Courtney McGrailJudas: The Troubling History of the Renegade Apostle
by Peter Stanford
(Hodder & Stoughton, £20.00)
The destiny of Judas, the outcast apostle of the 12, was brought forcibly before us all with the rediscovery in the Jesuit residence in Leeson Street of Caravaggio’s painting of the arrest of Jesus. Now in the National Gallery, it provides the classic image of the moment in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus was betrayed by Judas.
But is the matter quite that simple, Peter Stanford, a former editor of the Catholic Standard, asks, in his latest exploration of the byways of Christianity.
Previously, he has written about the Devil and about Pope Joan among other topics. Now he turns to a character whose role in the drama of the Easter event has, over the long centuries since, given rise to diverse views, among both the pious and among theologians.
His book is written in a popular style, but is nevertheless very thought-provoking and well-informed.
Stanford begins with the Gospels’ accounts, which are full of variations, and with the early references in Paul and the Fathers of the Church. Because Judas was the almoner of the disciples, and seems to have been, shall we say, careful in his accounts, his image became attached to bankers and to money lenders in later centuries. This image folded into that of the “perfidious” Jews who put Christ to death – the beliefs that motivated the anti-Semitism of Europe down to our own times.
Yet to condemn the Jews was to avoid the truth of the matter as it seemed to theologians – that it was the burden of all human sin that Christ suffered for.
Medieval legends
Peter Stanford traces out these medieval legends, but then detects in the Post Reformation era of the Enlightenment a new attitude to Judas: Judas the rebel, Judas the radical.
However, in our own time, yet another version of Judas has emerged. A more nuanced interpretation that without Judas, there would have been no arrest and no crucifixion.
We think that the story would have turned out as it did even without Judas – for some other way of arresting Jesus would have been found, as he was a well-known person, who did not really need to be identified.
Judas, despite the distain of centuries, had an essential role to play in the salvation story.
The Gospel narratives say that John, the disciple that Jesus loved, ran away in the garden. And later Peter, who had indeed tried to resist and had struck a blow in the defence of Jesus until he was told to put up his sword, denied Christ three times. So others among the apostles, including the man later centuries came to see as the first Pope, also “betrayed Christ”.
This was noted by Karl Barth writing in 1942: “The basic flaw was revealed in Judas, but it was that of the apostolate as a whole.” And he concludes: “Peter and Judas stood side-by-side on the same footing.”
But the ambiguities in the story of Judas – so well explored, but not resolved by Jorge Luis Borges in Three Version of Judas, his fiction from 1944 – remain with us.
There is a sense that Judas is a human figure, one we can relate to. For the truth of the matter is that we all betray Jesus in our different ways, not just the bankers bringing ruin upon us all, but the priests who have so horribly soiled their lives and the reputation of the Church in recent times.
Judas is a figure we should all contemplate. In Ireland we have a tradition of hatred of the informer – so well expressed by Liam O’Flaherty in his great novel of the troubled 1920s – but the informer from another point of view was merely doing his duty as a citizen by reporting crime to the authorities. So with Judas.
There is also the attitude to suicide that the story of Judas suggests: not the noble end for a hero, as so often expressed by classical writers, but a way out for the despairing. This is not what the Church teaches today, or what families made bereft would like to think.
Reading Stanford’s book my mind went back to Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon – the very title of which alludes to the Easter event – and the character Rubashov.
He sacrifices his life by admitting his “guilt” in order to further, not the tyranny of a Stalin-like leader, but a higher objective: he dies “for the good of the cause”. Did some thought like that motivate Judas too?
Far from being an object of obloquay, or a medieval ogre, Judas is perhaps in all his ambiguities a very contemporary figure.
In our own daily betrayals, we ought to bear him in mind.