Judas: A Biography

Judas: A Biography By Susan Gubar W.W. Norton & Co. 2009, $27.95, pp. 453

Notorious recipient of 30 pieces of silver. Betrayer with a kiss. Odd man out in countless medieval and Renaissance paintings of the Last Supper. Harvey Keitel, with a red beard and prosthetic nose, manhandling a frightened and confused Willem Dafoe in that Scorsese film.

Presumably most of the above rings a bell (or an alarm), even if the details of the original story are a bit fuzzy. Judas, after all, is arguably the world’s most notorious pariah. For two millennia, Christian anti-Semitism found in him an iconic image of Jewish deceit and perfidy—the friend and disciple who, according to the New Testament, sold out Jesus to the priestly authorities to be condemned and handed over to the Romans for crucifixion. On realizing the enormity of what he had done, Judas hanged himself, consigning his own soul to eternal damnation. Yet paradoxically his actions brought about what Christians believe is the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures and the redemption of all humankind.

As English professor and feminist scholar Susan Gubar (The Madwoman in the Attic) points out, Judas has often been seen as a more ambiguous figure than this simplified story implies. The gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—pay little attention to him, leaving an unclear picture both of the man and of his motives. Only the gospel of Matthew, for example, mentions the 30 pieces of silver and Judas’ suicide. In John’s gospel there is no kiss of betrayal, yet we learn that Judas acted as the disciples’ embezzling money manager. In John and Luke, Judas is understood to be possessed by the devil, while Mark and Matthew present a more human figure. There are other discrepancies, and in Judas: A Biography, Gubar discusses them expertly, although her claim that Mark, regarded as the earliest gospel, is more “historically accurate” than John is problematic. John is certainly the more complex literary and theological work, but all the gospels are fundamentally theological.

Gubar is also good at reminding readers of the intra-Jewish nature of the often shocking anti-Judaic polemics in the gospels. Like Jesus, all his disciples and most members of the nascent Jesus movement were Jewish. At least initially, the fierce debate over Jesus’ identity—and the meaning of his life and resurrection—was a debate about the future of Judaism. Of course, the harsh words of the gospels, and the “evidence” provided by Judas’ betrayal, would eventually be turned against the Jewish people in unspeakable ways. A large part of Judas examines that history of calumny as it found expression in literature, drama, painting and other arts, and later in the movies and scholarship. Here, too, Gubar works with scrupulous evenhandedness, careful to acknowledge the enormous changes in the attitude of Christian churches, especially the Catholic Church, toward Judaism after the Shoah.

Gubar, distinguished professor of English and women’s studies at Indiana University, conceives this “biography” not as a book about “theology or history, but instead about character and representation.” She argues that there has been an evolution, even a “maturation,” in how artists and thinkers have imagined Judas across the history of Western Civilization. This claim is reformulated in different ways, perhaps most succinctly when she writes that her book “tracks the fiendish premodern Judas, the loving Renaissance Judas, the heroic Enlightenment Judas, and the contemporary skeptical Judas.” And she declares herself particularly interested in what she calls Judas’ “exceptionally complex development during the cataclysms of the 20th century.”

Not surprisingly, such an ambitious project turns out to be sprawling, almost encyclopedic. Remarkably informative and often fascinating, Judas is also exasperating and exhausting. Exasperation arises from our uncertainty about whether Gubar’s thesis of Judas’ evolution from “disgrace to dignity” was derived from the evidence, or evidence she selected to prove her thesis. Too often, the selection and interpretation of her material seem arbitrary. For example, while noting that Judas came to be regarded by some as a “revered savior” in the 20th century, Gubar concedes that even the earliest imaginative accounts, such as the Gnostic “Gospel of Judas,” cast him as a hero, or at least an innocent agent of divine will. She never satisfactorily resolves these contradictions, resorting instead to equivocating phrases such as “seem to say,” “tends to” and “generally, though, it seems.” And her account of how Judas’ supposed ascent toward “dignity” was “arrested by the Shoah”—where once again he became an encouragement and excuse for the persecution and murder of the Jews—would seem to pull the rug out from under her “maturation” story.

Gubar’s dense and allusive writing style provides the exhausting part of Judas. In a typical passage, she writes that “the genesis of Judas in the knots and cruxes of the Gospels illuminates not only the origins of those religious species we call Judaism and Christianity but also the specious or virtual species of Judases who have populated the imaginations of countless people throughout the postbiblical history of Western culture.” Only the most dedicated explorer is likely to trudge all the way through such sentences.

As for the content of her argument, it is true that Judas’ significance in the tortuous relationship between Judaism and Christianity is indisputable—although it is probably more accurate to say that St. Paul, rather than Judas, as Gubar asserts, is “the principal figure through whom Christians have understood Jews and Jewry.” But how the “genesis of Judas,” even if located in “knots and cruxes” (sounds like a breakfast cereal), might illuminate the origin of Judaism is elusive at best. Finally, given all the hard work this book demands of the reader, it is a pretty poor payoff to be reminded that the betrayal represented by Judas is “a notoriously ambiguous moral category.”

Obviously, Gubar could not include every significant artistic reference to Judas. Yet two omissions that could have enlivened this study deserve mention. First is the work of the Japanese-Catholic writer Shusaku Endo, especially his novel Silence, a story of the 17th century persecutions of Catholics in Japan. In coming to understand that only by an act of apostasy can they be faithful to Jesus, betraying him to save others, Endo’s Jesuit would-be martyrs embody a profound literary expression of the paradoxical nature of Judas’ relationship to Jesus.

And then, on a much different note, there’s that much neglected theologian, J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. In a colloquy with a Quaker friend, Holden wonders if Jesus “sent old Judas to hell.” Jesus’ disciples “annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth,” Holden confesses. “They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head.” The disciples, Holden surmises, would have sent Judas “to hell and all—and fast, too—but I’ll bet anything Jesus didn’t do it.”

There’s a freshness to such impromptu theology. A little more of it, and less speculation about “specious or virtual species of Judases,” would have served Susan Gubar and her fascinating protagonist better.

Paul Baumann is editor of Commonweal.