by Tom Bissell
Luke apparently struggled hardest with the notion of one of the Twelve being a betrayer. To account for this unfathomable turn of events, Luke opted for an explanation that would long affect Christian thinking: Judas betrayed Jesus because of Satan.*8 This vastly expanded the reach, efficacy, and anthropological interest of Satan, hitherto an infrequently glimpsed enigma in human consciousness. Luke, like Matthew, was in all likelihood trying to counter the potent question of how the Messiah could have been betrayed by one of his own, but his thinking landed him on a radically different plane.
Luke abandons the Bethany portion of the betrayal narrative and merely notes that as Passover in Jerusalem begins, “Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was one of the twelve.” Judas confers with the authorities and once again is paid for his services. His motivation, however, remains demonic; money is a worldly afterthought. At the Last Supper, as in Matthew, Luke’s Jesus makes clear that he knows he must be betrayed to fulfill scripture (“For the Son of Man is going as it has been determined”) but wishes a woe, similar to that of Mark, on the one who will give him over. Judas, though, is not named. Nor does Judas, when he leads the authorities to his master, apparently get to kiss Jesus. Instead, Jesus stops him short with these words: “Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?” This is the only time in the gospel tradition that Jesus addresses Judas by name.
John appears just as bewildered as Luke that one of Jesus’s own followers was a traitor. “Did I not choose you, the twelve?” Jesus says to his disciples in the Gospel According to John. “Yet one of you is a devil.” Like Mark, John contains a story of Jesus’s trip to Bethany, though he lodges there in the home of Lazarus (not, as in Mark, Simon the leper). Lazarus lives with his sisters Mary and Martha, and whereas Mark and Matthew have an unnamed woman anointing Jesus, John tells us it is Mary who takes “a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard” and applies it to Jesus’s feet with her hair. In an additional touch of verisimilitude, the house soon fills “with the fragrance of the perfume.” John provides other extra details. In Mark, unnamed people get upset at this profligate use of expensive fragrance. In Matthew, it is the disciples. In John, it is Judas who complains, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” But John’s Judas is no man of conscience. “Judas said this,” John writes, “not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief.” According to John, Judas has been stealing from the common purse since Jesus’s ministry began. Interestingly, though, money will have no place in John’s version of Judas’s betrayal.
This leaves us with John’s rendering of the betrayal itself, which is, of all the gospels, the most dramatically compelling. As Passover begins, we learn that the Devil has “already” entered “into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot.” Jesus knows this, for “the Father had given all things into his hands.” John’s Last Supper, which lacks the Eucharistic tradition found in the other gospels, mainly consists of Jesus’s talking. One of the first things Jesus says is “Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me.” The alarmed apostles look about the table and ask who it might be. Jesus answers, “It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” Jesus gives the bread to Judas. The rest of the passage deserves full citation:
After [Judas] received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, “Do quickly what you are going to do.” Now no one at the table knew why he had said this to him. Some thought that, because Judas had the common purse, Jesus was telling him, “Buy what we need for the festival”; or, that he should give something to the poor. So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.
It is a scene of spooky, inarguable power and scalp-clawing mystification. Why do the disciples not understand Jesus’s words to Judas when he has plainly identified him as his betrayer? What is the difference between the earlier Devil that “already” entered Judas and the “Satan” that penetrates him here? This brand of narrative impenetrability is infrequent in John. Unlike the other evangelists, John has the proper storytelling sense to portray Judas’s departure from the Last Supper and to explain that Judas knew the postprandial gathering place to which Jesus would lead the Twelve (though John does not name it as Gethsemane). And yet, after subjecting Judas to such close narrative attention, John is content during the betrayal scene to leave Judas “standing with” the authorities and provide him with nothing to say or do. John also has a “detachment” of Roman soldiers there to do the arresting, whom Jesus forces to the ground in an apparent display of his power. The word translated as “detachment” is, in Greek, actually the technical military term for a cohort, which is to say six hundred soldiers, a number that would have been close to every available Roman soldier in Jerusalem. Whether John was simply confused by the terminology or intended to portray six hundred soldiers searching for one man is unclear, though none of the other gospels indicate the presence of Roman soldiers during Jesus’s arrest. John, turning his back on the unlovely spectacle, never mentions Judas again.
V.
All these questions and contradictions raise a fundamental question: Was Judas real? Those who believe Judas was real must shadowbox a few small pertinences: There is little information about him in the New Testament; what information it does contain is contradictory; the first generation of church fathers said almost nothing about Judas. Paul, our earliest*9 Christian commentator, writes in his first letter to the Corinthians of “the night when [Jesus] was betrayed”—literally, “handed over”—and embeds that betrayal within the Last Supper/Eucharist tradition, as do the gospels. But who, if anyone, betrayed or handed Jesus over is not specified by Paul.
The scholar Kim Paffenroth writes that Paul “shows that it is quite possible to proclaim an idea of Jesus, his mission, and his passion without any idea of his betrayer,” but very smartly goes on to note that it is “practically impossible to have a story of him that lacks the crucial poignancy of the betrayer.” Paul had a much stronger theological mind than the gospel writers. What he did not have is their storytelling inclination or skills. The difference between them is similar to the difference between an essayist and a fiction writer. If Jesus is an idea in Paul and a character in the gospels, Judas may be an example of the key difference between ideas and stories. Stories need characters, and characters need motives.
Matthew and Luke both attempted to deal with the betrayal as a fulfillment of scripture, but these attempts, even by the wooden-nickel standards of prophecy, are some of the least convincing bits of exegesis found in the gospel tradition. Consider the matter of Hakeldama, the Field of Blood. In Matthew, after Judas has thrown his money into the Temple, the chief priests gather it up out of the belief that it is “not lawful” for such money to be placed in the treasury. To cleanse the sum, they use it “to buy the potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners.” Matthew writes that this “fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah.” The prophecy being fulfilled here does not exist in any surviving form of Jeremiah. Matthew appears to be mixing various bits of Hebrew scripture, some of it perhaps from Zechariah. This has long baffled Christian commentators, who have generated all manner of explanations and excuses for the inconsistency. Meanwhile, in Acts, Luke refers to Judas’s having “acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness” and allows Peter to claim scriptural precedence for the occurrence: “For it is written in the book of Psalms, ‘Let his homestead become desolate, / and let there be no one to live in it.’ ” This is apparently a citation of Psalm 69:25, which no longer contains the words Peter cites.
Leaving aside the fact that Matthew and Luke refer back to passages of Hebrew scripture that are no longer extant, it is impossible for both accounts to be simultaneously true. In Matthew, the priests buy the field. In Acts, Judas buys the field himself. In Matthew, it is to serve as a foreigners’ burial place. In Acts, there are no burial overtones (though some sch
olars have suggested Hakeldama is a distant Greek corruption of “sleeping place” or “cemetery”). In Matthew, the “blood” of the field refers to that of blood money. In Luke, the “blood” appears to refer to that which Judas spilled onto its ground.
Luke also opted for a more economical placement of Judas’s death, saving it for the beginning of his Acts of the Apostles. Here, the death (not the suicide) of Judas comes during Peter’s address to the believers in Jerusalem. We are told that Judas, after acquiring his field, fell “headlong” and “burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out.” A somewhat similar account of Judas’s death can be found in fragments of a second-century work by Papias of Hierapolis:
Judas wandered in this world, a great example of impiety. His flesh swelled so much that where a cart went through easily, he was not able to go through, not even the mass of his head; they say that his eyelids swelled so much that he could not see any light at all….His genitals were more enlarged and unsightly than any other deformity, while blood and worms flowed from all over his body, necessarily doing great harm just by themselves….[T]hey say that he died on his own property, and that on account of the stench that place is desolate and uninhabited even until now.
Note the fixation on stench, the wormy corruption of the body’s sensual parts, the prolonged nature of the suffering. Note, too, what has been lost from Acts: the name of the field, how Judas came to possess it, and any notion of scriptural fulfillment. The accounts of Judas’s death in both Acts and Papias have much in common with an ancient genre that might be called the Horrible Death, in which a deserving fiend suffers a pustular and often disintegration- or worm-related end.*10
Scribes working throughout Christianity’s first five centuries were troubled by the New Testament’s discrepancies when it came to Judas’s end, and several changed a number of passages to bring them into agreement, but the invasive solutions provided by devout editors were eventually judged unsatisfactory. In time, a process called harmonization emerged within Christian thought, which involves taking contradictory passages from different gospels and explaining away the differences by creative imagining. In Judas’s case, this meant positing a death by hanging, as Matthew writes, but then a rope breaks, and a swollen, distended body falls and breaks open on the ground, as Luke writes. When one chooses to view the gospels not as singular texts with different points of view and distinct literary and historical contexts, the New Testament becomes a story as seamless as serial television, which is probably why harmonization remains the prevalent mode among conservative Christian apologists. Yet we can thank the gormless convolutions of harmonization for one aspect of the Judas story. Matthew never indicates that Judas was remembered as having used Hakeldama as his place of self-murder or being buried there, and Luke’s account as to where exactly Judas expired is vague. Only through harmonization did Hakeldama become known as the last earthly place on which Judas set eyes.
VI.
Let his homestead become desolate, and let there be no one to live in it.
Luke was citing scripture he believed fulfilled prophecy; he might as well have been forecasting Hakeldama’s future. Desolate? Lunar. Let there be no one to live in it? Neither Jay nor I had seen anyone for hours. It was the sort of hot, quiet day in which one could almost hear the faint sizzle of solar combustion. While Jay sat on a stone and read a book, I filled my notepad with doodles of the hilltop Old City’s skyline. We were as mutually oblivious and silently occupied as castaways who had given up all hope of rescue. I had planned to ask all those we encountered at Hakeldama what moved them to come here. Morbid curiosity or historical inquisitiveness? Spiritual openness or angry righteousness? Sadness expressed or vengefulness savored? As it happened, my only visitor thus far had been a small gray lizard. It approached, stopped next to my shoe, and locked into a pose of alert stillness. The moment I lifted my foot, the lizard shot away, a living bullet.
Jay suddenly said my name and told me to look up. On the ridge above Hakeldama, standing behind a barbed-wire fence, three sheep stared down at us with dull, domesticated half interest. They had approached along the same path earlier used by the Palestinian woman, who remained the only human being we had seen in the immediate area. One of the sheep was adobe brown and wore a bright, many-colored collar. The other two were collarless and white, or approximately white: clumps of dirt and dung dangled from their thick wool coats. A man came up behind the sheep, speaking to them in Arabic. It appeared that he was their shepherd, an occupation that came with certain sartorial expectations, all of which he atomized. He wore dusty jeans and a green-and-black Windbreaker with a prominent tear on one sleeve. He said nothing; neither did we. Two small children came up behind the shepherd, both carrying long wooden switches. One of the children began to apply his switch, harmlessly but repeatedly, to the backside of the brown sheep, which somehow seemed to sigh.
The shepherd appeared neither friendly nor unfriendly, and I debated whether or not to say hello. Jay had already returned to his book. Without saying anything, I returned to my doodles. A few minutes later, I looked up again. The shepherd, his small flock, and the children were still standing there, the cloudless sky behind them a wall of brilliant, wet-paint blue. I wondered if this man regarded us as trespassers. Was this perhaps his land? Did his children play here? Did his sheep graze here? All seemed remote possibilities. The land probably belonged to the nearby monastery, if anyone, and the only game I could imagine being played at Hakeldama was who could run away from it the fastest.
Below us, on the road that snaked along the bottom of the Hinnom valley, a hip-hop-blaring white sedan motored toward Silwan. A historically Arab neighborhood adjacent to the Old City, Silwan had lately become the object of a considerable settling effort by Jewish Israelis. One large Jewish development there is named for Jonathan Pollard, the convicted American spy who gave U.S. military secrets to Israel.
I looked up at the shepherd and waved. To my surprise, he smiled and waved back. To him I made another, more complicated gesture that involved pointing at myself, a two-fingered walking pantomime, and then pointing at him. Once he figured out what I was trying to suggest, he nodded and waved us up. We circled our way toward the ridge, stepping over what had to be the most halfhearted barbed-wire fence in all of Israel.
From the top of the ridge, we could see more of Silwan. I had read that parts of this neighborhood, which filled a valley and swept handsomely up its hillsides, were lovely, but many of its muddy and squatly woeful facing buildings resembled nothing so much as a charmless San Francisco. We could see something far more charmless, however, and this was a section of what the Israelis called the Separation Barrier and the Palestinians called the Racial Segregation or Apartheid Wall. The Israeli government proposed a limited barrier to separate Jewish Israelis from Palestinians in the early 1990s, during the first intifada. Construction on a barrier between the Gaza Strip and Tel Aviv began in 1994, but as Israeli-Palestinian relations worsened and finally ruptured in 2000 with the beginning of the second intifada, which killed more than eight hundred people, the Israeli government called for a far more comprehensive barrier.
The majority of the barrier was found in rural areas, and in those places it was, for the most part, a militarized chain-link fence. In urban areas, the barrier took the form of an eight-foot-high concrete wall, which was purportedly intended to frustrate snipers. The portion of the barrier we now looked upon was of the concrete-wall variety and lay close to Silwan’s southern edge. It was nearly finished. Another proposed portion of the barrier would brush the edge of the neighborhood of Givat Hananya or Abu Tor, which was found directly to the south of Hakeldama and had the distinction of being one of Jerusalem’s only mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhoods. As far as I could figure from the barrier’s currently planned coordinates, Hakeldama would be hemmed in on at least two sides but would not fall inside it. On one older, outdated map, the barrier’s proposed path seemed purposely altered to avoid enclosing Hakeldama—a p
lace, it appeared, no one had any wish to claim.
The shepherd welcomed Jay and me to his ridge with a handshake, his left hand placed over his heart. His name was Nazar, and he claimed to be thirty-four years old. If he had said his shoes were thirty-four years old, I might have believed him. Nazar looked at least fifty and seemed unwell in the purest diagnostic sense of the word. One of his eyes had the cloudy opaqueness of a mood ring, and his mouth was filled with the stained and broken teeth of a fairy-tale goblin.