chapter10

AND ONE OF YOU IS A DEVIL

How does a man become a devil? First we must ask, how does a verb become a man, a “word made flesh”? For that seems to be just what happened in the case of Judas Iscariot.

Did you ever notice anything strange about the story of Jesus getting arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane? We are told that the authorities wanted desperately to eliminate Jesus. They feared his influence among the people, and they feared it so greatly that they judged it too dangerous to arrest him publicly for fear that the crowds would not permit it. They might rise up and lynch anyone who tried to make away with their favorite. This is why the Sanhedrin engages Judas Iscariot. They want to know where they can find him out of the public eye. But why would they need a man on the inside for that? Luke 22:39 says Jesus and his band habitually retreated to the Mount of Olives. That must have been easily known. There is no hint of Jesus trying to keep his whereabouts a secret, nor of how he might have succeeded in the endeavor if he had wanted to.

And then, once the arresting party arrived in Gethsemane, why do they need Judas or anyone else to identify Jesus? Isn't the whole point of the exercise to seize Jesus on the sly since he is known to everybody? O’Reilly and Dugard have some inkling of the problem, since, as they describe the scene, they “explain” that the soldiers’ torches were not bright enough for them to distinguish faces (p. 223). Then why in Sheol did they bring them in the first place? Were they as discombobulated as poor Jimmy Carter, who failed to send enough helicopter gunships to rescue the American hostages in Tehran? If their flashlights were running out of juice, then surely they would have simply drawn their swords and approached the group of disciples, shining the fading light in each face. John 18:4–5 does not even have Judas point Jesus out, unlike in the Synoptics: “Then Jesus, knowing all that was to befall him, came forward and said to them, ‘Whom do you seek?’ They answered him, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ Jesus said to them, ‘I am he.’” Naturally, O’Reilly and Dugard hybridize John and the Synoptics, having Judas kiss Jesus to point him out and having Jesus ask who the soldiers are looking for, unwittingly underlining the superfluity of Judas in the scene. He seems to be a fifth wheel, of as little use as most of Michelle Obama's hundred-plus staff assistants.

You have to begin to wonder if Judas has been artificially inserted into the story. Where did the Judas character come from? We have already seen that perhaps the best guess as to the meaning of “Iscariot” is ishqarya: “Man of Falsehood,” “the False One,” or “the Betrayer.” This marks him as one of Tzvetan Todorov's “narrative-men,”1 a character who is identical with his function in the narrative, no more, no less. “We need someone to betray Jesus, so let's add Mr. Betrayer.”² And such was the zygote for the Judas Goat.

POGROM'S PROGRESS

The New Testament epistles know nothing of Judas Iscariot or even of any betrayal of Jesus. Not even in 1 Corinthians 11:23: “The Lord Jesus on the night he was betrayed took bread and broke it,” and so forth. The word translated here as “betrayed” is images , paradideto, which can just as easily mean “handed over” or “delivered up,” as in Romans 8:32, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up [ images , paredoken] for us all.” There is no reason, unless we insist on reading the gospel accounts into 1 Corinthians 11:23, not to translate the verse as “the Lord Jesus, on the night he was delivered up,” in other words, by the providence of God. But once someone thought to read the word as “betrayed,” the question arose to which Judas became the answer. We need a betrayer, so how about Mr. Betrayer? Judas the False One, Judas Iscariot.

Why the name “Judas”? Isn't it obvious? Judas stands for the Jews collectively, who rejected Jesus.3 He is exactly the same sort of fictionalized personification we see a bit later in the tradition (after the New Testament) as the Wandering Jew,⁴ the wise guy who heckled Jesus as the Savior painfully made his way to Golgotha. The legend has it that Jesus, not in a very forgiving mood, turned to him and muttered, “Tarry thou till I come again.”⁵ The poor jerk was condemned to live on and on, drifting through the wide world like the murderer Cain (Gen. 4:12, “You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth”). He witnessed terrible suffering and adversity, longing for surcease but doomed to this role until Christ should come again to reprieve him in death. The Wandering Jew was a symbol of Jews, Christ-rejecters sentenced to wander through the Gentile world until the end of the age. He was essentially a second Judas. Judas Iscariot was the first Wandering Jew, only his sojourn was not to last that long, finishing at the end of a length of rope.

The first thing on Judas’ rap sheet is his unmotivated visit to the Sanhedrin to offer information on Jesus. “Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them. And when they heard it they were glad, and promised to give him money” (Mark 14:10–11). Compare this with Matthew's rewrite: “Then one of the twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, ‘What will you give me if I deliver him to you?’ And they paid him thirty pieces of silver” (Matt. 26:14–15). Notice that, while Mark had Judas volunteer to turn Jesus over to the authorities, with no strings attached, Matthew has Judas mention money right up front. He has Judas offer to sell out Jesus if they will pay for his services.

Matthew even names a figure, and he is the only gospel writer who does. Where do you suppose he got that bit of “information”? From Zechariah 11:12: “Then I said to them, ‘If it seems right⁶ to you, give me my wages; but if not, keep them.’ And they weighed out as my wages thirty shekels of silver.”⁷ But Matthew mines even more “historical” data from Zechariah, which he regarded as a fruitful source of “facts” about Jesus, if only one knew how to read scripture esoterically (Matt. 13:52). What does Judas eventually do with his ill-gotten gains? He finds they are burning a hole in his conscience, so he rids himself of them. He goes back to the priests, who have neither sympathy for nor any further interest in him, so the betrayer pitches the money to the floor of the Temple treasury and leaves. The priests then deliberate on what to do with it. As it is bounty money, they cannot put it back into the treasury, so they decide to use it for a charitable act, the purchase of the potter's field to use as a cemetery for indigents (Matt. 27:3–10). How did Matthew “know” any of this? An educated scribe, Matthew draws on three different versions of scripture, Hebrew, Syriac, and Greek, as it suited his purposes. The Syriac version of Zechariah 11:13 says, “Then the Lord said to me, ‘Cast it into the treasury, the lordly price at which I was paid off by them.’” But the Hebrew has, probably because of some transcriptional error, “Cast it to the potter.” Matthew decided to harmonize the two, having Judas dump the money in the treasury (a place to which he could not have gained access in real life), whence it is recovered and given to the potter.8

THE FUNCTION OF UNCTION

Mark may have meant to imply that Judas was disgruntled at Jesus welcoming the Bethany anointing, thus violating his usual policy of telling rich would-be followers to cash in their possessions and give to the poor (Mark 14:4–5), and this was the last straw. Disillusioned with Jesus, he sneaks off to the Sanhedrin to conspire with them. Could be, I guess. But then Mark does not even specify that the carpers were among the disciples, though Matthew drew that inference (Matt. 26:8). And if Judas had decided to drop out of the disciples, convinced that he had backed the wrong horse—would his natural reaction be to engineer his former master's death? That seems a bit extreme. Why not just shake his head and go back home, like the disillusioned disciples in Luke 24:13–21? So it is not clear that Mark assigned any particular motive for the betrayal. And that is what we might expect. Hyam Maccoby comments on “Judas’ motive in betraying Jesus. In view of the fact that he is the vehicle of a cosmic purpose, a necessary actor in a drama of sacrifice, we should expect to find that any personal motives ascribed to him are flimsy, ad hoc, or contradictory; and this is just what we do find.”9 That is because these motives will be secondary attempts to historicize the original myth. If one is trying to make the story look like an account of historical events, one requires psychological, or at least narrative, motivation. And different authors will posit different motives, just as the gospel writers do.

As we have seen, Mark does not offer us a motive for Judas’ actions. It is enough that Judas’ epithet tells him what to do: Iscariot, the Betrayer. Again, Matthew felt he needed to make more sense of it, so he makes Judas venal and greedy: he sells Jesus out to make a few extra bucks. John carries this particular theme a step further: Judas was embezzling from the disciples’ petty cash fund the whole time (John 12:6). But even that is not as bad as it (and as Judas) gets. Luke has a different anointing story (7:36–50), in which it is a character called Simon the Pharisee who criticizes Jesus for putting up with the woman who anoints him. So he does not even hint that this episode might have goaded Judas into betraying Jesus. Nor does he ever intimate that Judas was a greedy man (though he does not hesitate to vilify the Pharisees in this manner, Luke 16:14). No, when it comes to Judas, Luke loads the big guns: “Then Satan entered into Judas Iscariot, who was of the number of the twelve; he went away and conferred with the chief priests and captains [of the Temple police] how he might betray him to them. And they were glad and engaged to give him money. So he agreed, and sought an opportunity to betray him to them in the absence of the multitude” (Luke 22:3–6). So Judas was possessed, and not even by some subordinate demon like Wormwood, but by Satan himself, “Our Father Below.”¹⁰ John, as we have seen, makes Judas the prototype for modern televangelists, skimming off the ministry receipts, but he also echoes Luke as well as Saturday Night Live comedian Dana Carvey's Church Lady: Who could have gotten Judas to betray Jesus? “Oh, I don't know…could it be…Satan?” John says, “The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him” (John 13:2).

O’REILLY AND DUGARD: FALSE WITNESSES

What do our intrepid historians (that's Syriac for “novelists”) make of Judas’ motivation? They drop the devil-possession business. I guess even they felt queasy about bringing Satan onstage as a character. Keep in mind, in general, they are trying to make the Jesus story look like it could have happened in the real world, and Satan would make the thing start looking like The Exorcist. But they do retain John's picture of Judas as a coin-pinching Jew—and this, even though it doesn't fit very well with another version they like: Judas as enthusiastic for Jesus but impatient to see him do his thing.

“What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?” Judas asks. [There's Matthew.]…“Thirty silver coins,” comes the reply. This is 120 denarii, the equivalent of four months’ wages. Judas has lived the hand-to-mouth existence of Jesus’ disciples for two long years, rarely having more than a few extra coins in his purse, and very little in the way of luxury. Now the chief priest is offering him a lucrative bounty to select a time and place, far from the Temple courts, to arrest Jesus. Judas is a schemer. He has plotted the odds so that they are in his favor. He knows that if he takes the money, one of two things will happen: Jesus will be arrested and then declare himself to be the Christ. If the Nazarene truly is the Messiah, then he will have no problem saving himself from Caiaphas and the high priests. However, if Jesus is not the Christ, he will die. Either way, Judas’ life will be spared. (pp. 210–11)

It doesn't seem to occur to Judas, or to O’Reilly and Dugard, that, if Jesus is the Messianic Superman, and even if he does cast aside his Clark Kent disguise and kick Caiaphas’ sanctimonious butt, he is going to know that Judas set him up. No hard feelings? I wouldn't bet on it. Nor is the Judas of Killing Jesus worried about reprisals from the other disciples if Jesus dies. The whole implausible scenario is the product of O’Reilly and Dugard treating the various gospel motivations of Judas as jigsaw puzzle pieces and trying to make a unified picture out of them, even if they have to shave some of the pieces and toss others off the table altogether. To borrow their comment about Caiaphas, “All these details…can be massaged” (p. 207).

Note also that our authors do not hesitate to include as a piece of their puzzle Matthew's thirty pieces of silver, derived from no one's memories, but from Zechariah. Matthew was not writing history, and neither are O’Reilly and Dugard.

They make a salad of the gospels’ various anointing stories, too. Their first maneuver is to resort to the oldest and most ridiculous trick in the harmonist's playbook. If there are contradictory versions of the same event, biblical inerrantists blithely conclude that the event happened two or more times. They want to be able to say that each account is accurate. Thus all must have happened. We have already seen O’Reilly and Dugard pull this stunt by having two different Temple cleansings. Now we are told that Jesus has been approached and anointed by devoted women several times—presumably much like Elvis, everywhere bombarded by female fans. This allows them to preserve as accurate the very different Mark/Matthew story of an unnamed woman in Bethany anointing Jesus’ head, the Lukan tale of an unnamed prostitute anointing Jesus’ feet, and John's episode of Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus’ feet at a dinner for Lazarus. And yet they combine elements of them anyway. We already saw that they identify the woman in Mark and Matthew (perhaps Mary Magdalene) with Luke's prostitute just because Catholic tradition says so. And now we are told that the feast in Lazarus’ honor was held not in Lazarus’ own home, as in John 12, but in the house of Simon the leper from Mark.

I'M AT THE END OF MY ROPE

I mentioned how Matthew embellished Mark's Judas sequence by borrowing the thirty silver pieces from Zechariah 11:12, then spun the story out further into Judas’ attempt to return the money, and so on, based on the very next verse of Zechariah. Matthew extends the story even further, concluding with Judas’ suicide by hanging, probably modeled on the hanging death of David's betrayer Ahithophel (2 Sam. 18:9–10). O’Reilly and Dugard chose this version over the very different account in the first chapter of Acts (which they refer to as “the first book of Acts,” a minor but symptomatic sign of their unfamiliarity or carelessness regarding the Bible).11 O’Reilly and Dugard include a colorful piece of trivia from ancient legend, namely that Judas hanged himself with a horse's halter, but they admit it might not be historically true (p. 265). That's too little, too late. The whole Judas story, including Judas himself, is legend, as we can tell by tracing its gestation in the womb of the early Christian imagination.