Apostle Read online

  The markets themselves were largely a gallows of shoddy merchandise: bowls of beads, body stockings, stuffed camels, plastic toy sniper rifles, pirated Arab-language copies of Toy Story, carbon-datably dried pineapple. At one corner, an Evangelical tour group led by a man with a thick southern accent argued over the opening line of the Twenty-Third Psalm, while a few feet away a Roman Catholic tour group led by a young, sunburned priest stopped at one of the stations of the Via Dolorosa. Meanwhile, M16-bearing Israeli soldiers looked upon them all with unmistakable irritation. A little farther down the street, mouthy Palestinian schoolkids shouted down insults from atop the wall of the Aqsa school. Nearby, tourists gawked at the gargantuan crown of thorns around the dome of the Church of the Flagellation, while others posed for photographs while struggling beneath its freestanding photo-op cross. Young Palestinian men manned T-shirt stands that sold FREE PALESTINE! shirts alongside shirts emblazoned with FOR THE SAKE OF ZION—I WILL NOT BE SILENT!

  Jerusalem might have been an easy city to love, but it was virtually impossible to like. As Jay pointed out, its tendencies toward the excessive should not have been surprising. During the second century BCE, a Jewish nationalist movement overthrew the region’s stridently Hellenizing Seleucid overlords and went on to found the Hasmonaean dynasty—a regime that became as cruel and appalling as that of any Greek-styled warlord. In the first century CE, Jewish Zealots devoted to the Temple led a doomed revolt against the Romans that ensured the destruction of that Temple, which was never rebuilt. Christians have never behaved more barbarously than during their various attempts, successful and unsuccessful, to control Jerusalem. Medieval Muslims once sacked the supposed tomb of Jesus itself, and today their twenty-first-century heirs are sent marching in the streets by an errant editorial.

  A German Dominican priest who visited Jerusalem in the late fifteenth century was already questioning whether the shrines he kneeled before had any relationship to the locations they claimed to commemorate. The places where Jesus was imprisoned, flogged, and finally condemned by Pilate have been in Brownian motion for centuries, often based on nothing more empirical than where a freshly arrived crusader felt like pointing his sword. In this respect, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Christianity’s holiest place, was both an exception and not. While its location is not based completely in fantasy (the first devotional building constructed on its grounds, raised by Constantinian architects in the fourth century, was built in recognition of an early local tradition), many of the claims made for the Sepulchre’s other contents (such as Adam’s tomb and the literal center of the earth) were puzzling, to say the least. The building that stands today is, by and large, a half-restored, half-reconstructed version of a church first erected in the twelfth century by crusaders. Weakened by various calamities over the last thousand years, the Holy Sepulchre of today only looked as though it were about to collapse and kill everyone inside.

  Many Christians face a challenging emotional experience in the Holy Sepulchre. They come to see the spot on which Jesus was crucified and peer into the nearby cave in which his body was entombed. What they find instead is hooded, frowning Copts, villainously bearded Armenians, medieval darkness, and gagging clouds of incense. The Holy Sepulchre is divided into various areas overseen by six Christian sects for whom agreement is a once-in-a-millennium occurrence. (Unsightly scaffolds once stood within the church for the better part of a century because none of its caretakers could agree on the form some badly needed repairs would take.) The key keepers of the church are, famously, a Muslim family—the only ones who can be trusted to let everyone inside.

  The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was merely one radioactive particle whirling within the spiritual fallout of the city that contained it. For decades, the troubles of Jerusalem have held our world hostage. This sad reality becomes most evident at the Western Wall, the one surviving piece of the Second Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans near the end of the Jewish War in 70 CE. Visually, it is striking: its crenellated baby-teeth ramparts, the fright wigs of bright evergreen that grow from its cracks, the irregular size of its constituent bricks, the glowy manner in which it catches and holds the slanted late-afternoon light. Many of the Jews who today came to the Wall prayed for the annihilation of the Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock*2 built above it, and within the latter one can find the following written around its inner dome: “God is but One God; utterly remote is He in His glory from having a son.” While we watched people pray at the Western Wall, Jay said, “Jerusalem is a city of contradictions. Three of them.”

  Before our search for Hakeldama began that day, Jay and I had stopped for an early lunch in what had become our favorite falafel restaurant. Near the end of our meal, nearly three dozen pilgrims from New Ulm, Minnesota, invaded the otherwise empty restaurant. Their Palestinian guide remained outside, pensively smoking. After the owner explained to them what falafel was, all thirty ordered hamburgers. A Santa-like man with a thick white nicotined beard and intensely merry eyes sat next to Jay; his short-haired, nervously smiling wife sat next to me. Both were eager to chat with what they were delighted to learn were fellow Americans. They had been in Israel six days. What had they seen? Bethlehem, of course. Galilee, where they had gazed upon the very place where Jesus once trod on water. This morning had brought them to the shore of yet another amazement: the dungeon in which Jesus had been beaten, even though the New Testament does not record such a dungeon. And us? We described our plan to find Hakeldama, which Judas supposedly purchased with the money he had earned by betraying Jesus. Husband and wife shifted uncomfortably and shared a bridge-partner glance. Jay quickly explained that he was a professional historian. His area was the Crusades, generally, but his particular specialty was the study of how Jerusalem was perceived by those who had never been there. He described to our new friends how nearly all of the first travel guides about Jerusalem were written by crusader-era scribes who routinely failed—to the frustration of modern historians—to take note of the contemporaneous reality of the city around them and instead focused on imagining they had found the exact spot where Jesus had saved the adulterous woman from stoning or where Mary had learned her Psalter.

  Our new friends nodded politely and for a while did not speak. Finally, the man looked up and asked, “Why the heck would you want to see where Judas killed himself?”

  III.

  “The figure of Judas Iscariot,” one popular Christian writer has said, “is the most tragic in all the Bible.” Another writes, “He committed the most horrible, heinous act of any individual, ever.” Yet another writes that Judas “is the greatest failure the world has ever known.” The name Judas Iscariot*3 has become an electromagnet of wickedness.

  Who Judas was, what he did, why he did it, and what he ultimately means have been debated within Christianity from its first decades. In the centuries since, many—believers and nonbelievers alike—have attempted to discern in his few scriptural appearances a personality complicated and large enough to merit the crime of which he is condemned. This has resulted in many imagined Judases. We have been presented with a Judas who is tormented and penitent, a Judas possessed by devils, a Judas possessed by the Devil, a Judas who is diseased, a Judas who is loyal, a Judas who does what he has to do, a Judas who wants Jesus to act against Rome, a Judas who is confused, a Judas who is loving, a Judas who loves women, a Judas who kills his own father, a Judas who works as a double agent, a Judas who does not understand what he has done, a Judas who kills himself, a Judas who lives to old age, a Judas who loves Jesus “as cold loves flame,” a Judas who is the agent of salvation itself.

  The scholar Kim Paffenroth, one of Judas’s more astute contemporary judges, writes that all of this imaginative toil has been for naught. “We will never see Judas,” he writes, “and we will never not see him because, like every historical or literary character, he is found everywhere and in everyone.” One of the first Christian martyrdom documents, written in the mid-second century, proclaims that those who be
tray their fellow Christians have “received the punishment of Judas himself.” By the third century, Christians were warning in their epitaphs that any violators or grave robbers would “share the lot of Judas.” By the time of the medieval Passion play—a performed reenactment of Jesus’s arrest, trial, and crucifixion, the nature of which allowed for frequent extra-scriptural editorialization—Judas had become synonymous with Jews as a people.

  The color used to symbolize him is that of contagion: yellow. His symbols have been the scorpion, money, coins, and the noose. In obedience to the many prescriptions of early Christian art, Judas was almost always turned away from the viewer, or beardless, or wearing an unusually colored robe, his halo extinguished. Even as these prescriptions faded from the Western tradition, Judas was often painted as a vile, apelike man. Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper defied centuries of tradition when it depicted Judas not as leaving the table, or already absent, but as sitting near Jesus, his face obscured by shadow. While at work on the painting, Leonardo had difficulty with Judas’s face. In the end, he made Judas resemble a prior he hated.

  IV.

  The greatest failure the world has ever known is mentioned twenty-two times in the New Testament. The Gospel According to John mentions him the most; the Gospel According to Mark, which was probably the first gospel to have been written, mentions him the least. In Mark, Judas is little more than plot spot welded to a name. Matthew and Luke, which most scholars accept as having used Mark as their narrative foundations, depart in different ways from their source when it comes to Judas.

  It is important to understand that when we speak of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as being the authors of the gospels,*4 we are speaking less of what one scholar calls a “detectable mind” and more of a complicated, even competitive, process of composition and interpretive overlay. None of the gospels are signed, and all show evidence of having been edited in the interests of theological refinement. Authors were not officially assigned to the gospels until the late second century by Irenaeus of Lyon, one hundred years after the last of them was completed. (Whether the gospels were intended to be anonymously written texts is a much more difficult and obviously unresolved question.) When Irenaeus attached names to the gospels, it was not necessarily out of the belief that men named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had written them.*5 “Authorship” did not have the same conceptual or moral framework in ancient times as it does for us today. Arguments based on who wrote which gospel in many cases hinged on the authority thought to stand behind that gospel—this is especially true in Matthew’s and John’s cases—rather than the person who actually, physically wrote them. This is very similar to the traditions of early Judaism, in which Moses is regarded as the “author” of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible not because he wrote them but because the traditions they contained were believed to wend back to him.

  The idea that the writers of the gospels were self-conscious newshounds going out and reporting or remembering the story of Jesus is somewhat anachronistic. The Gospel According to Luke’s opening lines claim that its author has “decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account” about the events of Jesus’s life and ministry, but many writers of historical narrative in the Greco-Roman world opened with portrayals of themselves as paradigms of reliability. The first-century historian Josephus, for instance, places early stress on his cool-mindedness—“I shall state the facts accurately and impartially”—yet he is widely viewed as one of the most gratuitously self-serving historians who ever lived.

  “Matthew,” “Mark,” “Luke,” and “John” were probably not individual authors writing by candlelight, their memories aglow and their sources scattered around them. The writing of the gospels was, in all likelihood, subsidized by various Christian communities, making their earliest forms compromise-driven. This is not to imply any purposeful dishonesty on the part of the early Christians who wrote and circulated the gospels. It is merely to acknowledge the gospels’ nature, which, as any scholar who has studied their most ancient surviving forms can attest, is distinguished by literally thousands of copyist errors, editorial intrusions, and regional peculiarities. Thus, to speak of the Judas of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John is to speak of Judas as he was understood according to different traditions embedded within imperfectly understood processes undertaken by sometimes vastly different Christian communities.

  In writing his gospel, Mark clearly had no great designs on establishing Judas’s meaning or in interpreting his actions. Thus, any questions surrounding Mark’s portrayal of Judas are in many ways codicils to larger questions about Mark’s gospel itself. The available evidence overwhelmingly indicates that an oral tradition concerning Jesus existed before Mark was first composed anywhere from three to four decades after the death of Jesus. Does Mark’s gospel indicate a break with that oral tradition, or is Mark’s gospel the literary consummation of that oral tradition? Did Mark invent key aspects of the Jesus story or merely preserve them? Was Mark the first to join two separate strands of Jesus material (a “words” strand and a “deeds” strand) into what is called a gospel? Did Mark invent the gospel form by combining these two strands? These questions are so difficult to answer in no small part because we cannot be sure if Mark was the first gospel.

  The early-second-century Christian Papias, who recorded an expanded form of Judas’s death unlike anything in the gospels, famously noted that he preferred hearing stories about Jesus to reading them. If that was the case, what, exactly, was Papias hearing? Was it our familiar gospels, now-lost gospels, an earlier oral tradition of the sort that Mark might have based his gospel on, or the stories of people who actually knew Jesus and his disciples? Because Papias knew of a version of Judas’s death quite different from that of the gospels, we can assume that other parts of the Jesus story were still in flux in the early second century. Actually, we do not have to assume. Works by Clement of Rome, Clement of Alexandria, and Polycarp, all of whom lived around the same time as Papias, refer to sayings they attribute to Jesus that have no precise parallel in our versions of the gospels.

  Mark’s story of Judas’s betrayal begins with Jesus and the disciples in Bethany at the home of Simon the leper. An unnamed woman sits at Jesus’s feet and opens “an alabaster jar of very costly ointment,” which she proceeds to pour over Jesus’s head. According to Mark, “some who were there” grow angry and demand to know why the ointment was wasted. These unnamed people begin to scold the woman. Jesus tells them to leave her alone, because she “has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you…but you will not always have me.” Immediately after this, Mark goes on, Judas “went to the chief priests in order to betray [Jesus] to them.” The chief priests, in turn, promise to pay Judas when the betrayal is enacted. Shortly thereafter, Jesus announces at the Last Supper, “One of you will betray me, one who is eating with me,” though he does not name Judas. Jesus then takes the disciples to the Mount of Olives, where he prays alone at Gethsemane and asks his father to “remove this cup from me.” When he returns from his prayer and finds the disciples sleeping, he upbraids them (“Enough!”), before suddenly announcing, “See, my betrayer is at hand.”*6 Judas arrives alongside “a crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders.” Judas has told the chief priests that he will identify Jesus with a kiss, which he does while fulsomely calling Jesus “Rabbi!” There Mark’s haunting, skeletal account of Judas’s betrayal ends.

  Mark leaves a number of things unclear. Was Judas actually inspired to betray Jesus over the issue of wasted ointment? Why did the chief priests need Judas’s help, exactly? At which point did Judas leave the Last Supper? How did Judas know where to find Jesus once he did leave the Last Supper? All are questions that would occur to any careful reader. Few have read Mark more carefully than Matthew and Luke, and both evidently found Mark’s handling of the betrayal either wanting or incomplete. Matthew was probably written between 70 and 80 C
E, while Luke was probably written between 80 and 100 CE, so both had access to repositories of narrative and legendary material the earlier Mark was apparently unaware of, or at least did not use. Some of this unique material concerned Judas.

  Like Mark, Matthew begins the story of Judas’s betrayal in Bethany. Again a woman pours ointment over Jesus’s head. This time, however, it is specifically “the disciples” who grow angry. Once more Jesus attempts to abate their anger with instruction similar to that in Mark, after which Judas goes to the chief priests and asks them, “What will you give me if I betray him to you?” The chief priests provide Judas his answer: thirty pieces of silver. (This is an apparent riff on the Hebrew scripture Zechariah. Matthew, more than any other gospel writer, worked with various pieces of scripture flattened out next to him,*7 extracting as much exegetical serum as possible.) Already the picture is more complicated than in Mark, for Matthew has made money Judas’s motivation rather than his reward.

  Matthew also changes Jesus’s Last Supper proclamation to the Twelve that one of them will betray him, expanding it to indicate that Jesus is aware of the identity of his betrayer—something Mark does not explicitly do—and that the betrayer himself knows he has been discovered. The second-century pagan philosopher Celsus, the first person whom Christianity irritated enough to inspire a book-length denunciation, pointed to Jesus’s betrayal as a powerful indictment of his divinity: “Would a god…be betrayed by the very men who had been taught by him and shared everything with him?” Mark provided no protection from the criticism that Jesus was too humanly stupid to foresee his own betrayal. Matthew seems to want to show that Jesus was not surprised by the betrayal, thereby shielding him from accusations of fallibility. Unlike Mark’s, Matthew’s Judas speaks up after Jesus’s announcement: “Surely not I, Rabbi?” Matthew also has Jesus address Judas during the betrayal: “Friend, do what you are here to do.” After witnessing Jesus’s condemnation, Matthew writes that Judas “repented” to such a degree that he brings his payment back to the chief priests. “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood,” Judas tells them and, in a move reminiscent of the wicked shepherd of Zechariah, casts his money into the Temple. He then departs and hangs himself. Matthew’s Judas publicly and unambiguously acknowledges his sin, attempts to disavow those with whom he collaborated, and doles out to himself the most extreme possible penalty. This is not Mark’s cipher, or a placard of evil, but a human being whose actions Matthew has at least attempted to comprehend.