“Judas, An Imaginary Character We Have All Met” April 2, 2023- Dr. Roger Ray
Remove the passion narrative from any thought of it being a historical account and ask yourself, “What does Mark (I’m calling the first author of the passion narrative “Mark” because we know of no earlier source) want to tell us in his version of the last days and the death of Jesus?” If Judas represents Jerusalem’s Temple/Priesthood version of Judaism, and the blood kin of Jesus, both nuclear family and nation, then what does his role as betrayer play?
https://chqdaily.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/spong-breaks-down-literary-myth-of-judas-iscariot/
Taken from a report in the Chautauqua Daily on a lecture delivered there in 2012 by Bishop John Shelby Spong
I will beg your indulgence for those of you who already know this too well as I dust off my undergraduate philosophy degree to air it out for a moment. The foundation of Greek philosophy rests on the shoulders of these three guys from the 5th century before the common era. Socrates was a teacher in Athens who never wrote a book or, as best we can tell, ever really had a formal job. But he was a mentor to Plato who was a friend and witness to Socrates’ execution. And Plato wrote a lot and was a formal teacher. His most famous and most prolific student was Aristotle.
We have several references to Socrates in other Greek writings but we only really know about him because Plato made him famous by using his name in the thousands of pages of dialogues that he wrote.
Socrates was executed by the government of Athens, evidently because his constant question was a threat to the established order of Athens and so he was sentenced to death by being forced to drink poison. Plato’s first writings may have simply been an attempt at telling the story of the unjust execution of Socrates, and so, what he wrote were stories of events and conversations. He listed the people who were there and gave an account of what was said. We call these “dialogues” because it isn’t quite a novel, it has some action in it but it is mostly an account of conversations.
Plato had established a writing style that he went on to use to write dialogues that he used as textbooks for his students. His dialogues examined the meaning of important concepts, but he wrote all of them, using Socrates as the main character. There may have been a certain loyalty to history when Plato originally wrote about the trial and execution of Socrates, but Socrates quickly became a character used to give voice to what Plato wanted to say. In your undergraduate philosophy class, if you were fortunate enough to have taken that class, you were told that Plato used Socrates as an “interlocular” – that is, a fictional character used to voice an idea or a perspective.
Reading Plato tricked a lot of us into becoming philosophy majors because his dialogues were pretty easy to read and they taught us how to critically examine an idea through vigorous debate. I doubt that there is a lawyer in America today who didn’t have to read Plato’s Republic in law school as an introduction to a rigorous definition of justice. Sadly, this also makes them think that they now understand Greek philosophy.
None of Plato’s readable writing style seemed to rub off on Aristotle whose writing is dense and extremely difficult to read…. As is almost all of the rest of philosophy. The people who hear me quoting Soren Kierkegaard so often that they decide to buy one of his books and read it for themselves, come to look at me with a kind of loathing as if I had tricked them into feeling stupid.
All of which is to say that turning a historical figure into an interlocular in order to use that person’s fame and credibility to teach an important point was a common literary technique for centuries before Jesus was born. Look at the book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah initially presents itself as being the preaching of a single prophet, but it covers a 120-year long period of the history of Judah. I’ve been preaching for 45 years, and I can tell you that I don’t have another 75 years in me. There may have been a historical prophet named Isaiah but there were at least two more preachers who used his name and reputation as an interlocular to carry their water.
The writers of the New Testament gospels wanted to tell us something about the teachings of Jesus and, possibly more importantly, they wanted to tell you about the religion that grew up around his name. They were not giving straight forward historical accounts but, one or two or three generations after he was dead, they used Jesus as an interlocular to convey their message. And in doing that, they used some characters in dialogue with Jesus who may or may not have been based on actual historical characters. There probably were historical disciples named Peter and James, for example, because there are references to them from sources outside of the gospels.
His parents may have been named Mary and Joseph but if they were, the words attributed to them in the gospels are almost certainly fictional representations of older heroes from Hebrew scriptures.
The oldest and, in many ways, the most reliable source of insight into the history of Jesus, oddly enough, comes from the only contemporary of Jesus to write any part of the New Testament, albeit someone who never actually met him, and that was the man we call the Apostle Paul.
If I knew a couple of dozen people who were actually interested in doing a Bible study, I would use the late Marcus Borg’s book, the Evolution of the Word, in which he puts the books of the New Testament in the order in which they were written so that you can see how the Jesus story evolved into the Christian religion.
If you read Paul’s authentic letters first, you see that he went to Jerusalem and actually met Peter and the brother of Jesus, James. He talks about Jesus having been crucified on a cross by the Roman government. He talks about people having seen visions of the resurrected Jesus. He even mentions the last supper which took place on the day that Jesus was betrayed. What Paul does not say is that he was betrayed by one of the twelve. He does not mention anyone named Judas. In fact, he says that when Jesus appeared after his death, that he appeared to the twelve, they were all still there, no defections, suicides, or instantaneous deaths as described in the gospels and the book of Acts.
Paul also doesn’t mention Mary or Joseph, an empty grave on Easter, or any other miracle beyond the fact that very many people seemed to have visionary experiences of Jesus after he was dead.
The gospels, all of which were written after Paul was dead and probably all of the eye witnesses of Jesus’ generation were dead, are passionate accounts that are written to inspire faith but we have to acknowledge that they are not historical and that many of the characters in the gospels are entirely fictional literary creations who are invented to represent a message, an idea, a truth, a truth about life if not a truth about history.
Bishop John Shelby Spong points out that the Greek spelling of Judas is the same as the spelling of Judah, the name of the nation which literally meant “Jew.” Imagine how differently we would have read the gospels if the person who betrayed Jesus had been named “Christian.” That would have made Sunday School a bit more sobering, wouldn’t it? But that is closer to what the Gospel of Mark was suggesting. Not that some evil person who lived two thousand years ago betrayed Jesus, but it was his people, his family, his friends, his religious community, and we can’t be sure that it wasn’t us!
It isn’t easy for those of us who grew up in a Christian church to do, but if you can let go of the notion that the gospels describe a historical account of the last days of Jesus and accept that Mark is constructing a drama, a drama that we have always called the “passion narrative” then we can ask what it was that he really wanted to convey by telling the story in a way that has Jesus’ death being directly caused by a character that represents the nation, the religion, the family and friends of Jesus?
On the face of it we can say that Mark is trying to answer one of the most obvious questions one would ask of the early Christian movement, “If Jesus was God’s son, how and why was he killed?” Mark’s answer is to portray Jesus as a kind of “everyman” who was murdered by a trusted friend, a fictional literary device friend who represents organized religion, family drama, and false friends…. Which is something we have all experienced.
You can read the gospel passion story from the perspective of Jesus, or Peter, or even Judas. What makes the passion narrative so compelling, what made Mark’s telling of the last days of Jesus’ life so powerful that Matthew, Luke, and John copied his version and influenced art, theater, movies with this theme of betrayal is not because it is an accurate description of what happened to Jesus centuries ago but because almost all of us have had a Judas in our lives, someone we loved and trusted, maybe even someone we stood up in front of a church filled with family and friends and swore an oath that we would love one another until the day we died, but then they changed… they cheated on you, lied to you, lied about you, they betrayed you, with a kiss!
Or the church that nurtured you as a child, where the most important and influential people in your young life taught your Sunday School classes, led your youth groups, sponsored you to go to church camp, choir trips, and retreats, and then, when you were just 14 years old, you told them who you really are and they condemned, every last one of them . . . or if they didn’t directly condemn you, they stood back in silence and if anyone asked about you, they just said, “Well, I guess I never really knew him.”
I got a letter from a young soldier more than a decade ago. He had grown up with a single mom, living in a broken down trailer park, and he was convinced by a recruiter that military service was the way for him to get an education and build a resume that would allow him to rise out of poverty and to alleviate the suffering of his family while he would become a hero to his nation. He brought all of hype about patriotism, brotherhood, and fighting for freedom and liberty.
He wrote to me from Afghanistan and said, “This war is nothing but America recruiting the children of the rural poor to come and murder the children of the rural poor in Afghanistan. None of our prisoners even know why the United States is here. They have no idea why we are at war. My country didn’t make me a hero, they made me a murderer.”
Mark didn’t write to glorify crucifixion, he wrote in a way that allowed all of us who feel like we have been crucified, betrayed by those we loved, lied to by a nation, a church, forgotten by a family, to realize that even though we may feel that our lives are over, that life can never be the same, we can never be happy again, we can never feel love again, and, at least for me, I can remember standing in my house and saying out loud to myself, “I hope that I never trust another person for as long as I live.”
This is not just figurative or metaphorical. There were 46,000 suicides in America last year and there were more than a million more who attempted suicide but, you know, you can die from a broken heart as well. I wonder how many of the 700,000 fatal heart attacks last year were really caused by stress, depression, hopelessness …. Literally, a broken heart.
Mark gives us word in the face of a broken heart, when you have been crucified at work, when your home has been destroyed and you only get to see your kids every other weekend, when your hopes for ever being happy again have been dashed, and the word he gives to us is resurrection. Forget about all of the heaven and hell mythology or imaginary talk about souls and spirits and ghosts. When you life has been broken and the shattered pieces are lying all around your feet, heaven is not the issue…. Tomorrow is the issue.
Mark doesn’t tell us anything about Jesus’ dead body appearing alive again to various people . . . that part of the story was created generations later, but he does give us this amazing account of women coming to a graveyard because, so far as they knew, Judas, religion, Rome, the government, they had all conspired to kill Jesus but they are met by a messenger who says simply, “He is not here. He has gone on ahead of you.”
I realize that most people who have been raised on the Jesus story have always interpreted the passion to mean that you, if you play your cards right, will go to heaven when you die. I suspect that nothing that I have said or will say will persuade people to let go of their hope for pie in the sky in the by and by. But for me, and frankly, for the academic Biblical community, the gospel is not about going to heaven. It is about salvation.
Salvation, in the Greek New Testament, is “sotoria” and to be saved, the verb form, is “sozo.” These words mean to be made whole, to be restored, and so, when the gospels say that a blind man had his sight restored or a leper had their skin healed, they were “saved” because they had been made whole again. Jesus didn’t send the blind man or the leper to heaven, but according to the gospel narrative, he gave them back their whole selves… not in an imaginary world in the clouds but right here, right now, in the only life we know anything about.
Therefore, the word faith, in Greek, is pistu, and I know a lot of people think that faith means making yourself believe something that is obviously not true but the word can more accurately be read as “courage” or “resolve.” The passion narrative tells me to take heart, to have courage, to be resolved to live on.
Being fired was horrible but no matter what malice was intended, it will only kill me if I allow it to. I’m still here. Ending a toxic marriage was horrible, expensive, and demeaning, but it didn’t have to be the end of all hope of love. I have been betrayed by false friends, and slandered by a thousand critics but that doesn’t mean that I have to turn my life, my joy, my reason for living over to them.
I won’t ask our musicians to sing it for us here, but I am still fairly persuaded that one of the best Easter songs was performed by Chumbawamba, “I get knocked down but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down.” And I hope that the same is true for you!
