In the story we call the “Passion,” there is no respite before the end. Everything that happens has to convey a seriousness that testifies to the reality of the suffering and dying of a savior. Even the slightest appearance that this one does not literally need to bear what is being narrated would give full credence to the suspicion of Docetism: that God stands aside while man suffers death in his stead. Before this death has been accomplished, no one sits down, not even in tears. Only the end, and nothing else, can mercifully resolve what came before. That is why there is not the slightest trace of humor, not even the knowing smile of a foresighted, pious soul.
The Passion has to deal with a God of the utmost sensitivity. The loyalty he had wanted to show his creatures from the beginning corresponds to his insistence on theirs. Loyalty is what is asked of, and imposed upon, every soul as faith. In view of the story of the Passion, this means at every moment: All this is absolutely true. In Bach, a musically ritualized loyalty is tested and celebrated. Its core is the seriousness of the realization that salvation arises from frailty.
Why does this need to be mentioned? Because it has become too obvious—not least through the St. Matthew Passion—to be understood. There are plenty of ‘ingredients’ in this narrative that could bring the comedy inherent in every tragedy to light. After all, with the election of his apostles Jesus assembled a ‘crew’ that was singularly unsuited for its task: people who until the very end did not quite know what the point of it all was except for an attractive kingdom of God (basileia theou). Who scampered off in all directions when the entry into Jerusalem did not go as planned. Whose knowledge of scripture apparently was not sufficient for them to be able to understand that everything had been prophesied. For whom everything had to happen just as it did, and only because it all ‘arrived’ so precisely was the one whom they never ceased to doubt vindicated.
The apostles, with their mixture of expectation and disappointment, are as ‘comical’ in their disposition as has to be the case considering the powerful discordance between the real and the imaginary; they are rendered laughable by the drastic futility of their alleged virtue: hope.
And is not Peter, the one who first sounds the theme of bitter tears, furnished with all the qualities of a comic figure? But he, too, belongs to the obligatory ‘fulfillments’ of scripture: “I will beat the shepherd and disperse the herd,” according to Zechariah (Matt. 26:31). Luke has Jesus add (because no one had yet understood): “Yes, everything must be fulfilled that has been written about me” (Luke 24:44). This turns even the comics into functionaries of salvation in this night of disloyalties.
This Peter is a blowhard before he fails, a miles gloriosus [vainglorious foot soldier] when he reaches for his sword to hack off an ear of the high priest’s servant. Luke knows that it was the right ear, and only John knows that it was Peter who did this; Matthew does not mention the name, and only John knows that the name of the injured servant was Malchus.
For the subtle humor of the eager swordsman Bach has no sense. He eagerly waits for the Evangelist’s sentence that concludes the scene: “Then all the disciples deserted him and fled” (MP 28). This is the moment to draw the listener’s soul again to its task and tribute: “O humanity, bewail your great sins …” (MP 29). Nothing is more offensive to this Jesus than the fickleness of those on whom he, after years of teaching and of miracles, has not been able to impart any firmness. The weakness of faith is always first of all the weakness of the God who finds himself offended by it. In every other case one would say: not a very convincing god. How then can the sin of failure among those who were so carelessly elected be so great? Why does Peter have to confess to the maids in the palace of the high priest that he, too, belonged to the followers of the Galilean? Why does his false oath: “I do not know the man” (MP 38a) so move us, if, after all, we know how little he could stand by his big words, because he, too, did not know what it was all about. For him, and for the believers, Bach offers the consolation of the chorale: “Although I have strayed from you / I return yet again …” (MP 40). Why should the belated listener not be allowed to smile about such ingenuousness?
In the sequence of tears that are being cried in the St. Matthew Passion, Peter’s are somewhat premature. They are not, like the tears of the final chorus, ‘rightful,’ but wrong and sentimental: “And he went out and wept bitterly” (MP 38c). What does Peter do next? Does he stand under the cross? He does not show up again until everything is over and counsel has to be taken about what can be made of the messianic catastrophe. Only his apostolic successors will again (let others) draw the sword. Beyond all faith, this belief will remain: that this God will be mortally insulted by the slightest deviation from his text and therefore has to be protected from it.
The humor that could find its place neither here nor anywhere else in the history of faith has its ultimate foundation in the absolute disproportion between the infinity that God has to be and the banality of the insults to which he can be exposed. Never must the witness listening to the St. Matthew Passion think about how all had begun: with the violation of a dietary rule in paradise, the first of many which also have their humor in the disproportion between the lawgiver and the law, and between his injury and the infraction. The St. Matthew Passion is free of such petty stuff; but not free enough, because it is only the ‘distance’ of human history that separates it from the offense against the Father for which the Son of man has to die.
In the world of the Bible, everything reminds us of everything else. This has determined the idiosyncratic treatment of its texts: everything could be related to everything else. Traditional exegesis looks very much like unbridled association. To say this with a bit of levity: so little did God concentrate on the essentials in his revelation that its recipients have struggled to keep it together and see the ‘connecting thread.’
Some things were not noticed at times. Contributing presuppositions seemed unimportant, and sometimes downright alarming.
In the denial episode of the St. Matthew Passion, one secondary aspect becomes almost too prominent: the emphasis on the country of origin of Jesus and Peter. In the courtyard the maidservant says to Peter: “And you were also with that Jesus of Galilee” (MP 38a). There is an undertone here of someone living in the capital near the temple: who is this prophet from the provinces about whom everybody is so exercised—for it is Jesus, not Peter, whom the designation of origin Galilaios concerns. The second maidservant does the same but specifies Jesus as being from Nazareth (Nazaraios). Already in the first instance Peter opened his mouth and said he did not know what she was talking about. In the second he goes too far in his carelessness and vows “I do not know the man” (MP 38a). But this torrent of words betrays him. All who had stood around and listened now come closer to him (threateningly?): “Truly, you are also one of them, for your speech (lalia sou) betrays you” (MP 38b; Matt. 26:73).
The heightened drama comes not only from that fact that Peter now reaches for the extreme measure of cursing himself—just like the good old days: ‘I want to be cursed if this is true!’—but also because now everything is concentrated on the one who by his denial in the idiom of the Galilees (from the southern end of Lake Tiberias, and a fisherman to boot) betrays himself as a liar. Without any real need, for nothing is happening to him. The suspicion of being a ‘foreigner’ suffices, even though the city is teeming with them during Passover.
Was this whole excitement not a matter for people from the provinces and their outlandish gullibility? Imported from Galilee to Judea, where one knew better what was and was not appropriate?
This seemingly anecdotal matter has rarely been considered. Yet everybody well versed in the Bible certainly remembered that great effort was expended at the beginning of Jesus’s story not to let him be born in Galilee. The Census of Quirinus that would turn out to be so bothersome for chronology became an element of the story only so that the birthplace could be moved to Bethlehem in Judea, the only place where a claimant to the throne of the house of David could hail from. In the end, and despite Luke’s ingenious transposition of the childhood story as told by the mother, it was all in vain. Even before Pilate has the inscription affixed to the cross, declaring Jesus a Nazarene and the King of the Jews (Matthew saw the contradiction and fixed it), the maidservants know that Jesus was from Nazareth and his followers from Galilee.
Was the reason for the scorn directed at Peter, as well as his fear of embarrassment, not precisely that he who had just been celebrated as the “Son of David” during his messianic entrance into Jerusalem on a donkey’s back, following the words of the prophet, could not have been Davidian because he was from Galilee, was not born of the tribe of Judah like the royal family? Had the excitement and the cheering abated because it had become known that he could not have been who he claimed to be? In that case, it would have been a decisive mistake to begin the salvific mission in Jerusalem, where no one cared for the people from Galilee and where the Hosanna at the entrance would be understood as an attempt by the pilgrims from Galilee to install their messiah.
No one, then, thought about Bethlehem in Judea, the place that would become as important to Christians as Jerusalem. And Peter? He had not only denied his master. He had done him the disservice, in the middle of the palace courtyard of temple administrators and in front of all their servants, to also defame his master as a Galilean like himself with the very language (lalia) of his denial—and thereby to drag into contempt the one who had affirmed again in the interrogation that he was the King of the Jews. In his eagerness not to be who he was, Peter by his dialect had provided the counterproof both for himself and for the one whose status as a Davidian could so easily be extinguished that Pilate could risk the inscription, the point of which the St. Matthew Passion conceals from us.
The reader familiar—through Luke and Bach—with the Christmas story will hardly remember the beginning of Matthew during the episode with Peter, a beginning that was never popular because it contained the genealogy of Joseph and thus makes Jesus into a Davidian: “Story of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1).
From the depths of time, across three times fourteen generations, the husband of Mary emerges and accepts in a dream the angel and its message when he is addressed as the Son of David. The birthplace Bethlehem here needs no justification: here Joseph lives, here he takes the pregnant woman as his wife, here she gives birth, here the magi come from the East to pay homage, following the words of the prophet and the guidance of the stars.
Only after the return from the flight into Egypt does Matthew decide to turn Jesus into a Nazarene. Again it is external coercion, the fear of the successors of Herod in Judea, which makes Joseph hesitate to declare his son a Bethlehemite. Only then does he finally turn toward Galilee, apparently unwillingly, because a second command in a dream is necessary so that the further prophecy, that the one who is to come will be called Nazaraios, is fulfilled. In Matthew, he is from Nazareth not even by virtue of his father’s place of residence, of whom it is explicitly said that only now had he ‘settled’ (katokesen) in Nazareth.
Matthew noticeably insists that his Jesus originates in every sense—not only accidentally—in Judea and only was regarded as a Galilean as a further humiliation. In order to follow attentively Peter’s self-incrimination from denial to defamation in Bach, the attention of the ‘implied listener’ has to be already attuned to the keyword “Galilean.”
Perhaps the second most important function of repetition in myths after the dissolution of fears is to dissolve hatred. Not only the central figure of the ‘Servant of God’ but also the minor characters like Pontius Pilate, or even Judas, are kept in a peculiar suspension between being guilty and contributing to salvation.
Christian dogma has never allowed that the fallen angel in the role of Satan be turned into the principle of evil and an object of unbridled hatred, principally because the reservoir of creatureliness is inexhaustible and even in rejecting God’s incarnation the zealot betrays a detectable remainder of zeal for God; similarly, in the case of Judas the complicity with the one who drew him into his fold and intimacy is undeniable. It was inevitable for someone who was overly zealous for the purity of the Messiah to take offense, someone who had already, in the scene in Bethany with the anointing woman, reached the limits of his tolerance. Much has been said but too little has been thought about this.
But part of such a rethinking must be that Bach begins the St. Matthew Passion with this scene, which as an anticipatory anointment of Jesus’s corpse relates to the Passion but also prepares and introduces the digression of Judas. It is not just Judas but all of the apostles who grumble (eganaktesan) and utter the deprecatory word ‘waste’ (apoleia; in Luther’s translation: Unrat) that for Bach seems to emerge from the background of the looming crisis: “Wozu dienet dieser Unrat?” [What is the point of this waste?]. When Jesus answers with the provocative promise that this woman, no less than they, the grumblers, will become part of the gospel, Judas is only the amplifier. He is the true believer who, without hesitation, gives his answer to this provocation: “Then one of the twelve, named Judas Iscariot, went to the high priests.…” (MP 7; Matt. 26:14).
It is not only the reaction of the messianic brotherhood to the elevation of the anointment by the nameless woman into the gospel, not only the stinginess of the keepers of the alms who know at all times where the money could be invested better—it is the conjunction of anointment and burial, and the intimation of a long period of missionizing and waiting, that bestows on this moment such an ominous effect with regard to the Passion as the messianic catastrophe into which it would develop.
The one anointed in advance by the woman would be buried—that meant: he would not triumph as the Davidian king, and he would not elevate to high positions in his kingdom those who were entitled to them. There is only a gradual difference between Judas and the rest of the apostles, and when John calls him ‘the son of perdition’ (ho hyios tes apoleias) he becomes ‘waste’ as a figure—precisely what all of them had condemned in Bethany: the futility of an effort.
Judas is simply an exponent of messianic impatience. He does in his fashion what the others will do in theirs. It is not only their annoying falling asleep in Gethsemane, their flight after the capture, or the triple denial of Peter. Just as Judas wants to turn the page by forcing a demonstration of power, the others will try the same but avoid suicide: they will try to salvage what can be salvaged.
These lost souls, ‘sons of perdition’ in their own right, will found behind closed doors the association that the theological literature calls—without much further definition—‘the post-Easter community’ and whose product is the ‘kerygma’: the renunciation of the what in order to strengthen the that. For that everything had to happen as it did in order to fulfill the scripture compensates for the disappointment over what had actually happened, which looked like the destruction of an entirely different expectation.
Those listening to the St. Matthew Passion do not have to reflect on the ‘post-Easter community’ because with the scene in Bethany they are being pulled into the story and can already anticipate how this ‘community’ is unable to meet the demands of the Passion.
Where was the common sense—not to speak of higher senses—of the one who selected this motley crew of pathetic and susceptible followers? And then, in the moment when they are ready to make their full claims, to confront them beyond all measure with anointing women and gloomy allusions to his tomb? Vae victimis—the innocent is guilty of that which approaches. The one whose task it should have been to prevent this failed. Could Jesus know that this was precisely the way to turn his own downfall into a Christology that would explode all theological dimensions?
With his premature death, Judas will have missed a solution for the problem of God’s kingdom after the catastrophe. This solace might have convinced him not to despair of the grand dream. This is not the view that the community of those who witnessed the Passion has on the Judas pericope; it is that of the ‘post-Easter’ people. They have no reason to see Judas as the antagonist of their salvation just because he visibly could not wait. Judas is not the one who effectuates what otherwise would have not occurred and in the absence of which the ‘sinners’ in the community could go to sleep reassured. His guilt as part of salvation is no more decisive than the snake’s seduction in paradise. Augustine will look back on the scene in paradise with the almost joyful locution felix culpa because in Paul he had found an entirely different fundamental thought: God’s responsibility for salvation and damnation through the act of predestination. This decree no longer has anything to do with this sin or that salvation, because it presupposes and includes the imperceptibility of the Messiah. This is the price one pays for the conception of a God beyond the reach of deeds or misdeeds in the world.
For John, Judas is, in Luther’s parlance, “the lost child.” No one else is lost but this one, but with the addendum “that scripture be fulfilled” (John 17:12). Who else could it have been but the one in Matthew who was unable to bear his Lord’s discourse about death and burial: the accelerator of the decision, not its originator.
Indeed, what did Judas actually contribute? Nothing to the official indictment, because he agreed with its truth, and Jesus’s withholding it in Bethany was the reason for his betrayal. In John, Jesus prophesizes differently: his isolation from everybody, but not his abandonment by the Father. In John’s ‘theology,’ this has become impossible: “Indeed the hour is coming, yes, has now come, that you will be scattered, each to his own (hekastos eis ta idia), and will leave me alone. And yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me” (John 16:32). This is a precise contradiction to Matthew’s and Bach’s moment of the “Eli, Eli.…” John, the only apostle at the foot of the cross, does not fulfill the prophecy of abandonment—he claims to have been an eye- and ear-witness and does not report the last scream, but only the last word of completion and fulfillment. He stands at the opposite pole to the “lost child.”
The explicit addition that scripture has been fulfilled is the proof of Judas’s ‘role’ in the drama of salvation in John and, even more, the reduction to a minimum of what ‘theologically’ is still worth mentioning. Matthew still has the mysterious exchange between Jesus and Judas during the Last Supper, after the “woe” about the betrayer of the Son of man for whom “it would have been good for that man if he had not been born” (Matt. 26:24). Judas asks: “Rabbi, is it I?” And Jesus responds, as if he had not asked: “You have said it” (Matt. 26:25). As if at a loss, Bach passes over this exchange to the breaking of the bread and the ‘testament’ in flesh and blood. And when Judas arrives with the kiss of betrayal, Jesus, as if oblivious, as if denying the determinism of salvation in the words during the supper, says: “My friend, why have you come?” (Matt. 26:50).
What happens between these two is, aside from God abandoning the servant of God, the most enigmatic event in the Passion—an enigma that John demonizes when he says as ‘explanation’ upon the dunking of the piece of bread: “Now after the piece of bread, Satan entered him” (John 13:27). But Jesus encourages him to do soon what he is about to do—a monstrosity that only the favorite apostle reports because he alone could hear it. Acceleration of salvation? Participation in or even assumption of guilt, if there could be any guilt?
John, it has to be said, acts as the adept who was allowed to rest on his master’s breast during the meal and thereby heard and saw what escaped the others. That is his artifice: to add unknown elements as the latecomer among the evangelists, and to claim authenticity against those who had not been present or followed from afar. This evangelist knows more, but he does not yet know of the ‘inspiration’ that he could invoke for everything he adds. No, he occupied the privileged place of the witness who experienced even what could not have been seen: how the devil entered into Judas. The ritual communion in which the piece of wine-soaked bread is offered by the Lord is perverted into divisiveness.
In Matthew, it is Jesus’s apparent desertion of his calling as the ruler in Jerusalem that drives the traitor to his deed—plausible enough, given the un-messianic anointing of the ‘Anointed One’; in John, this turns into a mystical act of repulsion, into the false ‘mission’ of one possessed by Satan with whom the great exorcist of demons accomplishes his work in reverse. In all of this, there was nothing that had to be ‘fulfilled’ according to scripture. The speculative evangelist ranges with terrifying freedom over what in Luke is entirely abstract, in a formula isolated from its context: “Then Satan entered Judas … and he went forth …” (Luke 22:3–4).
Should that which is no longer ‘fulfillment of scripture’—Satan’s entering into Judas under the hand of Jesus as he offers the piece of bread—have its purpose in making divisiveness final by exceeding any relation to scripture? Is it the founding act of all future dualisms? If this is right, it is John’s exclusion of Judas’s deed from the realm of acceptable behavior of the apostles after Bethany, after the Last Supper, after Gethsemane, that promulgates it. Satan did not enter into the others, was not ingested with the fateful piece of bread. They are, by way of negation, marked for salvation. Judas in this case would not be the exponent of an apostasy that inexplicably experiences a ‘post-Easter’ conversion. In the sense of a radical loss of salvation, Judas would be the victim against which the others are measured and absolved. The entire construction of a betrayal that is completely superfluous has to be understood as the fiction of a scapegoat that had ‘done’ something when the others had ‘simply’ been passive.
In this case, John would be the indicator of the promulgated tendency to turn one into the ‘son of perdition,’ and leave for the others the escape into post-Easter withdrawal. The ‘exponent’ would have been turned into the ‘solitary actor,’ into an instrument of Satan and not simply into one who despaired in his disappointed messianic fervor, and who would not let himself be consoled and stalled by apocalyptic promises. What would the expectation of an imminent end even mean, if the entry of the Davidian into Jerusalem had already happened? After the halfheartedness of the Synoptic Gospels, John finally cuts off this escape for Judas, legitimized by a Jesus who had encouraged him to do his deed. Which he immediately carried out.
The demonology of John is not transparent enough to evaluate sufficiently the entering of Satan into Judas—as the expulsion of the ‘exponent’ of the apostles’ debility—and to put it into relation to Jesus’s words in Matthew that it would be better for this man never to have been born. Could this judgment, this refutation of the right to be created, be applied to Satan? Gnosticism lurks in this thought. Under no circumstances could it truly have been better for the fallen prince of angels not to have been created—that would have been worse for the creator than for the creature. Even for the creature it must have been a mercy to exist, however much he had rejected all mercy. Could the demonization of Judas be advanced beyond this point by equating being born with being created?
The ‘implied listeners’ of the St. Matthew Passion, as they are intended and ‘addressed’ in the arias and chorales, are the sinners whose redemption is assured by the ‘strength’ of the Servant of God; but in the figures who conspire against Jesus they are also presented with their complicity in creating and permitting suffering. The apostles who fall asleep three times represent the stolid refusal of compassion and solidarity; Peter’s triple denial is the temptation to refuse to bear witness to a world that, even without threat, despises and laughs at special claims to salvation. But Judas—is he still the ‘exponent’ of the believers, or is he the exotic miscreant who is best excluded from any possible identification by the declaration of better-not-to-have-been-born and, more forcefully still, by having Satan enter into him?
The composer of the St. Matthew Passion passes over the theological enormity of the saying ‘this man would have been better off had he not been born’ (ei ouk egennethe ho anthropos ekeinos) as if he did not notice it (Matt. 26:24; MP 11). This corresponds to the suppression of creation in the entire history of salvation. When it is said of a Greek tragic hero that it would have been better had he never been born, it is implied that the gods who delude him in order to destroy him or let him destroy himself have not created the world in which this takes place. More importantly, they have not created the one who suffers or imparts suffering. The Greek gods possess only limited power against one another and especially against a world that dictates the conditions of their actions. This would have to be radically different in the Gospels and their Passion stories, assuming the ‘unity’ of the Apostles’ Creed that was common to composer and audience: the unity of the first and second articles of faith. Then the saying ‘better not to have been born’ would be impossible, for the God of redemption is supposed to be identical with the God of creation: the traitor would remain the creature of the betrayed.
John presents himself as the exclusive witness of many things that allegedly escaped his evangelist predecessors. He reports the most words from the cross, and he mentions the entering of Satan into Judas “together with the piece of bread” (meta to psomion) offered by Jesus (John 13:27). But as we have seen, this scandalous demonization—unbeknownst to all the other celebrants who do not even understand Jesus’s urging and believe it refers to Judas’s office as keeper of the alms—in its secrecy cannot compare to the extreme case Matthew’s Passion states with its tragic word: “It were better for him that he had never been born” (Matt. 26:24; MP 11). Matthew does not seem to know what he makes the Lord say at the table: he, too, fails to keep the creation and the responsibility of the creator for every one of His creations in mind.
It might be this factor that lets John choose the other path, that of the possession by Satan. For John, the master of the Logos prologue, is the first ‘theologian’ to consciously forge the unity of creation and salvation. By declaring that in Jesus the Logos became flesh, he identified Jesus with the Word of creation, of which he said: “All things were made by it; and without it nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:3). This includes Judas. That is why the devil had to take possession of him and provide the motivation for the episode in Bethany, which in Matthew leads to catastrophe.
Could John let Satan be present at the Last Supper if he knew what Matthew had written about the three temptations of Jesus in the desert, and to which Luke had added that Satan had let him go “until the next opportunity (achri kairou)” (Luke 4:13)? Did John simply continue the Satan episode by making Judas into the instrument of the last and greatest ‘temptation,’namely, to refuse to suffer, and to command the legions of angels? If that were so, Jesus would urge Judas on, because he wants to force exactly this decision (krisis). Should the justification for introducing Satan into the digression about Judas consist in showing Jesus as the acting and decisive subject, because he imposed the ‘crisis’ on his tempter and antagonist when he offered to Judas the magical symbol of the wine-soaked bread?
This would introduce a measure of coherence into the scene: It was still the Logos that caused the events to unfold, even forcing the beginning of the Passion at the fixed hour and—as if in mockery of the temptations in the desert after the baptism—with a view to the final and absolutely valid test of strength in the face of death. John’s intimacy with the Lord almost makes visible a sort of conspiracy with Satan. Something remarkable from the episode in the desert after the initiation at the River Jordan is repeated: Jesus had been “driven into the desert by the Spirit” in order “to be tested” (periasthenai) by the tempter (Matt. 4:1). Yet how could it be that the tempter (ho peirazon) not only approached him with words but also twice took him away (paralambanei)—would the evangelist have let this happen without consent, including the hypage satana [Begone, Satan] (Matt. 4:10)? There is an agreement in the background, as if everything were part of larger dealings.
“Judas, are you betraying the Son of man with a kiss?” (Luke 22:48). Only Luke has these words in the scene of Jesus’s arrest. It expresses the outrage that the betrayal is executed through the sign of love (philemati). Luke obviously could presuppose in his ‘implied listeners’ that they would meet Judas’s action with even greater disgust.
Matthew reports only briefly the arrangement between Judas and the armed gang, and has him give them the sign with the address ‘Rabbi’: “and kissed him” (Matt. 26:49). He had used the same address shortly before, during the Last Supper: “Rabbi, is it I?” (Matt. 26:25). But now when the expected occurs, Jesus asks Judas: “My friend, why have you come?” (Matt. 26:50). Perhaps he is asking for the explanation of the betrayal, which he had omitted earlier during the meal as if he knew it already? The answer, if it was of any interest, will never come. The servants of the high priest intervene.
Exegetically, it seems as if this betrayal is unambiguous and the kiss the hyperbole of a depraved cynic. But why should Jesus not have reacted to the ritual greeting? Because he did not want to expose Judas as the one who had just challenged him whether he knew of his scheme for betrayal? As if Judas had just come here to greet the rabbi, and the temple servants had thus, by chance, recognized him as the one they were searching for?
We cannot get to the bottom of the story of Judas because this figure was stigmatized as evil so quickly. Does the kiss in the garden on the Mount of Olives only confirm that this betrayal was superfluous? That everything would have happened as it was written even without the traitor? This is what Jesus had told the traitor during the meal, even before he had singled him out, as if to expose the pointlessness of his action: “The Son of man indeed goes just as it has been written of him, but woe …” (Matt. 26:24). Jesus and Judas encounter one another during the arrest as if Judas had not been able to accomplish anything: he is not evil, he is superfluous.
But this is only the concealed implication of this event. For the functionaries of the temple, Judas must have accomplished something. It was probably trivial: nobody knew Jesus. He himself says: “I sat daily with you, teaching in the temple, and you did not seize me” (Matt. 26:55). It is accepted as a forgone conclusion that his enemies feared public commotion and therefore seized him at night. But was this public, intermixed with pilgrims, really to be feared—the next day they would shout exactly what was expected of them. No; even if Jesus had taught in the vast expanse of the temple like many other teachers—he looked like the other teachers, yet they did not know him. Jesus of Nazareth in Jerusalem was not, as in Galilee, the conspicuous figure posterity wants to see in him. Someone was needed who knew him well, lest an irksome mistake be made. Because Jesus was to be accorded a high degree of popularity among his contemporaries, at the time the Gospels were written the betrayal by Judas could not be depicted as if its sole purpose were to create the opportunity to apprehend him discreetly under the cloak of night.
The beginning of Matthew’s Passion offers an entirely unlikely sequence of events: first, Jesus discloses to the apostles “that in two days will be Passover, and the Son of man will be handed over to be crucified” (Matt. 26:2; MP 2a); only then does the evangelist recount that the meeting in the palace of the high priest Caiaphas took place where it was discussed “how with stealth they might capture Jesus and kill him” (Matt. 26:4; MP 4a) without risking a popular uprising during the festival; and, finally, Judas goes to the high priests and offers his services, as if he had known about the meeting.
The reverse order is much more likely: Judas turns to the Curia and denounces his rabbi for the heresies with which later, in the ‘trial’ of the Passion, Jesus is confronted. Because no one knows anything about this visitor from Galilee, Judas offers to identify the right person. In the council of the priests Jesus has, as we know, at least one secret ally and hears from him what awaits him and who has already ‘betrayed’ him, not who will betray him. The arrest on the Mount of Olives is the crisis moment of ‘betrayal’ only if one presupposes the sequence so carefully rearranged by Matthew.
There is no deceptive intent in this artifice unless we adopt the parameters of ‘historical reason.’ The congregation to whom the Gospel was addressed would never have tolerated that the ‘Lord’ who would soon return was so inconspicuous and common in the city of the temple. Jesus’s aura of singularity had to be intensified, perfect for the authorities to notice him.
The St. Matthew Passion makes us notice that after being flooded with images for thousands of years, we imagine we know what Jesus looked like. In reality we know nothing. Even less than not knowing what he looked like. We do not even know how old Jesus was when he was subjected to the terror of suffering and death. Is it important whether he was thirty or fifty years old? There is a venerable tradition that says he was thirty-three—equally venerable is the objection of Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon in the treatise Against Heresies that Jesus would have lacked the full measure of incarnation if he had been deprived of old age and maturity.
Unfortunately, Irenaeus follows this beautiful thought with a less pleasant afterthought: He wants to eliminate the thirty eons in the gnostic system of the Valentinians from any association with Jesus’s lifetime. That is why he ignores Luke’s information that Jesus at the time of the baptism in the Jordan was “about thirty years of age” (Luke 3:23) and instead seizes on an interjection made to a remark of Jesus in John: “You are not yet fifty years old and have seen Abraham?” (John 8:57). Though a quibble—does one say this to someone who is thirty? No, says Irenaeus, someone addressed in this way is not far from fifty. The crucified was not a young man, and for that there was a rich tradition: “From the fortieth to the fiftieth year is the age of accomplishment, the age of our Lord when he taught. The Gospel testifies to that, as do the priests in Asia Minor who have heard it from John, the pupil of the Lord.”1 Some had heard it from other apostles “and are witnesses thereof.”2 Trustworthy were those who wanted to dispute that Abraham had “rejoiced to see my day.”3 They had not risked in this polemic to judge his age wrongly. To the contrary, they had searched the archives or had trusted in their senses: “As they saw him so they spoke. But what he looked like, that he was in reality.”4 A pointed, yet parenthetical dig at the Docetism of the Gnostics.
To defend the ‘full humanity’ of the savior meant to deny that he had rushed through his bodily existence as a mere transit. He could bear to be human. This is an anticipation of the Passion before it begins to appear. Older people may claim that they, too, were implicated in this incarnation of the Son of God.
Could it be that the Gnostics were an unacknowledged ‘youth movement’? One could find support for this suspicion in the inverse fact that youth movements, broadly and typologically speaking, like to present themselves as Gnostics. Should we imagine Judas as one of those youthful believers to whom his rabbi seemed gradually to have become so old and tentative that He needed to be forced to use His powers? Perhaps it is good that we do not know the dates of Jesus’s birth and death, in spite of all the ingenuity invested in the search.
The evangelist Matthew denied the composer of his Passion the opportunity to represent the great crowd scene of the Messiah’s entry into the temple city—on the donkey’s foal, accompanied by cries of “Hosanna” from the masses—between the initial scene of the anointment in Bethany and the Last Supper of unleavened bread in Jerusalem. Instead, Matthew places the episodic recognition of the Davidian as the last trigger for his execution further toward the beginning in order to leave enough space for his teachings and miracles, for the cleansing of the temple and the prophecies that city and world will perish. The participation of Judas—as well as the independent development of his story—becomes more important in proportion to the scandal of eliminating the messianic triumphal march from the context. The Passion is driven by the betrayal of someone whose messianic expectations have been disappointed. The episodes with Peter and Judas arrange themselves alongside the story of the Nazarene.
Along with this, another short episode is omitted from its possible setting to music: the calling of the children in the temple. They apparently continue to imitate what they have heard from the frenetic masses during the entry to Jerusalem, the “Hosanna.” Yet more openly than the spectators had dared, the children confer upon the One who is present, and not to someone yet to come, the full power of the Son of David: “Hosanna to the Son of David!” (Matt. 21:9). The theocrats and the scribes want to tie Jesus to this. They ask whether he hears what the children are calling? Jesus’s response is a reference to the psalmist, to the fulfillment of the verse: Had they not read that God uses the mouths of children and nursing infants for his praise? Then he turns around and goes back to Bethany (Matt. 21:15–17; cf. Psalms 8:2).
Thus, we find the scene in Matthew, who places the emphasis entirely on the indirect confirmation through the clairvoyance of the children. In Luke, the reference to the psalmist is missing. Here, the Pharisees, after the entry into Jerusalem, point out to Jesus the messianic blasphemies of his apostles. He should silence them. Jesus’s answer would have corresponded even better to the reprimand that he should silence the cheering children: “If these keep silent, the very stones will cry out” (Luke 19:40). The image of the stones crying out comes from the prophet Habakkuk (2:11), but serves in this instance as the immediate transition to Jesus’s tears over the fall of Jerusalem in his vision. It is not, as in Matthew, the fulfilled prophecy of the messianic truth from the mouths of children but the outstanding fulfillment of the apocalyptic threat from the mouth of the crying Jesus—the clamor of the bursting walls of temple and city—that Luke uses as confirmation of the one who is supposed to forbid his apostles to call him by his name. But it is only after Jesus has placed the stones’ crying out under the condition that he should silence his followers—which he will not do and which therefore would be entirely hypothetical—that he has the terrifying vision of a destroyed Jerusalem and hence access to an unconditional future. How can this be, given that his proclamation as king by his followers has passed as unopposed as the “Hosanna” for the Son of David from the mouths of the children in Matthew?
The Passion is also the story of the falling silent of the followers without any exhortation by the master. Betrayal, denial, flight, and suicide are only keywords for the great confusion sown among his followers by the impotence of the one who is finally triumphant—as if the vociferous enjoyment of their pretension to the kingdom had really been denied them. The Passion signifies that the condition for the crying out of the stones obtains even if it happens in a different manner than predicated by the authorities. This continues far into the story’s aftermath, which unfolds in such obscurity as if its truth were as endangered as Bible criticism claims. What is to be called ‘resurrection’ and constitutes the hope of all believers is a secret story concocted behind closed doors. No “Hosanna” can be heard, as would be expected if the victory over death were certain. The silence satisfies the condition: these here keep silent, therefore the stones will cry out.
Eighteen hundred years after the stones cried out, Jerusalem had become the city of monks and pilgrims—and of their modern descendants, tourists. One of them—no longer pious but still curious and well versed in the Bible—is Mark Twain, who crosses the Atlantic in a boat full of Quakers in 1867. He is reporting for a newspaper in San Francisco and, two years later, publishes a charming little travel book about it. He does not possess the patience of the pilgrims for whom the eagerness to see and the burden of travel melt into an experience of salvation. But he still can relate to their ‘concept of reality’: only that which leaves traces is real.
Along the Via Dolorosa where the Lord bore his cross, he [Twain] sees with their eyes—but writes in the language of disbelief and distance—the old stones and the traces of the Passion on the path to Golgotha. Fixed in the wall of a house was a scarred and scuffed stone, polished by the pilgrims’ kisses, that seemed to bear “a grotesque resemblance to a human face.” The guide explained the venerability of the stone. This was one of the “very stones of Jerusalem” that Jesus had said would be clamoring when he was told to silence his apostles. One of the pilgrims objected that Jesus had said this would happen only if they did not shout Hosanna. The guide was unfazed: “This is one of the stones that would have cried out.”5
Some will say that there is nothing reasonable to be learned from the craftiness of the guide. That may be so, but still we are reminded of something that is always worth thinking about: the language that Jesus of Nazareth and his followers spoke and that his enemies as well as his supporters understood lacked the mode of expression used by the guide—it had no subjunctive. The language of the New Testament in which this passage has come to us may reflect this fact by using the future tense even before the vision of the destroyed temple justifies the indicative. Whatever he might have ‘thought,’ Jesus first would have to have said, for the comprehension of his enemies: “If these were not shouting—as they obviously are—then the stones would be crying out.” Could he think this even if he could not say it? We meet the limit of language, where, as we know since Wittgenstein, it collides with thought; such a collision is (possibly) the case here, as the late history of the reception of this passage in Luke and its quotation from Habakkuk in the ears of a carefully listening reporter lets us deduce, presume, suspect, or hope.
“Unto the present day” the potter’s field designated as a cemetery for pilgrims is called the ‘field of blood’ (agros heimatos), because it was paid for with the “blood money” (time heimatos) that Judas had ruefully brought back and thrown into the temple.
Bach does not enter deeper into the outcome of the betrayal story. In contrast to Peter’s denial episode, he does not offer the sinner the opportunity to identify with the figure of the betrayer. After the triple denial and the crowing of the cock, the “Aria” evokes the bitter tears of the apostle and allows the sinner to beg, with Peter, for mercy: “Look here, heart and eyes / Weep bitterly before you” (MP 39). The “chorale” completes the identification with someone who had only ‘deviated’ and now returns to the fold. “Although I have strayed from you / I return yet again …” (MP 40).
The end of Judas is peculiarly understated even though Judas performs the ritual of repentance that otherwise is sufficient for a sinner. The focus is not on the betrayer but on the betrayed. The aria demands, without any identification with the one who had just repented and hanged himself, the return of the betrayed from the high priests, as if the contract were void after the return of the blood money, and the previous situation could be reinstated: “Give me back my Jesus! / See the money, the murderer’s fee, / The lost son throws at you, / Down at your feet! / Give me back my Jesus!” (MP 42). The singer demands what Judas, who had only admitted his guilt, had not demanded. The ones listening to the St. Matthew Passion are meant to stay focused on their Savior even while the Evangelist allows himself a long and detailed digression on Judas for whom he cannot say anything more definitive than he “hanged himself” (MP 43c)—even shorter in the Greek, kai apelthon apenxato. Only one thing seems to be important: the contrast to the Peter episode, which is comparable to the path of a sinner, whereas the Judas episode is incomparable with any path faced by the composer or his listener.
There are many exegetical opinions on why the evangelist has rendered the end of Judas in such a long digression and thus has brought the composer of the St. Matthew Passion into such difficulties with regard to the proportions—of course without yet showing any concern for the greatest of all ‘side effects’ of this text. To my mind, the key to understanding this disproportionate interest seems to lie in the short phrase I quoted at the beginning: heos tes semeron—“unto the present day.” This could be, independently of all questions of chronology, a very late day. The designation of the field as the field of blood by means of the blood money signified that there could be no opening of the graves until the day of resurrection.
Thus, the location, the name, and the function—and, on the day of Judgment in the nearby Valley of Josaphat, the resurrected themselves—could testify to the authenticity of this origin. Much later, all the instruments of Jesus’s Passion as corpora delicti were said to have been recovered: the cross and the nails, the crown of thorns and the shroud, including the most obscure relics. But that was during a different time, more prone to legends. Within the canon of the Gospels, the field of blood is a singular case: the precise location of a fact that can be visited and owned, and that emerged, as if accidentally, in the course of the Passion. It is a sales contract entered into with the previous owner—identified as a potter—for the most real article in any time: a parcel of land.
Jesus did not leave behind any footprints, in contrast to the horse of the prophet who, from very nearly the same place, ascended with him into heaven and disappeared. The field of blood is only a mediated trace, a reflection of the implosion of messianic hope in the traitor, and, via the traitor, the trigger of the Passion. But the ‘detour’ that the evangelist’s digression follows, from the state of mind to the betrayal, from the blood money to the pilgrim cemetery, is a monument to ‘realism’: the absolute duration, the place where the dead are conserved, unto every present day.
The reference to continuity unto every present day is a doubled-edged sword, and with its thoughtless use Matthew lets us see how little it bothers him that the world continues to exist and that the departed has not yet returned from the “right hand of the power” on the clouds of heavens, as he had declared fearlessly to the high priest (Matt. 26:64), thus earning the death sentence for blasphemy according to all sacred law. The messianic self-declaration as the one who will return and the reference to something that reminds us of him “unto the present day” follow each other closely—as insurance for the continued verifiability of the Passion story, and as the proclamation of the apocalyptic ephemerality of everything that is done to the one who had answered the high priest’s question whether he is Christ, the Son of God, without any subtlety and theological ado: “sy eipas” [You say so] (Matt. 27:11). The terrifying correspondence in this context is the answer given to the repentant traitor: “ti pros hemas; sy opse”—What is that to us? You see to it yourself” (Matt. 27:4; cf. MP 41b).
This kind of pointed emphasis even of longer episodes is a stylistic peculiarity of the evangelist Matthew; it contributes much to the text’s suitability for music, especially the crowd scenes. Foremost the bone-chilling “Barabbas!” Part of this predilection for phrases that indicate an appalling end is the “… and died”—Luther’s own phrasing, so important for Bach. The original text, perhaps to avoid the ultimate harshness of realism using a bit of metaphysics, is: “apheken to pneuma”—“and gave up his spirit” (Matt. 27:50).
Luther, with his disdain for the metaphysical, provided better for Bach.
Two episodes, tied to persons from the closest circle of the apostles, have prominent places in the St. Matthew Passion: the betrayal by Judas and the denial by Peter. The importance of these two digressions cannot consist only in the fact that they increase the overall measure of suffering, as two people of the group assembled by Jesus who not only abandon him like all the others but also act with special perfidy. More is at stake here: precisely the relationship of trust, the degree of distinction, and the expectations that came with it led to the betrayal and the sheer meanness of distancing. This Jesus did not live up to what was expected of him.
Is this not the deeper justification for Bach’s opening the St. Matthew Passion with the anointment in Bethany in the house of Simon the Leper, because it points toward Jesus’s death and the (later omitted) embalming of his dead body? Jesus takes exception to the criticism that this is wasteful—originally, in Mark, the grumbling of “a few,” in Matthew that of “his apostles,” in John finally the explicit naming of Judas who is already suspected here of having misappropriated the fund of alms belonging to the group (Mark 14:4; Matt. 26:8; John 12:4). The layering is significant: Jesus refuses the mischaracterization of the anointment as a messianic homage by speaking not of his dominion but of his death.
This contradiction is adumbrated in the reproach: “What is the point of this waste?” This question concerns the “price” of the ointment, and in a model case for associationism the man from Kerioth [Judas] is made to think about the “price” of the one anointed and to ask: “What are you willing to give me?” (Matt. 26:14). That is how the thirty pieces of silver get into the Gospel. A memorable, ‘disdainful’ sum, about which it has rarely been asked whether it was a lot or a little, whether Judas would have found himself enriched or whether he wanted the symbolism of a cheap sale for almost nothing: a disappointed person who wanted to show quantifiable contempt for this messianic loser who seemed to wish his own death. So much has to be written and sung about this Judas in order to cover up what expectations were aroused in him and what disappointments he met.
Only with difficulty does the late evangelist John bring consistency to the story by having Judas use the betrayal to recover the money he tried to embezzle. Luckily, Matthew knows nothing about this concatenation of motifs. To him, it looks as if Judas Iscariot hanged himself like a figure in a tragedy blinded by higher delusion.
In contrast to the loquaciousness of the apocryphal gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, the canonical evangelists have shown remarkable discipline in resisting the urge of the imagination to complete the story; between Mark and John they have added just enough ‘motivation’ to ascribe a ‘betrayal’ to the figure of a traitor without clarifying what it actually comprised. Why is the use of the remorsefully returned pieces of silver so important that the Passion has to dwell on it even though the tragedy of Judas is long over? One answer could be: It is so incredible that money plays a role in the presence of God’s son—and a role that is entirely superfluous for his salvific destiny—that there has to be an accurate record of its existence. His value as a piece of property fulfills this function.
Was that the end of the thirty pieces of silver? Not quite. Imagination could not leave them there for random usage after the purchase of the potter’s field. Bach dedicated a basso aria to the money, wedged between the rejection of the ‘blood money’ from the temple treasury and the decision to purchase the ‘blood field’: “See the money, the murderer’s fee, / The lost son throws at you, / Down at your feet!” (MP 42). The pious ambiguity of this remorseful restitution consists in the sinner’s soul participating in the line that is not spoken by Judas but insinuated as such: “Give me back my Jesus!” But the priests and elders had rejected Judas even before he could think these words, using a statement of irreversibility that must not apply to the sinner: “What is that to us? You see to it yourself!” (MP 41b).
Next to the identity of Judas emerges an identity of the pieces of silver, insofar as the sum cannot return to where it was taken, from the offertory (korbanas). As blood money it is impure. The numerable ‘sum’ of individual coins turns into a single substance, homogenized by the impurity of treason. This is the story in Matthew—still without the prehistory of the treasurer who believed to have been defrauded of exactly this sum.
Imagination was not satisfied with this ‘role’ of the pieces of silver. The Legenda Aurea by the late thirteenth-century bishop Jacobus de Voragine contains an entire vita of Judas, explicitly taken from an older historia apocrypha: on the whole, this vita in its circularity resembles the tragedy of Oedipus without, however, the aporia of the tragic, as Friedrich Ohly in his important reconstruction of the figure of the ‘damned’ and the ‘elect’ has shown.6 And one finds the exact offsetting of the price of Mary Magdalene’s ointment in Bethany with the ‘blood money.’ After Judas has escaped the circle of patricide and incest with his mother, he becomes the accomplice of Pilate as the ‘accountant’ of Jesus; he calculates the price of the ointment at three hundred pieces of silver and his own share at 10 percent—or else he converts the special value of the temple’s coin into its full amount, ten times the value of ordinary money. Everything has to be accounted for exactly. Precise accounting represents a bit of reliability in the whole story, “although it is probably better left aside than repeated,” as the writer of the Legenda admonishes his readers.7 He does this all without apparently realizing among what mythical archetypes he is moving.
The possibility that Judas could have made the transaction especially ‘cheap’ because he wanted to sell symbolically the messianic loser or abdicator is blocked as an ingress to the story by the motivation that John has added. But if Judas’s greed wanted to have the full equivalent, the price had to be very high. This he could achieve only if the coin used to pay possessed an age-old, mythical provenance.
As, for example, in a Latin poem from the twelfth century in which the wicked Assyrian king Ninus orders the father of Abraham to mint thirty pieces of pure gold, precious enough to pay for his residence in Nineveh. These pieces of gold were in Abraham’s purse when he left Mesopotamia and moved to Canaan, where he used the money to purchase land near Jericho in order to till the land and bury his dead. With the same coin the purchase price for Joseph was paid to his brothers. From them it moves back to Joseph on the occasion of their grain purchase. Joseph then used the money to buy, for the first time, ingredients for embalming—namely, for the corpse of Jacob, his father. The thirty coins remained together, entering into the treasury of the temple in Jerusalem as the offering of a sybil and queen, whence they were taken to Babylon and passed through the hands of the Queen of Saba until they were brought to the manger in Bethlehem by the three magi and kept hidden in the cavern during the flight to Egypt, and later, on Jesus’s order, offered to the treasury of the temple in Jerusalem—where the falsely named “pieces of silver” (argyria) awaited the one who would be worthy of them.
Evidently what constitutes ‘value’ here is no longer the exchange of the metal but instead its function in salvation history, its constantly playing a role at turning points in Jesus’s prehistory. Judas has become entirely a cipher in this metal’s appreciation in value. So much for the returns produced by the stamina of the imagination, collected by Godfrey of Viterbo, who aided Frederick Barbarossa as chronicler with this Pantheon. In particular with the lesson that no one involved in this translatio knew what they were doing, especially from a higher, and indeed from the highest, viewpoint.
The last words on the cross transmitted only by Luke—“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34)—not only forgive the misdeeds and the misdoers, but refer to the mystery of the entire history leading up to this turning point, a history that is ‘made’ only by those who do not ‘understand’ what they are doing when they receive and spend these overvalued pieces of silver, for whatever purpose.
The evangelist’s phrase that the ‘field of blood’ is preserved “unto the present day” is an equally ‘realistic’ and melancholic statement. Not even the temple into which Judas threw the ‘murderer’s fee’ was still standing when the Gospel according to Matthew was written down. It is as if nothing had happened: neither the expectations, nor the disappointments. Without the restlessly traveling apostle [Paul] who never even met Jesus, a ‘Christology’ against which John could competitively measure his own would never have emerged.
But one piece of reality remained: the value of the land purchased with the thirty coins. For anybody who ever comes in contact with a ‘Philosophy of Money,’ this story of the pieces of silver, their revaluation and their transformation into the indestructible piece of land for pilgrims’ graves is a singular lesson in the paradoxical ‘realism’ of the nominal, as if it were made for a “De moneta” treatise.
The “unto the present day” remained a binding word of God for the witnesses of a world that would not end: for the crusaders in the Middle Ages who forced their way into the holy land with bloodshed. Together with the flow of sacred relics, new local legends emerged. Knights and pilgrims found what they were looking for. The pilgrim’s report of Ludolf von Suchem from the fourteenth century describes the ‘field of blood’ and the summary burials on it. For the cemetery is too small for the unexpected onrush of ‘cases.’ Into the field deep, round holes have been dug, into which the corpses are thrown; after three days only the bones are left, otherwise “such a little space would not be sufficient to contain so many dead bodies.”8
That the ‘field of blood’ is so small has its reason in a circumstance that had been newly ‘imported’: the high priests had paid half of the blood money to the guards at the tomb, which means they had bought their silence. For this the small miracle of the quick decay of the corpses has to stand in. It ‘condenses,’ if this can be said, the ‘realism’ of the already more-than-millennium-old “unto the present day.”
The further history of the coins’ capital wanes, because the first split of the money between the guards and the potter continues in the manner of the miraculous multiplication of relics. Leopold Kretzenbacher has compiled an entire catalogue of treasuries in cathedrals, monasteries, and castles that contained a ‘piece of silver’ with the worn head of the emperor who might well have been Ninus, the founder of Nineveh. As late as 1480, Johannes Tucher from Nuremberg, an ancestor of Hegel’s wife, saw one of the coins in Rhodes in the castle of Saint John: “There also is one of the coins for which the Lord Christ had been sold.” Tucher made a cast of lead, brought it back, and poured silver copies, which he sold. That was, paradoxically, the multiplication of the ‘true’ pieces of silver.