Matthew is the only one of the gospels where we can read of the death of Judas, embedded in the passion story. Luke does not mention it in his gospel, but deals in more detail in his book on the Acts of the Apostles with the nasty end of the traitor apostle. It is difficult to reconcile Luke’s description with Matthew’s text. Accord-ing to Matthew’s account, Judas himself initiated the betrayal of Jesus, deliverAccord-ing him into the hands of the chief priests (Mt 26,14–16), later he is present at the last supper (Mt 26,21–25) and he participates in the capture of Jesus (Mt 26,46–50).
This is followed by the dramatic conclusion of the sufferings of the Messiah and his death on the cross. Judas repents of his act and takes back the thirty pieces of silver to the high priests, saying: “I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood” (Mt 27,4) “What is that to us?” they replied. “See thou to that.” Upon which he threw the pieces of silver into the temple and went out and hanged himself (Mt 27,5). The chief priests gathered up the silver but decided that: “It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood.” They took counsel and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in. Where-fore that field was called, The field of blood, unto this day” (Mt 27,6-8).
Matthew’s account is full of direct and indirect references to the Old Testa-ment. The motif of thirty pieces of silver (Zech 11,13) runs like a red thread through the narrative. The reason why Judas’s despair, beyond personal remorse, is so great can be understood from Deut 27,25: “Cursed be he that taketh reward to slay an innocent person. And all the people shall say: Amen.” According to this, Judas realised that with his action he had excluded himself from the house of Israel and placed himself under a curse. In such a case it would have been the task of the chief priests and the elders to provide for atonement, but they were more con-cerned with the fate of the thirty pieces of silver than with what happened to Judas. He was left alone with his sin – and it cost him his life.
Matthew’s rather brief account of the death of Judas was further expanded and coloured by works of ecclesiastical art in the Middle Ages. The examples presented
54 by the author (a relief from Autun Cathedral, a miniature from the Stuttgart Psalter, a stained glass window from Alsace made in 1520) with their mere factual portrayal enrich the range of mediaeval and Renaissance symbolism. The nakedness of the body hanging on the rope indicates the vileness of the sin revealed before the Lord, and the fact that he tries to cover his nakedness even in his death struggle shows the duplicity of the traitor. The fact that the rope does not form a loop around the neck of the trapped apostle gives a glimpse into the depth of his spiritual struggle with the demons tempting him: if he had the strength to raise his head he could escape.
Luke – in contrast with Matthew – writes about the death of Judas not as part of the passion story but wedged between the Ascension and the events of Pente-cost. According to Luke it is Judas himself who buys a field called the Field of Blood after his death that was probably due to an accident. According to this account Judas shows no sign of remorse: he uses the blood money “wisely to buy a piece of land. Luke does not mention the thirty pieces of silver; his description of the traitor’s death actually indicates an accident: Judas “falling headlong” and “burst asunder in the midst and all his bowels gushed out” (Acts 1,18).
Commentators in different periods paid much attention to Luke’s naturalistic description. It is an old opinion, for example, that Judas’s soul departed through the spilled intestines. It did not leave through his mouth because he had kissed Jesus with his lips, so his wicked, unholy soul could not depart through the lips made sacred by Jesus. Most of the mediaeval portrayals (e.g. Biblia Pauperum, Cathedral of Benevent) try to harmonise the accounts given by Matthew and Luke, by show-ing Judas hangshow-ing on a rope with his bowels spilled. As a symbol of greed leadshow-ing to sin, the victim is occasionally shown with a bag of money around his neck. His damned soul departs through his side in the form of a small child-like creature.
With his drastic series of images Luke was almost certainly attempting to show the just judgement of the Lord over the wicked sinner. The extra-canonical writ-ings and unquestionably works of fiction have preserved even more variants – some of them quite absurd – or have transformed the tradition regarding the death of Judas. In his Master and Margarita Bulgakov portrays the death of Judas as murder in which the instigator was none other than Pontius Pilate. According to Papias Bishop of Hieropolis (+163), Judas became “vile in his whole body” as a fitting punishment for his godlessness. His eyelids swelled so much that he could not see the light of day, his private parts swelled disgustingly, his body filled with pus, worms emerged from him and tortured him to death. He died alone on an abandoned farm, that became a depopulated, uninhabited region right up to the present because of the terrible stink. There are centuries of folk tradition behind the folk narratives of the legend of Papias. It is sufficient to refer to the accounts recorded in scripture about the death of Antiochus Epiphanes, or Herodes Agrippa I of which Luke writes: “he was eaten of worms and gave up the ghost” (2Mac 9;
Acts 12, 23). But we could continue with the examples of the death of Catullus as described by Josephus Flavius or the sufferings of Herod the Great, and the same textual tradition crops up again in contemporary legends about the death of re-formers of the modern age (Luther, Calvin).
The death of Judas Iscariot in the New Testament and the history of its influence
The 13th century Legenda Aurea, and the legend of Saint Brandanus (Navigatio 55
Brendani) also have many threads linking them to the above-mentioned folkloris-tic legend originating in the ancient world. In addition to the elements men-tioned above, the narrative of Navigatio Brendani adds an important new motif:
“I am the most unhappy Judas who betrayed the Lord. I hanged myself in my despair. If my repentance had been true the Lord would have had mercy on me.”
The Lord suspends the punishment of Judas who crouches on a rock in the middle of the ocean, on Sundays and on the feast days of the Blessed Virgin, because he knows that he helped a leper at least once and committed other good deeds. The notion that Judas is given reprieve from Hell at least on Sunday is the Christian variant of the Jewish Sabbath idea. According to the latter, rest on the Sabbath has absolute validity and so applies even to Hell.
According to Islamic tradition, based on the 4th Sura of the Koran, Judas is a substitute victim. It was not fitting for the Messiah, the messenger of Allah, to be caught and murdered by the Jews and so in reality they did not kill him, it was not him that they crucified. According to Tabari, one of the most influential exegetes of the Koran in the Middle Ages, and also to Wahb ibn Munabbih, a teacher who lived around 700 AD, it was Judas who died in the place of Jesus. This Islamic claim about the “substitute passion” of Judas crops up even in the 20th century.
But it is not esteem for Judas that lies behind it, on the contrary, contempt. Ac-cording to this conviction the prophet of Allah cannot die an ignominious death on the cross: it is only a traitor, a Judas who can meet with such a fate!
LITERATURE
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GÁBORJÁNI SZABÓ BOTOND