Judas Read online

  JUDAS

  Copyright © 2015 by Peter Stanford

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Originally published by Hodder & Stoughton Limited, a Hachette UK Limited company

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stanford, Peter, 1961-

  Judas: the most hated name in history / Peter Stanford.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Judas Iscariot. I. Title.

  BS2460.J8S73 2016

  226’.092—dc23

  2015036010

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-750-3

  ALSO BY PETER STANFORD

  How To Read a Graveyard:

  Journeys in the Company of the Dead

  The Death of a Child (editor)

  The Extra Mile: A 21st Century Pilgrimage

  C Day-Lewis: A Life

  Why I Am Still A Catholic:

  Essays in Faith and Perseverance (editor)

  Heaven: A Travellers’ Guide to the Undiscovered Country

  Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times

  The She-Pope: A Quest for the Truth Behind

  The Mystery of Pope Joan

  The Devil: A Biography

  The Outcasts’ Outcast: A Life of Lord Longford

  Cardinal Hume and the Changing Face of English Catholicism

  Catholics and Sex (with Kate Saunders)

  Believing Bishops (with Simon Lee)

  For Sue and Steve:

  for your encouragement and enthusiasm

  Contents

  Prologue: The Field of Blood, Jerusalem

  Part One:

  Judas – the evidence

  1What’s in a Name?

  2The Twenty-Two: Judas in the Gospels

  3The Garden of Gethsemane, Jerusalem

  4Life After Death: How Judas Lived On

  5A Good Betrayal? The Gospel of Judas

  Part Two:

  Judas – Satan’s tool

  6The Making of the Medieval Judas

  7Devilish Visions in Volterra

  8Bags of Money: Judas and the Original Merchant-Bankers

  9An East Anglian Journey in the Company of the Arch-Traitor

  Part Three:

  Judas – God’s agent

  10How Judas Became an Enlightenment Hero

  11The Judas Myth and Modern Anti-Semitism

  12Giving Judas a Second Glance

  13Three Contemporary Versions of Judas

  Epilogue: Sir Laurence Whistler’s Judas window, Dorset

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  The Field of Blood, Jerusalem

  ’Twas the body of Judas Iscariot

  Lay in the Field of Blood;

  ’Twas the soul of Judas Iscariot

  Beside the body stood.

  Robert Buchanan: The Ballad of

  Judas Iscariot (1874)

  The signage in Jerusalem is, at best, intermittent. On the journey in from the airport at Tel Aviv, there are familiar, standard-issue, large roadside boards, with directions in three languages – Arabic, Hebrew and English. Once inside the Old City, with its Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Armenian quarters, it all gets much more hit and miss: odd arrows here and there, often with any wording obscured by a market vendor’s display of holy pictures, pottery or pyjamas, pointing variously to the Western Wall, holy of holies for Jews, or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, standing on what is believed to be the site where Jesus was crucified, or the Al-Aqsa mosque, high on the list of must-see sites for Muslims. But never all three at once. Perhaps – to apply the most benign standards – it is assumed that in such a small space (within its ancient walls, the Old City of Jerusalem amounts to just under a square kilometre), visitors will inevitably stumble on this extraordinary trinity if they walk around for long enough.

  In my wanderings, I only spy one sign for Hakeldama (originally the Aramaic hagel dema, sometimes rendered as the Greek Akeldama, and meaning ‘Field of Blood’), the spot where Christian tradition holds that one of the twelve apostles, Judas Iscariot, ignominiously committed suicide after betraying Jesus. And, even then, it is very much a forgotten footnote, down in the corner of a weather-beaten outdoor pilgrims’ map on display at the church of Saint Peter in Gallicantu, outside the Old City. Everywhere else is name-checked in big letters, with a rough drawing next to it. Hakeldama, though, floats on the margins of the map, as if halfway to oblivion.

  If visitors did once seek out the scene of Judas’ last moments on earth, and there is plenty of historical evidence that pilgrims did, then it has now fallen from the itineraries of the estimated 3.5 million tourists who come to Jerusalem each year. Such modern neglect has a certain logic. Encouraging hordes to seek out the spot where Christianity’s most notorious traitor hanged himself would, in secular times, add a curious voyeuristic twist to 2,000 years of vilifying Judas, whom the gospels describe as partaking in the first-ever Eucharist at the Last Supper, but still managing afterwards to sell his master for a measly thirty pieces of silver.

  That tawdry transaction was the first never-to-be-forgotten moment of infamy in the tale of Judas that has been handed down the centuries. In the core texts of Christianity, the second instalment comes soon afterwards when, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Judas identifies Jesus to a detachment of soldiers with the notorious ‘Judas kiss’. That embrace, outwardly of friendship but in reality of betrayal, has come to sum up the reputation of the traitor within Jesus’ trusted inner circle. And then, with Christianity for centuries confining Judas’ biography to a three-act drama, there is the concluding spectacle of the false apostle yielding to despair and killing himself.

  What is there, then, to see at the Field of Blood, other than the ugliest side of human nature – and frankly there is enough of that to witness day to day in the grating tension between holiness and darkness in the divided city of Jerusalem? Judas’ place of death, moreover, offers no enticing prospect of the sort of spiritual nourishment that today draws even the most sceptical visitors to Jerusalem’s array of ‘holy places’. All of these sites may still cause endless, bitter disputes between the faiths. The golden-topped Dome of the Rock shrine, for example, alongside its near neighbour, the Al-Aqsa mosque, sits atop the Temple Mount, simultaneously hallowed ground in Judaism, and once commandeered by the invading Crusaders in the twelfth century for their own Christian church. Yet it still attracts crowds. We wait in long lines to pass through security points designed to filter out those fanatics with their guns and bombs who might be tempted to press by force their particular branch of religion’s claim. Once inside, though, whatever its bloody, factional past and present, this sacred ground still has the capacity to inspire.

  By contrast, at Hakeldama, Judas’ last footprint on earth represents more of a cautionary tale, of the type once found in now-neglected children’s literature such as Struwwelpeter,1 and from which we adults are increasingly conditioned to recoil as too blunt, too black and white for modern sensibilities. Down the ages Judas has been singled out from innumerable other human options as absolutely the worst of the worst. In John’s gospel, he is damned not just as the devil incarnate but also as ‘the son of perdition’.2 Pope Leo the Great, in the fifth century, demonised Judas as ‘the wickedest man that ever lived’.3
Nine hundred years later, in the greatest poem of the Middle Ages, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, he is sentenced to the ninth and final circle of hell, reserved for those who have committed the most heinous crimes of betrayal known to humankind, an eternal, icy torment shared with Brutus and Cassius, murderers of Julius Caesar, and, of course, Satan, from whose frozen mouth Judas dangles, half digested, his legs kicking in vain against his fate to the very end.4

  And Judas Iscariot’s name continues in the twenty-first century to represent a crushing rebuke, a despicable traitor, as in the controversialist Lady Gaga’s 2011 single, ‘Judas’, about being in love with a bad ’un. ‘Jesus is my virtue’, she sings in a promotional video bursting with religious imagery, ‘and Judas is the demon I cling to’.

  Yet, even for that contemporary minority with an overactive interest in the macabre – and there are plenty, I have observed, who like nothing better than ghoulishly to travel the globe seeking out ‘haunted’ places where horrific deeds took place5 – the Field of Blood scores poorly as a desirable destination. There are doubts, above all, about its authenticity.

  Whose blood is it that is being remembered? That of Jesus, sacrificed on the cross on Calvary on Good Friday to save humankind, or of Judas, spilled in death following his betrayal of his master? In his gospel, Saint Matthew makes plain that it is Jesus’ blood.6 He writes bleakly and movingly (for this listener at least, when hearing the passage read aloud during mass over the years) of Judas’ wretched remorse once he had sold Jesus out. He tries to salve his conscience by returning his fee – the money paid to him for Jesus’ blood – but the chief priests refuse it as tainted. So, the outcast to trump all outcasts flings down the coins in the sanctuary of the Temple, takes himself off to an unnamed site and there commits suicide. The Jewish leaders thereafter pick up the sullied loot that is blood money for Jesus, and use it to purchase a plot, as a graveyard for foreigners, ‘called the Field of Blood’.

  This account in Matthew does not place Judas’ suicide itself at Hakeldama. Indeed there is another tradition, albeit now muted, that suggests it took place within the Old City itself. So popular was it in its time that twelfth-century pilgrims would trudge along to visit the Vicus Arcus Judae (Street of the Arch of Judas), when the Christian Crusaders were running the city. One of the senior church leaders of that time, Archbishop William of Tyre, writes of Jerusalem, the city where he was born: ‘By the covered street, you go through the Latin Exchange to a street called the Street of the Arch of Judas . . . because they say Judas hanged himself there upon a stone arch.’7 On maps of the period, X marks the spot.

  By contrast, in the Acts of the Apostles, coming after the gospels in the running order of the New Testament, the blood staining the Field of Blood is not that of Jesus but Judas.8 Moreover, Acts talks not of a suicide but of Judas dying by a kind of spontaneous combustion of his body that will find no name in medical dictionaries. Saint Peter, busy stamping his authority as Jesus’ anointed first leader of his fledgling church, describes, with the relish of the righteous, how Judas, his one-time fellow apostle, spent his ill-gotten silver pieces on purchasing the field himself, where ‘he fell headlong and burst open, and all his entrails poured out’. It was as if Judas had been struck down by a thunderbolt that split him in two. When news spread of this gruesome death, Peter continues, ‘the field came to be called the Bloody Acre, in their language Hakeldama’.

  To thicken this historical mist, the precise site of Hakeldama is itself only a matter of tradition, rather than archaeological fact. It stands on a barren hillside on the south side of the valley of Hinnom, perched precariously in one of the cat’s cradle of stringy ravines that intersect the peaks and troughs of Jerusalem, but this location was simply the one chosen by the early Christians. In the centuries immediately following Jesus’ death, they picked out places in and around Jerusalem to associate with events described in the gospels, some on the basis of more compelling evidence than others. Their habit of praying at such sites was then taken up with gusto from the third century onwards by a new flood of pilgrims who came to the city with the specific intent of walking in the footsteps of their Lord.

  On these itineraries, Hakeldama featured as the very spot where Judas lowered himself into the fires of hell with the jerk of a rope round his neck. One of the earliest references comes in Onomasticon, a study of place names found in Holy Scripture, compiled by Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine in the 330s, and one of the most hallowed of the early church historians.9 He refers on several occasions to the pilgrim site at the Field of Blood, and places it in the valley of Hinnom, south of Mount Zion (save on one occasion, when he unaccountably moves it north of the same peak).

  Eusebius’ survey follows the bountiful visit to Jerusalem in 326 of Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, the Roman Emperor who in 313 had granted liberty to Christianity after centuries of persecution. A zealous Christian convert (and, by some accounts, a former barmaid who wasn’t married to Constantine’s father), the Empress Helena came to the city with her son’s blessing, and his permission to build monuments to her faith. Principal among the works she commissioned was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself, where it is said she had found the remains of the ‘true cross’ on which Jesus had been crucified. Among her other projects, though, was a new cemetery chapel on the hillside of the Field of Blood. It marked what had, since Jesus’ time, been a catacomb for the Christian dead. (This claim has some authenticity. A shroud has been found at Hakeldama still bearing clumps of human hair, dated as first century CE.)

  It was not just Judas’ reputation that drew these diligent, pious early church pilgrims. It was on this same spot, in the niches carved out of the rock face of Hakeldama, that the apostles were said to have hidden away once Jesus was arrested and until his resurrection. Unlike Judas’ connection to Hakeldama, this claim has no basis whatsoever in the gospels, yet still became part of the tradition that developed in these first centuries of the church. Later the Crusaders, arriving at the end of the eleventh century on papal instructions to conquer Jerusalem on behalf of Christians, were to replace Helena’s cemetery chapel with a much larger structure, presumably because their arrival caused so many deaths and the foreigners’ graveyard was much in demand.

  So, unsignposted though it may be today, people did once head in numbers for Hakeldama – to bury and remember the dead, to follow the trail of the apostles, and to recall Judas. It was the last of these three, its link to Jesus’ betrayer, that seems to have exerted the greatest pull. In the earliest surviving account of a Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the Itinerary of the anonymous ‘Pilgrim of Bordeaux’ who came in 333, the author makes reference to ‘returning to the city from Aceldama’, having seen ‘in a dark corner an iron chain with which the unhappy Judas hanged himself’.10

  The chain seems to be his own embellishment on Matthew’s gospel, which makes no mention of any such thing. It is by no means the first addition, and certainly is not the last. In the 680s, the French bishop Arculf made his own contribution. In De locis sanctis (‘Concerning Sacred Places’), his account of a journey to the Holy Land, he reports with some excitement going to Hakeldama and seeing the very fig tree from which the traitor was found hanging.11 The fig, by tradition the tree of life, was being crudely imported into the story of an inglorious death to amplify the significance of Judas’ story in the Christian narrative. And it has been talked up ever since. There, but for the grace of God . . .

  ‘You’re very lucky,’ pronounces the short, stout, balaclava’d Greek Orthodox nun who peers out round the half-opened red metal front gate of Saint Onouphrius’ Monastery. Since the 1890s it has been the only lived-in structure on Hakeldama, a small, fortress-like compound, clinging to the rock face and surrounded by high walls. They are topped by barbed wire, above which peep the branches of trees. Perhaps the fig tree that Arculf saw is still in bloom? Or, better still – and now my imagination is racing away – a Judas Tree, the pink-flowering Cercis siliquast
rum, which reputedly got its name because, in other embellished accounts, its branches once played host to Judas’ rope?

  ‘We’re closed,’ says the nun, with a short-sighted smile, ‘but I’ll let you in.’ The notice board outside specifies the monastery’s brief, weekly opening hours, including this particular morning and this precise time, but it feels rude to point this out as she hospitably swings the door open wide. She had been showing out some workmen who had been helping her in the monastery gardens, she explains, when she spotted me making my way up the unmarked muddy track that leads to the monastery from the main road on the valley floor. Otherwise, she implies, the bell would have gone unanswered and made my pilgrimage fruitless.

  Perhaps this absence of welcome – in marked contrast to every other site I visit in Jerusalem – is another reason for the decline in numbers heading for Hakeldama. We step into a wide, glazed porch area, with large picture windows looking out northwards towards the Old City, and the white, marbled steps made up of gravestones in the Jewish cemetery as they climb up the slopes of the Mount of Olives. Around us are a couple of dusty plastic tables with cellophane-wrapped floral covers, which might once have belonged in a café, long since abandoned. In one corner stands a small, crudely constructed piety stall with sachets of dried herbs for sale, plus booklets and prayer cards about Saint Onouphrius, a fourth-century hermit monk believed to be buried here. But, curiously, not so much as a passing reference to Judas.

  The nun – who doesn’t tell me her name – wonders aloud what I am doing there. ‘No one much comes any more,’ she continues, almost to herself. Her English is perfect, and she has pulled down the flap of her balaclava sufficiently so that her words are not swallowed by the wool, but I still can’t detect whether it is relief or regret in her voice. There are, she reveals guilelessly, only two sisters living in the monastery now (a third died recently) and – here she gestures to the walled garden behind her, visible through an open gate – it is all getting too much for her. A pile of pruned olive tree branches and ripped-up geranium stalks lies by the entrance, waiting to be removed.