Antiquitopia

August 3's edition of the New Yorker has an article by Joan Acocella discussing Judas traditions with special focus on the Gospel of Judas. Did Judas deserve this fate? If Jesus informs you that you will betray him, and tells you to hurry up and do it, are you really responsible for your act? Furthermore, if your act sets in motion the process—Christ’s Passion—whereby humankind is saved, shouldn’t somebody thank you? No, the Church says. If you betray your friend, you are a sinner, no matter how foreordained or collaterally beneficial your sin. And, if the friend should happen to be the Son of God, so much the worse for you. For two thousand years, Judas has therefore been Christianity’s primary image of human evil. Now, however, there is an effort to rehabilitate him, the result, partly, of an archeological find. In 1978 or thereabouts, some peasants digging for treasure in a burial cave in Middle Egypt came upon an old codex—that is, not a scroll but what we would call a book, wi...

For those furiously revising and revisiting Judas traditions in the wake of the discovery and continued study of the Gospel of Judas, it might do some good to read Borges' short story, "Three Versions of Judas." It is, as usual, labyrinthine in presentation, provocative, and amazing! The story, using basically just the canonical Gospels and some heresiological reports, revises the relationship between Jesus, God, and Judas. It suggests that Judas seems unnecessary. For a teacher who performs public miracles in the day and has a large following, it should not be difficult to find him. Therefore, Judas' betrayal seems superfluous. It seems to exist only for the purpose of damning Judas. Yet it is a superfluity that signals that something else is going on in the story, something subterranean. The Word, when it was made flesh, passed from ubiquity to space, from eternity to history, from limitless satisfaction to change and death; in order to correspond to such a s...