Contemporary literature and films have recast Judas as a tragic and therefore noble figure.
“Poor old Judas.” The chorus sings his lament in Jesus Christ Superstar, but it is a dirge for a different kind of Judas than the one portrayed by the church over the centuries. The age of the antihero rejects both the possibility of dynamic positive good and of corruptive unqualified evil. Popular psychology asks that we review the character of Judas in the light of our self-understanding and speculate on justifiable motives that could have prompted his actions. The attempt to rehabilitate Judas Iscariot, however, may be based less on these transitory reasons than on the hidden but heartfelt realization that we all participate in the great betrayal. It is not Judas that is being excused, it is we, ourselves.
The personality of Judas and his relationship to Christ as portrayed in the Bible are enigmatic. To the modern—skeptical of prophecy and miracle—there may even appear something conspiratorial. The brief, oblique references to Judas give little hint of any depths of character. His actions seem prompted by a pettiness that is inconsistent with the high position to which we now elevate our villains. But one thing is clear in the biblical account: the man of Kerioth stood in contrast both to the man of Nazareth and to the other disciples. Judas, tempted, nurtured his temptation: corrected, fed his resentment. Doubting, he succumbed to faithlessness and, sinning—in the betrayal—compounded his sin by denying any possibility of reconciliation. His character is wholly without merit, but like Dorian Grey’s mouldering portrait he leers at us and an identity too shocking to admit is disclosed.
As if to confirm our brotherhood with Judas, our history presents a stream of unbelievable events accelerating at Future Shock speed in disorienting contradiction to our apparent technological progress. From mass murder to ecological rape, we seem convicted as a species of abject betrayal of our physical environment, our fellow man, and even of the few we hold in closest regard. With every new shock there occurs again the tension between the assertion, “I could never do anything like that” and the knowledge, “Yes, I could.”
For the churchgoer, the formula, “Christ died for our sins,” involves the individual in the betrayal and death of Christ—and at that point does so without necessarily communicating the redemptive and reconciling nature of that death. Judas then accurately represents man in his collectivity and his individuality. That is, Judas and man coincide in character, action, and condition in terms of a destructive and self-willed relationship to God and to God’s creation. More specifically, Judas and man share in the event of Christ’s death—the one in a localized and historical sense and the other in a less direct but even more causal way. The weight of our culpability is beyond our strength to endure.
What then? We may seek redemption; we may “curse God and die.” Or we may change our perspective on the problem. In contemporary literature and film, at any rate, it is the last choice that is taken.
Judas has come to be pictured as a tragic and therefore noble figure, the only one of the apostles to struggle honestly with the identity of Christ. Nikos Kazantzakis in The Last Temptation ofChrist takes the reader on a breathless and oppressive march to the cross. It is a march in which Judas acts both to set the reeling pace and to initiate the final outcome. Judas and Christ—in essential conflict—at the same time are joined in mind. They know each other. It is Judas, the strong flesh, that must propel Christ, the transcendent spirit, toward the ultimate moment of temptation and triumph. The minor characters—apostles, priests, merchants, and fishermen—float in a surreal montage around the Christ who must die and Judas who must betray.
More current and of much wider readership is Taylor Caldwell’s I, Judas. Caldwell, writing in association with Jess Steam, offers her readers a novel, a work of fiction, but one in which the foreword purports the book to be an apocryphal Gospel of Judas, and the history of its preservation is given in sufficient detail to be convincing. While many recognize this as a literary device, many more assume that the text is indeed a hidden version of the Christ story—a true story long suppressed by authoritarian churchmen. The advertising copy on the cover of the paperback edition supports this mistaken idea. Judas, the man, is contrasted with Judas, the myth (i.e., the Judas of the biblical account) and an impressed reviewer has concluded that “… we have to look at the story of Judas and Christ in an entirely new light.” A public primed by the distorted picture of biblical research presented in the film version of Irving Wallace’s The Word will not find it difficult to lend credence to this new “revelation” about Jesus.
Caldwell majors on the development of Judas as a man betrayed. He is depicted as a young idealist enlisted by a coalition of the Sanhedrin and the temple rulers to investigate the claims of a popular Galilean preacher; his sincerity and innocence turned, at the last, to the false purposes of the crafty Annas and Caiaphas. He is described as a Jewish patriot whose dedication is betrayed by the self-serving and cowardly bar-Abbas. He resists the cruel Roman procurator only to be tricked and trapped by his own impulsiveness and passion. Indeed, in each event, betrayal hinges on choices made by Judas that might easily be judged as understandable if not admirable. In the end he indicts Christ not as an act of personal betrayal but in the sincere expectation that Jesus—the Messiah—will grasp the moment of crisis and challenge to exert superhuman power over the people of Israel, freeing them from the domination of Rome.
In I, Judas, as in The Last Temptation of Christ, Judas is the one apostle who struggles with the identity of Christ. The others are either buffoons, liars, or cowards, responding to Jesus out of sheep-like obedience or out of expectation of personal gain. The Gospels certainly affirm that Christ was misunderstood during his life by his own apostles, but to characterize the apostles solely on the basis of these references does violence to the larger witness to their understanding.
Caldwell dazzles the reader with Bible quotes, with Bible-like passages, and with an impressive array of details and folk-life references. These, however, do not remove the impression that her characters act in ways entirely inconsistent with their day. Cultural minutia are provided but, in general, the major characters conduct themselves as though they were twentieth-century men in first-century costume. Judas’s rationale for seducing and abandoning his fiancée, Rachel, does not seem to come from the mind of a Palestinian Jew in the days of Pontius Pilate. A second gratuitous love scene takes place in the Fortress Antonia during a break in an audience with the procurator; not only is the event culturally improbable but logistically difficult.
Judas, in I, Judas, becomes such a shallow and bombastic character as the novel progresses that it is difficult to accept him as the theme character of the book. Judas, rather, plays the role of a foil—not to another character, but to an idea.
It is this idea, the casual substitution of the term “reincarnation” for “resurrection,” that poses the most difficult problem for the unwary reader. Suddenly the puzzling term “born again” seems to be clear. The concept of reincarnation long ago gained respectability among the general public as the first of the occult or psychic ideas to do so. In a society where acceptance of pseudo-scientific proof of such ideas is common, the step from one belief to the other is a small one.
In I, Judas, Jesus is pictured in conflict with the Sadducees not over the resurrection of the dead but over the reincarnation of the soul; his teachings are explained in terms of being born again in a cyclic or progressive sense, not in terms of being born again through a personal and transforming experience with the present and living God. The character of Jesus is altered to be compatible with the magical use of secret spells and of elemental power. He becomes a mediator of this power, a heavenly messenger—vague and unreal.
There may be more to trouble the believer here than in such skeptical works as the Passover Plot. You can hear the noise as the cynic grinds his axe, but there is little warning of bias in I, Judas. It is just that here and there, among the details and the Bible quotes, there are those small changes that alter the picture of Christ: of his person, of his teaching, and of his promise of resurrection.
David R. Phillips is minister of education and outreach at South Main Baptist Church, Greenwood, South Carolina.
