c. 2006 Religion News Service
ROME _ Every great story deserves a great villain. For centuries of Christians who consider the Easter story the greatest ever told, no one in history can quite match the despicable deeds and evil nature of Judas Iscariot.
But questions of whether Judas deserves his foul reputation have become increasingly loud in recent years, with some calling for a historical makeover for the fallen disciple. Not only has Judas become a character in Hollywood films sympathetically portraying him as a misunderstood revolutionary, he has benefited from a raft of scholarly research that aims to absolve him through close readings of the Gospel accounts and other early Christian texts.
Judas is even getting his own text. The National Geographic Society is unveiling a 4th century “Gospel of Judas” in a series airing on its National Geographic Channel. According to that gospel’s truth, Judas was fulfilling a divine plan by handing Christ over to his executioners.
As Christians observe Lent and prepare for Holy Week and Easter, Pope Benedict XVI seized upon a recent weekly audience to defend the traditional view of Judas, labeling him the “traitor apostle.” For Christiandom, much is at stake. A redefining of Judas alters the narrative of Christ.
This debate over evil personified could bear consequences beyond Christian doctrine. In blasting Judas, Benedict was not simply weighing in on academic debate; he was drawing a fundamental line between good and evil human behavior. Benedict knows that deconstructing the motivations of the standard-bearer of villainy could challenge conventional understanding of evil itself.
The timing is ripe for a new view on evil. With the U.S. “war on terror” stumbling in the eyes of much of the public, according to surveys, there is growing fatigue over the portrayal of the war as a black-and-white battle. President Bush’s 2002 characterization of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil” seems more simplistic and perhaps naive than it did in the months following the Sept. 11 attacks.
Reliable villains like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have given way to a faceless enemy. A sectarian war has broken out in Iraq, splintering the Iraqi dictator into anonymous thousands, and terrorist attacks continue across the globe, with or without the direction of Al-Qaida.
“What many people find disagreeable about the political use of evil is that it’s rooted in self-righteousness on the part of the speaker,” said the Rev. Robert Gahl, an Opus Dei priest and professor of ethics and morality at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. “It’s saying we’re entirely different from our enemies without any attempt to understand them.”
The attempt to demonize a foreign enemy is hardly new. The Bible is peppered with stories of the righteous struggling to resist the aggressions and influences of evil outsiders, according to Elaine Pagels, a professor of early Christianity at Princeton University and author of “The Origin of Satan.”
“When Jews talked about external enemies; they talked about them as if they were monsters,” Pagels said, citing the language of the biblical prophets.
More subtle examples of evil are found in the Book of Job, Pagels said, where Satan himself appears as an angel in God’s court.
“In a way (Satan) is a much more exalted image than the one used for outsiders. But he’s also a much more dangerous one,” she said. “It’s about inside betrayal.”
Straddling this distinction between foreign and insider enmity is the figure of Judas.
“The major problem of the current time is how to deal with the other,” or the unfamiliar, said William Klassen, author of “Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus” and a leading advocate for the rehabilitation of Judas. “Judas opens that up for us in a way that no other person in history does.”
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Scholars like Klassen argue that Judas’ last name “Iscariot” indicates he was probably from the village of Kerioth in southern Judea, while the other apostles came from the northern region of Galilee.
Judas, therefore, was an outsider who found his way into Christ’s inner circle and who allegedly abused his position of privilege.
The unique bond between Christ and Judas is apparent in the earliest gospel accounts, including the Gospel of Mark, written around 70 A.D. In Mark, Judas identifies Christ to authorities with an indelible kiss.
“He’s an intimate betrayer,” Pagels said. “That’s what’s so troubling. Judas turned in his own teacher.”
Centuries after Christ’s death, however, historical accounts of Judas begin to deprive him of his insider status. Taking license with his first name, which literally means “Jew,” early Christian writers and medieval historians aimed to alienate Judas from the church’s founders by applying anti-Jewish stereotypes to him.
By the time the Gospel of John was composed at the end of the first century, for example , Christians were already engaged in a struggle to break away from Judaism. In John, therefore, Judas is portrayed as a diabolic villain, driven by greed to betray Jesus.
“John was caught up in anti-Jewish propaganda and of course Judas was the archetypal Jew,” Klassen said. “He wants to vilify Judas to make sure that people don’t think Judaism is a good religion.”
As centuries passed from the moment of Christ’s death, Judas began to acquire more pronounced Semitic features in Western art and literature. In the fourth century writings of St. Augustine, early Christianity’s most influential theologian, Judas is presented as a distinctly Jewish foil to St. Peter, the founder of the church.
The more Christianity sought to distinguish itself from Judaism, in other words, the more Judas became distinctly Jewish. The evil he represented, meanwhile, evolved from a question of personal sin to one of a foreign threat.
Beginning with the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, popes have officially dropped the accusation of deicide against Jews.
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In dealing with the other, popes have gradually become more careful in applying labels to non-Christians of all types.
While confronting the rise of Islamic terrorism, for example, the late pope John Paul II never publicly recognized any connection between the Muslim faith and terrorist acts. Pope Benedict XVI has revised that policy by linking terrorism to Islamic “extremism,” but his condemnations appear directed primarily at the misuse of Islam, rather than the religion itself.
Benedict’s harshest condemnations are usually directed inward _ at Europe, the church’s historical backyard, and at the church itself.
At a Mass preceding the conclave that elected him pope, the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger turned a critical eye on the West, which he said had come under the control of a “dictatorship of relativism,” indifferent to questions of objective right and wrong.
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Benedict was essentially identifying a source of evil without giving it a name.
“I think there’s great wisdom in his deciding not to specify a target,” Gahl said. “In using the term `relativism’ he was describing an ideology that very few would attribute to themselves and yet it can be socially and politically identified as a position.”
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Benedict’s most direct challenge to evil came, when standing in for an ailing Pope John Paul shortly before his death. The then-cardinal delivered a stinging Good Friday sermon to thousands gathered at the historic Coliseum, selected as a symbol of Christian persecution by Romans.
After the stations of the cross had been reenacted, Ratzinger condemned the “filth” present in the Catholic priesthood _ an apparent reference to the clerical sex abuse and attempted cover-ups that have gripped the church in recent years.
Then as before, the church was confronting the threat of betrayal from within its ranks. Judas wasn’t mentioned, but his spirit was felt.
MO/JL END RNSEditors: To obtain files photos depicting Judas Iscariot, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject (Judas).
