had escaped. But when he saw him condemned, actually
already condemned to death, he repented since the affair had turned
out so differently from what he had expected. And so he hanged
himself to get to Hades before Jesus and thus to implore and gain
salvation. Know well, however, that he put his neck into the halter
and hanged himself on a certain tree, but the tree bent down and he
continued to live, since it was God’s will that he either be
preserved for repentance or for public disgrace and shame. For they
say that due to dropsy he could not pass where a wagon passed with
ease; then he fell on his face and burst asunder, that is, was rent
apart, as Luke says in the Acts.
A Dominican preacher, Vinzenz
Ferrer, in a sermon in 1391, had a similar explanation for the
suicide, that Judas’ “soul rushed to Christ on Calvary’s mount” to
ask and receive forgiveness: 4
Judas who betrayed and sold the
Master after the crucifixion was overwhelmed by a genuine and saving
sense of remorse and tried with all his might to draw close to
Christ in order to apologize for his betrayal and sale. But since
Jesus was accompanied by such a large crowd of people on the way to
the mount of Calvary, it was impossible for Judas to come to him and
so he said to himself: Since I cannot get to the feet of the master,
I will approach him in my spirit at least and humbly ask him for
forgiveness. He actually did that and as he took the rope and hanged
himself his soul rushed to Christ on Calvary’s mount, asked for
forgiveness and received it fully from Christ, went up to heaven
with him and so his soul enjoys salvation along with all elect.
Yet the all-too-rampant
anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages exploited Judas as the
arch-betrayer in order to arouse just such sentiments, by painting
him as a caricature of a Jew, with exaggerated features, a large
hooked nose, red hair, and of course greed for money. . . .
1 A. J. Droge and J.
D. Tabor, A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians and
Jews in Antiquity (SanFrancisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), cited by
Klassen, Judas, 168 and 175.
2 Klassen, Judas, 47,
quoting Augustine, City of God, 1.17 and Sermon 352.3.8 (Patrologia
Latina, 39:1559-63).
3 The translation, by
Morton S. Enslin, “How the Story Grew: Judas in Fact and Fiction,”
in Festschrift in Honor of F. W. Ginrich, ed. E. H. Barth and R.
Cocroft (Leiden: Brill, 1972), is quoted by Klassen, Judas, 173.
4 Quoted by Klassen,
Judas, 7.
Copyright © 2006 James M. Robinson from
The Secrets of Judas: The Story of the Misunderstood Disciple and
His Lost Gospel by James M. Robinson Harper San
Francisco; April 2006;$19.95US.
James M. Robinson
is the founding director emeritus of the Institute for Antiquity and
Christianity, and professor emeritus at Claremont Graduate
University. He is the author of
Trajectories Through Early Christianity and
A New Quest of the Historical Jesus.
He is widely known for his pioneering work on
the Sayings Gospel Q and was the general editor of
The Nag Hammadi Library in English.
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