A Reading of the Middle English "Judas"
A Reading of the Middle English "Judas"
by Mary-Ann Stouck
The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Apr., 1981), pp. 188-198
A READING OF THE MIDDLE ENGLISH JUDAS
Mary-Ann Stouck, Simon Fraser University
On the subject of Judas Iscariot, the vagaries of time have been kind: from the archvillain of Christian history he has become something of an archunderdog in recent times. Most medieval writers linked his crime with those of Adam and Cain in its heinousness, and claimed that Judas' action was motivated by base greed and depravity, whereas popular theology now affirms that Judas acted disinterestedly, or for political reasons, or that he was a tragic victim of circumstance.[1]
Naturally some variety of opinion existed in the Middle Ages, as now: the Gnostics, for example, claimed that Judas was enlightened and betrayed Christ in order to hasten Mankind's redemption by His death.[2] In general, however, we should be reluctant to bring modern sympathies to bear upon the medieval viewpoint. In the thirteenth century poem Judas we have an unusually imaginative presentation of the events and motivation leading to Christ's betrayal, but like most medieval writing its concern is to condemn rather than to vindi cate its chief character.
According to the poetic narrative,[3] Christ gives Judas thirty pieces of silver to buy provisions for the Passover feast, at the same time warning him that he is likely to meet some of his kinsmen on the way. Judas does indeed meet a "swikele wimon," a deceitful woman whom the text calls his "soster" but who may well be a "leman" and therefore his kin in the sense of "partner in evil";[4] she slanders Christ, and in a Delilahlike scene succeeds in persuading Judas to fall asleep with his head in her lap. While he sleeps, she steals the thirty pieces of silver. Upon awakening, Judas tears his hair until his head streams with blood; he is then approached by Pilate who asks him if he will betray Christ. Judas agrees to do so but to Pilate's surprise he will only take exactly thirty pieces of silver as payment. In the final scene of the poem, at the Last Supper, Christ makes the accusation of Judas, while Peter vows his own continued faithfulness. Christ foretells Peter's betrayal, and the poem ends in a seemingly abrupt manner.
The narrative economy and balladlike repetitions of the poem are intriguing; as with later ballads, the reader has the sense of being told only part of a complex story. Partly as the result of this technique, problems of interpretation abound: whether Christ is made to trap Judas deliberately by commissioning him alone, and not the other disciples, to procure the Passover provisions; the nature of the relationship between Judas and the unnamed woman; the reason for Judas' insistence on taking the smaller amount of money from Pilate rather than the gold he is offered; the implications for Judas of Peter's avowal at the end of the poem.
Although the work has generally been admired, there was little interpretive criticism of it until the recent publication of an essay by Donald G. Schueler who argues that the poem gives an interpretation of Judas as a man "humanly frightened and confused" (p. 842), one who is meant to stand as "the exemplar of our human frailty" (p. 844), comparable to Peter who also failed Christ in the last days of His life.5 Schueler's essay provides a welcome analysis of the poem on its own considerable merits, rather than treating it primarily as an item of literary history. His view of the poem is sympathetic to modern taste, but it ignores the problem that in the Middle Ages Judas was hardly ever depicted compassionately, and particularly not in popular writing. An examination of the poem in the context of other treatments of Judas available to the Middle English poet leads to a reconsideration of both its direction of our sympathy and the nature of its originality. The significance of the poem lies not in its departure from tradition, but in its close adherence to it.
The Gospels, the poet's primary source of information, are on the whole aggravatingly silent on the subject of Judas. The accounts of Matthew and Mark, similar in information and sequence of events, suggest no explicit motivation for his action. They begin with the significant anointing of Christ by an unnamed woman at Bethany (Matt. 26:6, Mark 14:3), to which many of the disciples object ("For this ointment might have been sold for much and given to the poor," Matt. 26:9), and are rebuked by Christ. Immediately afterward, but with no explicit connection of cause and effect, Judas is described as leaving to make the bargain with the chief priests. The other disciples are sent to prepare for the Passover, the Last Supper takes place, and Judas is accused. The scene changes to the Mount of Olives where Christ foretells Peter's denial and Peter protests his faithfulness.
Christ then goes into Gethsemane and the arrest follows. The narrative movement is swift, and all events take place in less than one chapter. The accounts diverge only in that Matthew supplies two additional pieces of information: he specifies the sum of money as thirty pieces of silver, and later describes Judas' repentance before the chief priests and his subsequent suicide (27:3-8).
These details do little to dispel our confusion. Although Matthew, by stressing the sum of money, suggests that greed was the motive, we do not really know whether the sum was considered large or small for the times; nor do we know whether Judas' repentance is meant to engage our sympathy. No enlightenment is offered by Luke, the most taciturn of the synoptics, who says merely "Then entered Satan into Judas surnamed Iscariot" (22:3) as a preface to Judas' meeting with the chief priests. The anointing at Bethany is not described. At the last supper Judas is not explicitly named in the accusation by Christ but is referred to indirectly, before Peter's betrayal is foretold. The fullest and at the same time most negative account is given in John. This describes the anointing at Bethany in the most detail, and is our only source for the identity of the woman as Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.
John reports that only Judas objected to the anointing (12:46), that he was the one who carried the purse to pay for necessary provisions, and that his objection to the anointing was made not because he cared for the poor, but because he habitually stole from the purse for his own purposes (12:6). At the Last Supper in this account Christ names Judas as His betrayer, but obscurely, so that the other disciples do not understand (13:18-30), and as in the Synoptics, Peter's denial is foretold. John's account moves much more slowly in terms of the action: not until five chapters later (28:21) does Judas come to betray Christ in Gethsemane. A final word on Judas is given in Acts 1:16-20 which provide a brief summation of his part in the betrayal.
In structure the Middle English poem is evidently based on the Matthew-Mark accounts of the New Testament. Omitting the anointing at Bethany described at the beginning of Matthew 14, the poet uses and adapts the five following events: Judas' departure to the chief priests; the sending out of the disciples to buy provisions for the Passover (in the poem these two actions are combined since Judas is sent alone for the provisions and makes his transaction with Pilate as a result); the Last Supper; the accusation of Judas; the move to the Mount of Olives and the foretelling of Peter's denial (in the poem there is no change of scene). Exactly at this point there is a natural break in the two Biblical accounts: Christ takes the chosen disciples into Gethsemane and turns His attention from the immediate behav iour of his followers to His own future suffering. There is, therefore, no need to argue that the poem is a fragment since the poet has simply taken the clear change in direction at Matthew 26:36 (or Mark 14:32) as his own finishing point.[6] He uses a specific section of the New Testament as his structural model, following the pattern of many other Middle English lyrics; Matthew and Mark are the relevant models because as we have seen the accounts of Luke and John employ a different sequence and a slower style of narration in describing the same events. The style of the poem doubtless takes some of its dispatch from the cryptic quality of the two Gospel accounts as well as from the poet's awareness of the effect of suggestion and implication.
The main divergence from the Gospels concerns of course the addition of Judas' encounter with the woman and his subsequent agreement with Pilate. To what purpose has this story been fitted into the Biblical account? Schueler suggests that it was devised to explain Christ's words concerning the bread of the Last Supper, "take ye, this is my body," for which "the new testament offers no rationale" (p. 843); the poem makes it clear that Judas has sold Christ's body to pay for the bread, thus making the bread literally His "body." The problem with this argument is not only that it assumes for the poem a type of structure more modern than medieval (i.e., that of organic unity), but also that it is based on a sequence that is not in the poem at all: Christ's words concerning the symbolic meaning of the bread and wine. Schueler invokes the traditional economy of ballads, "what is not said is often as important as what is," (p. 843) to explain this absence, but stylistic abbreviatio must at least be suggestive if what is not said is vital to the meaning of the poem. The words which the poet does give to Christ are clearly not aimed at reminding us of the bread and wine symbolism (and it was the symbolism that was theologically important, not the "specific motive that might have inspired [Christ's words].")[7]
Christ's words are rather aimed at Judas, and Judas responds to them as to an accusation:
'Wou sitte ye, postles, ant wi nule ye ete,
ic am aboust ant isold to-day for oure mete.
Vp stod him iudas, 'lord am i pat <frec>?'
The emphasis of the exchange falls not upon the universal guilt of mankind, which the bread and wine in part commemorate, but directly upon the guilt of Judas.
The story of Judas' encounter and transaction has been devised to support and emphasize this guilt. It is an instance of a tendency common in popular literature to supply what history has omitted, pro viding background and motivation for famous personages and events. The figure of Judas provided a natural focus for such treatments, from the Oedipuslike legend of his early life, to the incident in the well known account of the voyage of St. Brendan which follows Judas beyond the grave as the saint witnesses his torment in hell. Both stories date from early Latin accounts, and their inclusion in collections such as the Legenda Yurea and The South English Legendary is an indication of the popularity of speculation on Judas and on the betrayal.[8] The genesis of the incident in the Middle English poem no doubt lies in the archetypal story of man led astray by woman, the point of which was not that the man was the less to blame, though many males, from Adam to Chauntecleer, would have been glad to think so. The Coptic story cited by Pauli F. Baum, in which Judas is related to have sold Christ for thirty pieces of silver to appease the avarice of his wife, is another instance of the application of this particular archetype to Judas.[9]
The Middle English poem tells the same kind of story. Judas is misled by a deceitful woman, whether "soster" or "leman" (the term "Judas-schwester" was later used generically for such a woman),[10] who slanders Christ and steals the money Christ has given him. There were doubtless other medieval versions that gave similar accounts. As in the legends of the saints found in the Legenda ?urea beside that of Judas, the popular imagination consistently re sorted to myths and archetypal patterns in the creation of its heroes and villains.
The second aspect of the poem which is potentially puzzling, Judas' insistence upon exactly thirty pieces of silver, has a somewhat similar origin, for it lies in what was apparently a popular preoccupation with the sum of money for which Christ was sold. The Biblical tradition itself was divided on the significance of the amount as well as on its ultimate use. Matthew alone thinks it important enough to record the exact amount, which he says originates in a prophecy of Jeremiah (27:9). Various other interpretations related it to the assessed value of the good shepherd in Zechariah 11:12-13, or to the fine imposed on the owner of an ox that killed a slave (and hence the price of a slave) in Exodus 21:32. Concerning the final use of the money, Matthew states that after Judas had thrown it down on the temple floor the priests used it to buy a burial field; Acts 1:18-19 states that Judas him self purchased the field, and refers to the Book of Psalms (Acts 1:20). In the later tradition the conventional attitude toward the money is to consider it absurdly small in relation to the infinite value of what it purchases: in The Southern Passion, near contemporary of the Middle English poem, when Judas makes the agreement the narrator comments ironically that he gave the priests a good bargain,[11] and in the N-Town cycle even Annas, the chief priest, accuses Judas disgustedly of having sold Christ as if He were "hors or kow."[12]
The ambiguity of the Biblical tradition combined with the popular desire to find a special significance in numbers resulted in a proliferation of stories about the reason for the thirty pieces. The Wendish ballad cited by Baum is one of these: in it Judas sells Christ for thirty pieces of silver in order to recoup gambling losses of the same amount.[13] Baum also calls attention to another account of the money in a Provencale Passion (p. 185, n. 12). The best known of these stories in Middle English seems to have been that found in both The Southern Passion and the N-Town cycle. According to this version, Judas asked for exactly thirty pieces of silver from a sense of grievance over the anoint ing by the woman at Bethany. The ointment was valued at 300 pieces of silver by the disciples, Judas habitually stole one-tenth of whatever was given to him as purse-bearer for the group, and he therefore demanded thirty pieces from the chief priests as the amount he should "rightfully" have had. This explanation for the origin and significance of the thirty pieces was evidently common: it is found also in the detailed account of Judas in The South English Legendary.[14]
The direct relationship between Judas' action and the anointing at Bethany is certainly supported by John, which specifies that Judas alone objected to it, but the same motivation is implicit in the paratactic style of the Matthew-Mark accounts where the objections of all the disciples and Christ's words of thanks to the woman are followed immediately by Judas' departure to the chief priests. Only Luke there fore makes no connection between the anointing and the betrayal; the other three Gospels with varying degrees of emphasis make the point that it was primarily Judas who could not accept the woman's action or Christ's response to it.
A common Middle English explanation for Judas' betrayal is therefore based firmly on Biblical tradition, and it is this tradition that the poem Judas draws upon. The poet presents us in effect with an interpretation of the ideas and feelings that made the anointing at Bethany unacceptable to Judas; he invents a narrative that provides a gloss for the sparse details of the Gospels, with their simple juxtaposition of anointing and betrayal, and that gives Judas' traditional avarice a plausible basis. According to the accounts of Matthew and Mark, the disciples cannot comprehend Christ's words at the anointing.
They fail to do so essentially because their frame of reference is the body rather than the spirit, the flesh rather than the word. They can see the ointment only in terms of its monetary value, and their obsession with money and with its waste blinds them to the fact of Christ's divinity; the acknowledgment of it made by the woman confuses and angers them. Their response to the incident is petty and materialistic because they are not aware of the significance of the events they are involved in: they acknowledge Christ as healer and helper of the poor, but fail to recognize His true nature as Son of God.
An identical attitude toward Christ and toward material goods is revealed in the narrative of the poem, but this time it is developed solely in terms of Judas. Judas' extreme concern with the loss of the money given him by Christ, and with the fact that an admission of the loss to Christ would involve disclosure of his guilty relationship with the woman, causes him to recoup the money (hence saving face) by selling Christ to Pilate. The poem presents Judas as one whose concepts of discipleship and of Christ are hopelessly inverted: he sees Christ as a merciless master, the avenging Yahweh of the Old Testament, to whom every material penny is accountable, instead of a forgiving God in whom love supersedes justice. When Pilate asks Judas if he will sell Christ for any amount of gold, he responds emphatically that he will take only the lesser amount: " 'Nay, bote hit be for peplaten zat he habben wolde' "(my italics), designating Christ as one who is as pettily concerned with material goods as he himself is. The fact that he sells Christ in order to keep accounts straight is presented as a terrible perversion of values. It is an extreme example of the attitude of all the disciples who, in Matthew and Mark, value the price of the ointment over an acceptance of the true nature of Christ. Judas' view of Christ in the poem as a figure of vengeance rather than mercy is also consistent with his later despairing suicide, so firmly castigated in popular moral writings such as The Southern Passion:
. . . ffor he hadde whanhope . al a deuelwey he wende.
Ich rede ?>at noman synegy so .
vp hope of amendynge, ffor atte laste pe deuel wole . in wanhope him bringe.
(11. 1410-12)[15]
One other aspect of the poem depends upon the common association made between Judas' action and the anointing. John names the woman involved as Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, but in the Middle Ages she was connected with the repentant prostitute cited in Luke 7:37, since the anointing described there was often confused with that which took place in Bethany. A second confusion took place when the woman in Luke 7 was sometimes merged with the Mary Magdelene of Luke 8:2, "out of whom went seven devils." The Middle Ages made a popular heroine out of a combination of all three; The Southern Passion, The South English Legendary and the N-Town cycle, for example, all refer to the woman who anoints Christ at Bethany as the penitent Mary Magdalene. If the "soster" in the poem is really a "leman" as she appears to be, then she provides a direct contrast to the repentant Magdalene in her behaviour: she slanders Christ rather than acknowledging His divine nature (" 'ludas, 196 Stouck ]dou were wrf>e me stende pe wid ston, / for pe false proph?te J>at tou bileuest upon'"); she leads his disciple into sin; and instead of giving precious gifts she steals the money intended for the Passover provisions. She represents the unredeemed daughter of Eve, as Mary Magdalene represents the redeemed in medieval tradition.
The poem traces Judas' actions in the conventional terms of Christian sin. The fact that he is named by Christ at the beginning of the poem as one of the deceiving woman's "cunesmen" does not of course indicate that Judas lacked freedom to choose whether or not to betray Christ. According to the usual theological argument, Christ's apparent foreknowledge of his behaviour in the Bible is not a sign of Judas' lack of free will, but a sign of Christ's godhead. The relationship of Judas to the woman indicates that like all men he is open to temptation, but free to make the necessary, conscious, moral choice. Indeed, at first he resists her:
'Be stille, leue soster, J>in herte pe to-breke!
wiste min louerd crist, fui wel he wolde be wreke.'
"If Christ knew," but Judas has no intention of revealing that he consorts with sinners, and in these words are evident both his view of Christ as vengeful and merciless, and the duplicity which marks his actions in what follows. When he does succumb to the woman, conscious of his own wrongdoing, and loses the money by it, he goes mad with frustration and guilt ("He drou hym selue bi pe top f>at al it lauede a-blode"). He cannot explain his loss to Christ without acknowledging his own guilty behaviour. So he makes the bargain with Pilate in order to preserve the appearance of honesty, and his duplicity culminates in a direct lie at the Last Supper: " 'i nas neuer o pe stude per me pe euel spec' " His concern here is still with his own need to appear honest, he protests that he has not consorted with sinners, rather than directly with his betrayal to Pilate, giving yet another example of his inverted sense of values. Even now he does not seem to realize the enormity of his own action.
That realization comes later with his suicide, which is not described in the poem. But the reader is made aware of it not only by the parallel action of self-inflicted pain when Judas discovers the loss of the money, but also by the final episode in which Peter vows his continued loyalty to Christ and is rebuked. As the poem moves from a narrative inspired by the event that precedes the betrayal?, the anointing, so it also looks forward inevitably to what happens afterward. The point of the sudden shift from Judas to Peter is not to make the two disciples comparable ("Like Judas, [Peter] wants to do the right thing, but nevertheless, he will betray Christ in his turn");[16] it is primarily one of contrast. Whereas Judas sinned and, still failing to comprehend
the nature of Christ, refused to believe in the possibility of mercy, Peter, having sinned, repented and became the cornerstone of the Church. According to Matthew, Judas made public repentance before the chief priests but, alone, he was prey to
"wanhope," the sin that ultimately condemned him to perdition. Peter's repentance was private ("And he went out, and wept bitterly," Matt. 26:75), but was resolved through faith, not compounded by despair.
The contrast between Peter and Judas as examples of faithful and faithless discipleship is traditional, and appears at two main points in the synoptic accounts: at the Last Supper, where Judas sits apart from the others while Peter is placed with John close to Christ; and in Gethsemane at the scene of the arrest. The contrast at the Last Supper is underscored, for example, in The Southern Passion where only John is told that Judas is to be the traitor (11. 810-38) for if Peter had known, "He [Judas] hadde anon myd his tej). to-drawe and tobite" (1. 838). The scene at Gethsemane provided a particularly good opportunity to portray the contrast between Peter and Judas artistically:
In the scene of the Betrayal the kiss of Judas signifies the actual betrayal of Christ to the soldiers. The act of Peter striking off the ear of Malchus is often shown in the same scene, thus contrasting the treachery of Judas with the physical energy of Peter in defense of his Lord, and comparing this courage with the triple denial in the same night. . . . the pattern is shown of vaunted courage failing at the test, of remorse and forgiveness, and subsequent strength enhanced by this very humiliation.[17]
The events quickly following Peter's denial in the Synoptics include the scene of the arrest, and the poem looks forward to Peter's coura geous (if misguided) action here, in contrast to Judas' duplicitous kiss, as much as it does to the ultimate opposite destinies of each disciple. The Middle English poem offers a discerning interpretation of the role of Judas. But the originality of the poem does not lie in its departure from medieval tradition so much as in its attention to the details of it, and particularly to the gospel accounts' version of the events surrounding the betrayal. Judas' anger over the anointing at Bethany is examined and plausibly interpreted, and the results are imaginatively transposed into a narrative that makes use of popular archetypes and concerns. The view of Judas so presented is, however, neither tragic nor particularly sympathetic. The poem depicts him as one who consciously abuses his own free will to follow the typical pattern of Christian sin. What begins as simple duplicity has magnified results, and, as the contrast with Peter emphasizes, is finally compounded by despair, the one sin for which forgiveness is impossible.
Judas is not presented as a victim either of circumstances or of his own character; there is no hint of greatness in the portrait. The poem reveals clearly the lack of vision, the concern with materialism, that made him more than any of the other disciples fail to recognize the real nature of his master and the significance of present events until too late. The Judas of the poem is the same villain as the Judas traditionally despised throughout Christendom; only here he is fully and imaginatively revealed.
Footnotes:
1. See, for example, Langland, Piers Plowman: The A Version, ed. George Kane (London: Athlone, i960), Passus I, 11. 63-66. Sympathy for Judas appears to be a post-Romantic phenomenon: Thomas de Quincey expressed admiration for Judas and argued that he was attempting to further Christ's intentions by forcing him to assume an earthly kingdom ("Judas Iscariot," The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, ed. David Masson [Edinburgh, 1889-1890], vm, 177-206). For similar theories in recent popular theology see H. J. Schonfield, The Passover Plot (New York: Bernard Geis, 1965), and Haim Cohn, The Trial and Death of Jesus (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), the latter attributing the arrest of Christ to the political designs of the Jews and Romans rather than to Judas' betrayal.
2. Among the Gnostic sects the Cainites were noted for their belief in Judas' enlightenment. See Irenaeus Against Heresies, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Rev. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (New York: Scribner, 1925), 1, 358.
3 The poem is found in Trinity College Camb. MS. 323. Quotations are from the edition by Carleton Brown, English Lyrics of the XIHth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932), pp. 38"39
4 This suggestion was made by Peter Dronke, The Medieval Lyric (London: Hutchinson, 1968), p. 68.
5 Donald G. Schueler, "The Middle English Judas: An Interpretation," PMLA, 91 (1976), 840-45. For other commentaries see Dronke's discussion in The Medieval Lyric, pp. 67-69, and Douglas Grey's brief account in Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 124 and 268.
6 For the argument that the poem as it exists is a fragment, see R. W. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1945), P- 53
7 Schueler, p. 845, n. 12.
8 On the legend of Judas and its popularity, see Pauli F. Baum, "The Medieval Legend of Judas Iscariot," PMLA, 31 (1916), 481. Two early Latin versions have been published by Paul Lehmann, "Judas Ischarioth in der lateinischen Legenden?ber lieferung des Mittelalters," Studi Medievali, 2 (1929), 289-346. Baum also gives an extensive account of the Judas incident in the voyage of St. Brendan, in "Judas' Sunday Rest," MLR, 18 (1923), 168-82. The semi-charitable view of Judas in this story is related by Baum to the influence of the Cainites on the early redactors of the tale; interestingly, however, in the account in The South English Legendary the emphasis appears to be on Judas' punishment rather than on the weekly remission of it. See The South English Legendary, ed. Charlotte D'Evelyn and Anna J. Mill, EETS, o.s. 236 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956), 1, 197-200, 11. 522-604.
9 Pauli F. Baum, "The English Ballad of Judas Iscariot," PMLA, 31 (1916), 185.
10. Wayland D. Hand, A Dictionary of Words and Idioms Associated with Judas Iscariot (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1942), p. 346.
11 The Southern Passion, ed. Beatrice Brown, EETS, o.s., 169 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1927), 11. 779-84.
12 The Ludus Coventriae, ed. K. S. Block, EETS, e.s. 120 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1922), p. 279, 1. 235.
13 Baum, "The English Ballad of Judas Iscariot," p. 183. Schueler rightly points out that this folk song cannot be considered to be an analogue of the English poem because it lacks the necessary parallels ("The Middle English Judas," p. 844, n. 11).
14 The South English Legendary, 11, 696-97, 11. 117-36.
15 On the theological background for the final impenitence of Judas as cause for his damnation see Augustine, Sermones, Sermo 352, No. 8, Patrolog, a Latina 39? 155^~59? a^so Enarratio in Psalmum, 146, No. 20, PL 37, 1912-13.
16 Schueler, "The Middle English Judas" p. 842.
17 Heather Child and Dorothy Colles, Christian Symbols Ancient and Modern (London: G. Bell, 1971), p. 74. See also George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 51, and James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, introd. by Kenneth Clark (Great Britain: John Murray, 1974), p. 47, for similar accounts of the roles of Peter and Judas.