(This post originally was posted a while back at MySpace at http://blog.myspace.com/nevrsilentworld. I chose to post it up here as recent news headlines have resurfaced the debate on the existence and veracity of the Gospel of Judas. The debate, I imagine, will continue for a few more centuries; as long as there are people tenacious enough about their faith to decide the things that fall outside of that box are guilty of heresy)
It came out just like this: "Judas Iscariot would be the greatest interview ever."
And it's true. Argue what you will about whether he was a real guy or not (hardcore biblical literalists aside, the jury is still out among a lot of scholars), the bottom line is, there was someone who probably helped turn the guy now known as Jesus Christ in, and no matter what his real name was, we could call him Judas nowadays.
It's a troubling name, one of those that you figure no one will ever name their kids again, just like no one is likely to ever name their kid Adolph. This, in spite of the fact that in his own time, Judas was, like Jesus's real name (Jesus is a translation from the Hebrew / Aramaic name Yeshu, a sort of nickname for Yehoshua, or Joshua) a very popular one. Both names were ones given by rather proudly nationalistic parentage--it'd be like naming your kids after George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, or in the case of Judas, like just plain naming your kid America. So if there is one thing to say about both Jesus and Judas, they had rather patriotic moms and dads. And that takes a lot o' balls when you're an occupied land. It's like naming your kid Freedom if you lived in 1984's Oceania. Unfortunately, now you hear the name Judas, and the only word that resonates is the word "traitor." That may be unfair, if you ask me.
But I'm getting a little ahead of myself, and maybe off-track, as usual. The point is, the person we've come to know as Judas Iscariot may well be the single most intriguing, enigmatic, stupefying, stunning figure in all of western history. There's so little we know, and so much we assume about this character, this scapegoat, this pariah of religious history.
This topic got started in my "Personal Classroom" when someone commented on the recent runaway growth of my beard (the topic of a future Dreaming Life column if I go as far up my own ass as I'm planning to write these days). Usually, I'll make a comment that I'm going for the whole Cuban Revolutionary look (and when I wear certain hats, I really do look like one of Che Guevara's associates). One night at the bar, I simply responded that I was planning to audition for the role of Judas for this spring's production of Jesus Christ Superstar. The only problem is, I wasn't a looming potent black man, like Carl Anderson, and that's really what people want in the JCS version of Judas. Somewhere along the lines that week, I made it a point that, as a writer, Judas was the man any journalist worth his/her salt would die to get their tape recorder in front of.
It's like holding a seminar with Satan, basically. People would just love to hear his side of the story. And let's be honest, the one thing none of the gospels, or any of the historians of that time (the few that even cared that much about the budding Christian movement) paid any attention to, was Judas' side of the story.
It's easy to just say "So and so was the bad guy in this story, and he did something really bad...." But living in the 21st century, it's not enuph for me to simply dub a guy the bad guy, label him as the villain, and then get on with the story. Even villains and so-called evildoers have motivations, as obscure as they may be to everyone else but themselves. Trust me, the motivations they'd give you wouldn't be "because I'm the bad guy." John Wilkes Boothe thought he'd be praised as a national hero for his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He was utterly amazed when it didn't pan out that way.
We don't live in a one-dimensional world, and possibly the the biggest problem with the gospels is that, at best, even its protagonist has only two dimensions. The hardest part of believers and non-believers alike when grappling with the mythos and / or history of the Christ is wrapping their brains around a god-figure who was also fundamentally supposed to be human. For Christ's sake (sorry about the pun) one gospel writer (the one we call "John" now) couldn't even fucking portray him in anything remotely human fashioned. Like Robert Powell's portrayal of the Saviour, you can't even imagine John's rendition of JC blinking on camera (I can't imagine the amount of Visine Powell needed to pull that off in Jesus of Nazareth).
And then there was Judas. In the gospels, he's given barely a few lines worth of mentioning. That's rough press for a guy who, according to said texts, is single-handedly responsible for turning his boss, partner, saviour and pal over to the authorities, all for a really dismal price (we'll get into that later). Why so little about the guy? Were the authors and early believers so glum on the fact that one of Jesus' own gang sold him out that they didn't even want to bring him up? You'd think someone would have wanted to figure out what the hell happened.
Trying to find historical perspective in what is first and foremost a spiritual tome is always asking for way too much. Instead, like the best literary characters, we have to take what we're given, and make our own interpretations. And the fact of the matter is, there is an assortment of apocryphal and non-canonical texts, but therein lies as much madness as the gospels themselves (some apocryphal works depict Roman governor Pontius Pilate as an eventual Christian convert, and that's just plain laughable).
So Judas is a puzzle. One of the greatest literary and historical ciphers in the world, which means authors, artists, poets and scribes would have a lot of latitude to work their own ideas out.
Sadly, with Judas, that really isn't the fact. Dante chose to put him in the lowest, final circle of hell, among the other traitors of humanity. Not exactly sparkling company, and still not asking to get the guy's side of the story. Taylor Caldwell did finally publish I, Judas, a sort of Gospel or Testament According to the Traitor in 1977. I haven't read it (yet), so I can't give a lesson on it.
The first time I ever came across any means of coming to grips with understanding what Judas was thinking was the riveting Carl Anderson portrayal in Norman Jewison's film version of Jesus Christ Superstar, based on the concept album and subsequent stage production written by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. In his opening performance, "Heaven on Their Minds" a disenchanted Judas is left wondering how the hell things got so out of hand, how his friend and fellow social revolutionary could have taken things so far. And it's quickly understood that, in JCS, Judas is as much the protagonist of the story as the title character, if not, perhaps more. This is one of the few times we're given anything at all about his side of the story.
In the annals of Jesus Christ Superstar, Carl Anderson is as immortal as Jesus Christ himself. No one of my generation can think of the character of Judas, and NOT think of Carl Anderson (hence the fixation on the looming potent black man I mentioned earlier). It didn't hurt that the man played the character on stage more than anyone else in the history of the production. He played the role all the way up until his death in 2004, at that point, not just a looming potent black man, but one dreaded out more than fucking Bob Marley, looking even scarier, conflicted, and, well, potent in that social upstart kind of way. Fucking R.I.P. Carl. As angry, tortured and ill-tempered as Carl's Judas was, all accounts of Carl the man were exactly the opposite. That's art, after all.
Carl's rendition was of a man who felt that the hype of his colleague had become dangerous, that the program they once started had lost sight of itself. Basically, that he had to turn his buddy in to keep things from getting out of control, and save everyone's neck. Following Jesus' arrest, he comes to an even more damning realization. He would save no one. His actions would lead only to his death, that he would forever be painted a traitor, a sellout (even though he protested all along how he didn't "want your blood money"). Judas would be damned for all time.
Granted, this was all extrapolated from Tim Rice's 'book', in JSC's own late-sixties, hippie-laden ways--some of which doesn't quite stand the test of time (does anyone really want to watch apostles sing "What's the buzz? / Tell me what's a-happenin'?" in this day and age). But it was also a sign of the times that Judas be personified as a powerful, articulate, tempestuous, impatient African American. How fucking perfect an allegory is that? With Carl came all the imagery of the civil rights and Black Panther movement, the Watts riots, and urban social uprising. Was there not symbolic balance that Judas, like so many African American leaders, would do everything in his power to do what he felt was right, but still wind up villified by it? After all said and done, the white man's Jesus always bleeds truer.
But it was about time somebody finally gave Judas his due, right? Nobody had ever given Judas a reason to do what he did before, right?
Truth is, author Nikos Kazantzakis had them by about ten years, when he wrote the incredibly controversial book, The Last Temptation of Christ. Kazantzakis was a man of deep faith, even if how he envisioned his faith was in a manner that would get him excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox church. Most of you would recognize the title because of Martin Scorsese's equally, if not more controversial 1988 film based on the book. In both book and film, the apostle Judas Iscariot is not the darting, dwarfish coward that tradition and the Apocryphal works had a tendency to depict him as. Instead, he is a bull of a man, huge in stature and fortitude. He's a dagger weilding zealot (this isn't that outlandish--a few scholars have asserted that the name "Iscariot" was a derivation of sicarii, a faction among latter first century jewish zealots known for illegally carrying daggers), who is originally assigned by his colleagues to kill Jesus (because Jesus, who begins as a carpenter who builds crosses for the Romans, is the real traitor). In time, he decides to follow Jesus on a messianic campaign.
Kazantzakis' Jesus was troublingly human; one full of self-doubt, fear, and, yes, temptation. His awakening to status as saviour is one that comes in incremental steps, ones that don't always make sense at the time, and God's revelations are ones that Jesus often tries his best to deny. At first, his friend Judas refuses to accept the idea that God wants Jesus to die as a means of being the messiah (it wouldn't make sense to any first century zealot, of course).
Here, however, we have a complete turnabout of the whole Judas as traitor depiction. In Kazantzakis' work, it is requested of him. It is the recognition that Judas is the only apostle with the required strength of conviction, the only one with the courage to commit an action which will forever change the course of events; to make a decision that will, in effect damn him in the eyes of the world, for eternity.
This is an incredibly moving juxtaposition, and it's one I subscribe to. If any of you have talked with me personally, or read some of my previous works (ones before I started Dreaming Life here), you'd know I adhere fervently to the Devil's Advocate party, with a certain type of caveat.
Judaeo-Christian faith has always posited the fundamental belief that God performs his work through his action upon history. That's pretty much what the entire Old Testament is about, it's a portrayal of a culture's history through the lens that God works his miracle and his purpose through that narrative.
If we're going to follow that line of thinking, we should be realizing that the "Bad Guys" -- guys like Satan and Judas, are given the most awesomely difficult jobs in the cosmos. They perform God's work by being the asshole. Now imagine if, like I do, they had an idea of that from the start. If you take the story of the Fall from Genesis and more importantly from many of the Apocryphal texts, Satan probably knew what he was in store for the moment God created man, and demanded that the angels bow before them. Among most texts, it is Lucifer's pride that befalls him and many of the other angels; that the rebellion is borne out of a former servant deciding he would no longer be a servant. What if Lucifer was performing the ultimate act of loyalty? "I'm rebelling against you to prove many points, one of which is how much I love you, God. You've forced me to become the essence of everything wrong with your creation, and through an act of rebellion, I'm going to obey. Even though I don't like it. Because it is what must be done." How difficult a proposition is that? Aren't we being a little hard on the old bastard?
Kazantzakis does the same thing with Judas. The ultimate act of love is through his betrayal. He doesn't agree with it, he doesn't like it, but he obeys, because he has faith that his friend understands something he cannot. That God demands this. That it must be done.
Tradition holds that Judas was paid for his betrayal with thirty pieces of silver. This is an exhorbitantly low price for the price of the head of a seditionist (which Jesus would have been in both the eyes of the Roman occupiers, and the quisling Saduccean faction who would have regarded Jesus as a threat to their peacemaking tactics). The thirty pieces isn't likely a real price, it's one of those great literary symbols. Certain scholars (and one of the gospels, in fact) have asserted that thirty pieces of silver is about enuph to procure you a very cheap plot of land--a potter's grave. In effect, what the gospel authors may have been saying was that Judas sold out his rabbi, and all it bought him was his death. And eternal ignominy.
Tradition also has it that Judas committed suicide. Mark says he hangs himself, Luke that he flung himself off a cliff (actually some regard the gospel as portraying it as more of an accident), or both (it's often depicted that he hung himself, then the olive tree on which he dangled broke and he was cast into the ravine--it's also depicted that, when he was dashed upon the rocks below, he was disemboweled, and all of these have varying symbolic importance if you do a lot of research on spiritual metaphor in mythology). Some fringe elements even assert that all this hanging from trees and casting into ravines is a roundabout way of saying that Judas himself was also crucified that day (now THAT would be the ultimate betrayal!), since most often, if the Romans bothered to pull you off the cross at all, they flung you down into the trash pit (it's one of those factoids that's given a lot of trouble to the whole "Jesus died and was buried and on the third day rose again" thing, since it's possible he never even came off the cross).
But let's get down to the biggest point of it all. In keeping with the musical that started this whole diatribe, let's call it Superstar Status. Sometimes people can do awful things, and be awarded celebrity for it. One could argue that's the case with Judas Iscariot. He's famous for being infamous. He's a celebrity for being an asshole. On the other hand, maybe he did all the right things, all the things he had to, and his only reward was said infamy, while his buddy Jesus was awarded all the Superstar status. Judas just may have been given the hardest job of all, next to Jesus'. Yes, Jesus obviously had to bite the big one on the cross, but if the believers are right, he would have known he was coming back three days later. If you know you're not really going to stay dead, just how hard is it to face your death? Then look at Judas. What if he knew all along he was going to do the unpopular thing, the world's hardest fucking job, and his only reward would be that he'd wind up "damned for all time"? That God / Jesus had chosen him for this one awful thing, and he knew it...and he did it anyway? And all he would get for it was death?
If a journalist got to ask him that question, man, that would be the fucking cover of Time Magazine.
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