by Tom Bissell
Nazar spoke halting English. I asked him if the children with him were his. They were not. He did not know whose they were. Sometimes, he said, they walked with him while he grazed his sheep. I looked at the children. They were ten or eleven, black-haired, brown-eyed, their faces just beginning to shift from adolescent roundness to preteen angularity. I said hello. One smiled, but neither responded. The smiling boy was wearing a Darth Maul T-shirt and had a large half-moon scar under his eye. The other boy shifted his gaze from me to Jay and back again in the sad way of someone who had come to take his invisibility for granted.
When I asked Nazar if many people came to Hakeldama, he did not seem to know what I was talking about. I pointed down toward the field. Hakeldama. The Field of Blood. Suddenly he was nodding. I asked, “Do you know the story of this place?”
“I know the story,” he said. “Yes.”
“Judas?”
“Yehuda. Yes. I know the story.” To prove it, he jerked an imaginary noose around his neck and smiled. “Yehuda.”
“Do many people visit Yehuda’s field?”
“Yes, some America, some Britannia. Not many people. One day, people come. Two day, no people.”
“What do you think of the field?”
Nazar thought for a moment. It was clear he regarded this question as odd. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Yes. Nothing.”
“Do these children know the story of the field?”
He spoke to them in Arabic. The children emphatically shook their heads. He looked back at me. “They don’t know.”
It seemed apt that of the three people I encountered at Hakeldama, one did not care two figs about its associations, and the others knew nothing about it. Nazar’s brown sheep bleated irritably. One of the children hit the brown sheep on its rump with his switch. The sheep trundled along down the ridge, stopped, and bleated again. “These are your sheep?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. But I already knew that, because Nazar had already told me.
Our conversational oscillograph was flatlining. Out of this straining awkwardness, Nazar suddenly pulled a question. “How big is your stay?”
“A few days.”
“Yes? Good.”
“And how about you?” I asked him. “Do you live nearby?”
“Yes, I live.” He swept his hand toward Silwan, into which a lone red motorcycle with an unhelmeted driver was flying up a path.
“Can you see your house from here?”
Nazar did not answer. Instead, he turned and pointed to the southwest, where the keg-like King Solomon Hotel rose up from the horizon. “You live?”
“No,” I said, pointing to the west. “Over there. Yemin Moshe.” This was a tiered residential complex of apartment buildings, all of them architecture-school elegant and well tended. It was, needless to say, a Jewish neighborhood.
Nazar nodded glumly and seemed to weigh the advisability of bringing up something else he wished to address. I waited. “Before,” he said finally, “I live two houses.” He was vaguely aggrieved now, began to speak faster, and his grammar quickly became a casualty. These two houses were also in Silwan, but neither was a house he currently lived in. Apparently, a Britannia had wanted to help him with one of his homes, his home, which is under the ground, on the other side, which big shot came to help, help, help, but he come now away, and no help. And three hundred, which is three hundred? Three zero zero, which is this? Three hundred. Yes, Britannia help three hundred, he try but no help. And then Israelis take his home.
I stood there, nodding in a careful, piecing-it-together way. Jay and I would spend the next four days exchanging theories as to the precise nature of these described machinations.
Once again Nazar pointed off into the distance, toward the Separation Barrier/Apartheid Wall, which suddenly looked to me less like a wall and more like a dam, which, I supposed, it was. He began to say something about the barrier but did not have the words. His hand dropped. He shook his head and looked at the ground. He had said as much as he could.
“What is this little fence for?” I asked him, placing my hand atop one of the barbed-wire fence’s wooden stakes.
Nazar looked up. “For small people and animal not come here. No fence, maybe big fall.”
I thanked Nazar for his time. “No problem,” he said, and again, fumblingly, we shook hands. As Jay and I started away, the muezzins of Jerusalem’s many mosques began the adhan, or call to prayer. They did not begin simultaneously. At first, there were four distinct voices, at least one of which did not sound prerecorded, but they were soon joined by others, and more after that. I had heard the adhan in many cities of the world and had never found it anything other than an ideal of sonic beauty. The call to prayer made mornings less lonely, made late afternoons more melancholy, and filled the evening with strange, silvery omens. But I had never heard a call to prayer quite like this growing gale of sound. The voices—another had just joined—lost their lovely spirals of individuality and overlapped into a formless meteorological whole, something everywhere at once but nowhere specifically. I was not sure if this sensation was due to the acoustics of the valley or the sheer number of voices or was a simple acknowledgment of the hostility these calls to prayer both provoked and gave voice to. For a moment, it felt as though the Hinnom valley’s every ghost had turned banshee in anger and now sang and swirled around us. When we looked back at Nazar, he was using a large, flat rock to drive the fence stake I had touched deeper into the ground.
VII.
It was difficult not to be frustrated by the barrenness of Hakeldama, as well as by the myriad contradictions and uncertainties surrounding Judas’s betrayal of Jesus. Of course, the greatest mystery was the central one: Why? Why did Judas betray Jesus? Any attempted explanation for Judas’s actions is limited by the paucity of the source material (not that this has stopped anyone). The earliest Christian writers to inch beyond the gospels’ minimalist portrayal of Judas sought answers in his childhood. A work today known as The Arabic Infancy Gospel, written around the fifth or sixth century, is the first surviving piece of Christian literature to have imagined Judas as a boy. For its author, the seeds of evil were planted deep: the nasty tyke, already possessed by Satan, strikes his fellow toddler Jesus (on the very spot a Roman lance will later penetrate) and makes him cry. For this writer, evil was a matter not of behavior, or even choice, but of being. Such a villain had to suffer, yet the suffering of Papias’s and Luke’s Judas, however extreme and loathsome, is also somewhat impersonal—a scary, vaguely ludicrous bedtime story. In the following centuries, Judas found himself pushed down on ever more horrifying nail beds. The most famous example is contained in the Inferno section of The Divine Comedy, wherein Dante marvels at the sight of a three-headed Satan, each of his mouths filled with a sinner “torn up by teeth…that stripped their backs to show the bones beneath.” One of these sinners is Judas, his extruding legs kicking helplessly and eternally. Virgil tells Dante,
With just his legs
He signals pain. His head is not on show.
We do not see or hear the way he begs
For that same mercy he did not bestow.
One of the strangest and most elaborate retellings of the Judas story can be found in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend,*11 an audacious churchman’s attempt to collate, curate, and expound on the lives of literally hundreds of figures from the first Christian millennium. (It is, essentially, Christian legend encyclopedized.) According to Jacobus, Judas’s mother, Cyborea, has a dream that she will bear a son “so wicked” he might destroy the Jewish people. When Judas is born, his alarmed parents put him in a basket and push him out to sea. The queen of an island called Scariot happens to be walking along the beach when the basket washes ashore. Barren of an heir, the queen decides to raise Judas as her own, “in royal style.” Then the queen unexpectedly becomes pregnant; once her child is born, “Judas frequently maltreated the royal child and made him cry.” The queen, in frus
tration, tells Judas he was a foundling; Judas, in turn, kills the queen’s son and flees to Jerusalem to “the household of Pilate, who was then governor of Judea.” Pilate adores Judas, treating him “as a favorite.” One day, Pilate, while strolling around his palace, sees a nearby orchard and sends Judas to fetch some fruits. The orchard’s owner comes out and confronts Judas. They argue; Judas kills him, quickly disposes of the body, and marries the man’s wife. Of course, the man he has killed is his father, and the woman he has married is his mother. When this Judas discovers his life is plagiarized Sophocles, he turns to Jesus and begins to follow his ministry.
Accounts such as Jacobus’s contain an implicit rehabilitation of Judas, if only because he is shown to be the victim of forces beyond his comprehension. Although Jacobus wrote at roughly the same time as Dante, we can see a differently perceived Judas taking shape. The first-century minds of the gospel writers imagined a Judas who caused the tumblers of prophecy to fall into place. Jacobus’s freer mind was able to inject agency into the Judas story, if only to cruelly drown it. Being evil, Jacobus seems to suggest, is not the same thing as being cursed. Amid the spear-like certainties of medieval Christian thought, this Judas comes as something of a respite, and his fate might have struck many of Jacobus’s readers as being much like their own: resoundingly unfair, difficult to comprehend, and pointless to resist.
The most prominent form of Judas rehabilitation imagines him in terms that could be called heroic, if tragically misguided. This Judas is typically a reluctant traitor who turns Jesus over to the authorities for reasons ranging from frustration to impatience to the certainty that a captured Jesus will finally act, take up his Davidic crown, and drive the Romans from Palestine. Even though the gospels contain nothing to support this view, the Judas of ardent nationalism has been a popular one since the nineteenth century and became even more popular in the latter half of the twentieth, when post-Holocaust sensitivities to the conspicuously Jewish role Judas had long played in the Christian narrative intensified.
The idea that Judas betrayed Jesus in order to save Israel is often called the De Quincey theory, so-named for the opium-eating memoirist Thomas De Quincey, the first writer to popularize (though not originate) the notion. He published his views in an essay titled “Judas Iscariot” in 1857, a time when textual criticism, unaligned with any religious creed and much of it German, was beginning its first invasion of the New Testament. De Quincey argues that the Twelve were guilty of the “delusion” that peaceful means could succeed in bringing the Kingdom of Heaven down to earth. He goes on to refer to Jesus as “sublimely over-gifted” and “like Shakspere’s [sic] great creation Prince Hamlet, not correspondingly endowed for the business of action.” In De Quincey’s excitable mind, Judas was the only member of Jesus’s circle willing to take the necessary action to place Jesus “at the head of an insurrectionary movement.”
This is, in many ways, the Judas contemporary audiences are left with, a man who can be imagined only as having acted out of hope for insurrection or some other ostensibly rational purpose. Perhaps this merely reveals a reasonable human dissatisfaction with the Judas story, which centuries of pogroms, many of them driven by Christian determination to blame the death of Jesus on Jews, have made morally appalling. The Son of God, betrayed by the son of the Jews. This was the view of Augustine and many other early Christian thinkers, but only in the sludgier corners of the Internet could one dare publicly entertain such thoughts today.
In 2006, the public received yet another ideation of Judas when the lost*12 Gospel of Judas, a work written in the mid-second century, was finally translated and published by a team of scholars working for the National Geographic Society. This gospel—a self-applied misnomer, in that it is structured not like a gospel but rather as an interminable cosmic dialogue between Jesus and Judas—had in some manner come to the attention of the church father Irenaeus, who condemned it for its portrayal of Judas “as knowing the truth as none of the others [that is, the Twelve] did.”
In The Lost Gospel, one of many quickly published books about The Gospel of Judas, the journalist Herbert Krosney writes, “This version of Judas’s story was too controversial for early Church leaders like Irenaeus. By condemning it, they erased it from history, never to be seen again.” Krosney also argues that “Jesus Christ arranges his own execution” in this controversial gospel by asking Judas to betray him, without remembering that in the canonical gospel tradition Jesus implicitly does the same thing. Krosney refers to Judas as being “unlike anything that you have read before,” which is simply not true. Many dozens of novels, plays, stories, poems, and films have presented essentially the same story that Krosney spells out.
Despite these insinuations, The Gospel of Judas is a piece of sectarian polemical literature aimed at rival Christians. It is not, and does not pretend to be, an account of the life and death of Jesus. As the scholar April D. DeConick has established, The Gospel of Judas makes no claims for a heroic Judas acting in concert with Jesus and in fact condemns him more harshly than the gospels. “Our modern consciousness appears to need a ‘good’ Judas,” DeConick writes. “We have generated plot after plot, character after character, story after story, to exonerate Judas, to figure out his motivations, to make him our friend and hero.”
To find this man in The Gospel of Judas required considerable effort. The gospel came out of the traditions of Sethian Christianity, so named for Adam and Eve’s son Seth, whom these ancient Christians believed had secret rituals and guidance written on stone tablets that they alone possessed. Sethian Christians additionally regarded the now widely accepted Christian theology of atonement (which presupposes that Jesus died for our sins) as little more than child sacrifice. DeConick refers to the Sethians as the “most confrontational” group among the second century’s many heterodox Christians, as they apparently viewed Christians who claimed direct descent from apostolic teaching with special disgust.*13
DeConick argues, in fact, that The Gospel of Judas is basically an anti-apostolic parody. Here, the apostles are presented as having dreams involving child sacrifice and sodomy, which Jesus tells them are representative of the “people that you lead astray.” Judas, who in the work receives both illumination and condemnation, is merely Jesus’s cosmological sounding board—though the gospel’s elliptical presentation of the betrayal, with which it concludes, is undeniably powerful: “And [the scribes] approached Judas. They said to him, ‘What are you doing here? Aren’t you the disciple of Jesus?’ He answered them as they wished. Then Judas received some money. He handed him over to them.”
VIII.
To early Christians, a horribly punished Judas reaffirmed order. To modern Christians, a horribly punished Judas questions the very nature of Christian redemption. Irenaeus, in his dismissal of The Gospel of Judas, referred to “the mystery of the betrayal,” and it is a mystery, one deep and confounding enough to have taxed the best minds of Christianity. In the Gospel According to John, Jesus says, “I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.” If this is the case, if Jesus died willingly, how, then, can Judas be blamed for the betrayal? What, exactly, was betrayed?
One early Christian named Marcion pondered this very question. A rich Greek shipping mogul and bishop’s son, Marcion rejected every apostle but Paul as false; his conception of Jesus’s divinity was, incredibly, even higher than that of what became Christian orthodoxy. Marcion’s Jesus was an entirely new god, a “stranger” god, who had no relation to the Jewish God. To gather support for his beliefs, he relocated to Rome and cobbled together his own proto–New Testament, which contained most but not all of the Pauline letters and what is believed to have been a heavily redacted form of the Gospel According to Luke, though Marcion dispensed with Luke’s Acts.*14 One of the most powerful, successful, and influential Christian heterodoxies of its or any other time, Marcionism remained active three hundred years after its founder’s death—smaller Marci
onite communities endured until the tenth century—and some of its beliefs traveled as far as Afghanistan. Marcion himself was excommunicated by the Roman church in the mid-140s; the church even bit the bullet and returned his many tithes and alms. Marcion’s conception of Jesus nevertheless prompts serious theological questions. If Jesus truly was who he said he was, for instance, could he be betrayed? To a Marcionite, the answer was obvious. Marcion’s “gospel” thus contained no mention of the Judas tradition.
In the third century, Origen, early Christianity’s greatest theologian, asked similar questions about Judas, and one of his answers came out of the belief, which he helped formulate, in what is called universal reconciliation, which holds that all souls, including demonic ones, will eventually receive salvation, in part because the fall of humankind into sin was a universal event beyond the control of those who were not yet born. (Universal reconciliation was declared anathema by the church in the mid-sixth century, and Origen himself was named a heretic—though an often fondly regarded heretic whose work many thoughtful Christians enjoyed on the sly for centuries.) Origen believed that Judas began as a faithful, believing disciple of Jesus but suffered some crisis of faith that allowed Satan to influence him. Judas was, all the same, saved. To support this view, Origen noted the manner in which Judas behaved after the betrayal, as well as his “agonizing remorse when he repented of sins that he could no longer bear even to live.” This showed that Judas “could not utterly despise what he had learnt from Jesus.”
One of Origen’s most moving struggles was his attempt to reconcile Jesus’s apparent foreknowledge of Judas’s betrayal with the freedom of choice supposedly granted by God. Origen, who was deeply conversant with Greek philosophy and literature, used the example of Oedipus to show that foreknowledge did not overrule free will because foreknowledge was not causative and prognostication was not instigation: “For it does not follow from the fact that Jesus correctly predicted the actions of the traitor and of the one who denied him, that he was responsible for their impiety and wicked conduct.” While Origen acknowledged that citing a story from mythology was somewhat unusual (“historicity does not affect the argument”), he did not have many other places to turn. Judas was forcing even the most brilliant Christians to confront questions that the faith seemed ill-equipped to answer.