The Middle English Judas: An Interpretation
The Middle English Judas: An Interpretation
by Donald G. Schueler
PMLA, Vol. 91, No. 5 (Oct., 1976), pp. 840-845
The Middle English Judas: An Interpretation
THE THIRTEENTH-CENTURY Middle English Judas has no source or close analogue either in the Bible or in any other known work. Its account of the events of Maundy Thursday is unique:
Hit wes upon a Scere porsday pat vre Louerd aros;
Ful milde were pe wordes He spec to ludas:
"ludas, pou most to lurselem, oure mete for to bugge;
pritti platen of seluer pou bere upo pi rugge.
"pou comest fer i pe brode stret, fer i pe brode strete;
Summe of pine cunesmen per pou meist imete."
Imette wid is soster, pe swikele wimon:
"Iudas, pou were wrpe me stende pe wid ston,
"ludas, pou were wrpe me stende pe wid ston,
For pe false prophete pat tou bileuest upon."
"Be stille, leue soster, pin herte pe tobreke!
Wiste min Louerd Crist, ful wel He wolde be wreke."
"ludas, go pou on pe roc, heie upon pe ston,
Lei pin heued i my barm, slep pou pe anon'"
Sone so ludas of slepe was awake,
pritti platen of seluer from hym weren itake.
He drou hymselve bi pe top, pat al it lauede a blode
pe lewes out of lurselem awenden he were wode.
Foret hym comrpne riche leu pat heiste Pilatus:
"Wolte sulle pi Louerd, pat hette lesus?"
"I nul sulle my Louerd for nones cunnes eiste,
Bote hit be for pe pritti platen pat He me bitaiste."
"Wolte sulle pi Lord Crist for enes cunnes golde?"
"Nay, bote hit be for pe platen pat He habben wolde."
In him com ur Lord gon, as is postles seten at mete:
"Wou sitte ye, postles, ant wi nule ye ete?
"Wou sitte ye, postles, ant wi nule ye ete?
Ic am iboust ant isold today for oure mete."
Up stod him ludas: "Lord, am I pat?
I nas neuer o pe stude per me pe euel spec."
Up him stod Peter, ant spec wid al is miste:
"pau Pilatus him come wid ten hundred cnistes,
"pau Pilatus him come wid ten hundred cnistes,
Yet ic wolde, Louerd, for pe loue fiste."
"Stille pou be, Peter! Wel I pe icnowe;
pou wolt fursake me prien ar pe coc him crowe."[1]
It was on a Holy Thursday that our Lord arose;
Full mild were the words He spoke to Judas:
"Judas, you must go to Jerusalem, our food to buy;
Thirty pieces of silver you bear upon your back.
"You will come far in the broad street, far in the broad street;
Some of your kinsmen there you may meet."
He met his sister, the treacherous woman:
"Judas, you deserve that men should stone you with stone,
"Judas, you deserve that men should stone you with stone,
For the false prophet that you believe in."
"Be still, dear sister, may your heart break!
If my Lord Christ knew [what you said], full certain he would be avenged."
"Judas, go upon the rock, high upon the stone,
Lay your head in my lap. Sleep for awhile."
As soon as Judas was awake from sleep,
[He discovered] thirty pieces of silver had been taken from him.
He tore his hair until it was bathed in blood;
The Jews from Jerusalem thought he was mad.
Forth came the rich Jew who was called Pilate:
"Will you sell your Lord, who is called Jesus?"
"I will not sell my Lord for any sort of goods,
Unless it is for the thirty pieces that He entrusted to me."
"Will you sell your Lord Christ for any sort of gold?"
"No, unless it is for the pieces that He would have."
Our Lord came walking in as his apostles sat at their meal:
"Why do you sit, apostles, and why will you not eat?
"Why do you sit, apostles, and why will you not eat?
I am bought and sold today for our food."
Up stood Judas: "Lord, is it I?
I was never in the place where men spoke evil of you."
Up stood Peter and spoke with all his might:
"Though Pilate comes with ten hundred knights,
"Though Pilate comes with ten hundred knights,
Yet I would, Lord, fight for love of you."
"Be still, Peter, I know you well.
You will forsake me thrice before the cock crows."
Notwithstanding the singularity of its content, Judas has been studied by scholars chiefly for its uniqueness in another respect: it is the earliest surviving ballad in Middle English.[2] On that account it has been the starting point for many learned discussions on the genesis and form of medieval balladry and has often been anthologized. Only recently has a critic noticed that the poetic merit of the piece is at least as worthy of discussion as its early date. Peter Dronke, in The Medieval Lyric, admires the work's "dramatic compression" and its "sharp moments of tension and climax" and recommends it as "the first masterpiece of expressionism."[3]
Yet even Dronke tends to skirt that one feature of Judas that is most central to the art of the ballad, namely, the purpose and meaning of its narrative. This critical hedging, however, is hardly a cause for wonder. The story of Judas is a perplexing one, describing actions that have no discernible motive, with a dramatic emphasis that shifts startlingly from one stanza to the next and a theme we guess the presence of yet cannot quite pin down. We come away from a first and second reading of the work with a feeling of vague frustration, a sense of its perversity. Here, after all, is a tale that clearly is meant to supplement the biblical account of Christ's Passion; as such, it ought to preach a lesson and enlarge our understanding. But instead we get what seems to be a riddle of a story, with insufficient clues. We are apt to decide, as have past commentators, that we are dealing with a fragment, not a finished piece;[4] or that a lost legend of Judas might explain what the ballad, on its own, does not;[5] or that, in this ballad, as in fairy tales, things happen the way they do because-well, because that is the way they must happen.[6]
Yet the strange story, notwithstanding its silences, seems rightly to begin where it begins and to end where it ends, and the inexplicable twists of its plot seem more ambiguous than arbitrary. In returning to the ballad, we sense that the composer is deliberately inviting his listeners to solve the riddle for themselves. And, as my reader will have guessed by now, I propose to accept that invitation in the discussion that follows.
The narrative consists of four dramatic episodes which span all of Maundy Thursday up to the moment when the Last Supper is about to begin. In the first of these, Christ, in words "ful milde," requires Judas to go to Jerusalem to buy "mete" for the Passover feast that evening, and gives him "pritti platen of seluer" to carry with him for that purpose.[7] Rather enigmatically, he remarks that "pou comest fer i pe brode stret, fer i pe brode strete; Summe of pine cunesmen per pou meist imete." In the second episode, Judas does in fact meet a kinswoman, his "soster," and that "swikele wimon" berates him for believing in a false prophet.[8]
Judas, who still has not understood the prophetic import of Christ's words that morning or the foreknowledge that they implied, angrily warns his sister that if his lord knew what she was saying he would be avenged. Suddenly this sharp exchange breaks off. The sister-or leman, if that is what she is[9] - persuades Judas ". . . go pou on pe roc, heie upon pe ston, Lei pin heued i my barm, slep pou pe anon."
The third episode, the one that raises most of the work's narrative problems, describes Judas' awakening and his discovery that the thirty pieces of silver are gone. He tears his hair till his head is bathed in blood. And while he is in this distraught state, he is approached by Pilate, "pe riche Ieu," who asks him if he will sell his lord. Judas replies with disconcerting single-mindedness:
"I nul sulle my Louerd for nones cunnes eiste,
Bote hit be for pe pritti platen pat He me bitaiste."
Pilate, like the listener/reader, can hardly believe what he hears. "Wolte sulle pi Lord Crist for enes cunnes golde?" he asks. But Judas insists it must be only for "pe platen pat He habben wolde."
Again the scene abruptly changes. We are at the Last Supper. The apostles have assembled. Christ asks,
"Wou sitte ye, postles, ant wi nule ye ete?
Ic am iboust ant isold today for oure mete."
Judas responds-and here the traditional biblical account begins to be recognizable-
. .. "Lord, am I pat?
I nas neuer o pe stude per me pe euel spec."
But Jesus does not answer Judas' curiously pathetic and querulous dissimulation. Instead, at this suspenseful moment, Judas simply ceases to exist as far as the ballad is concerned. It is Peter who is now the focus of attention. He declares that he will fight for his lord, "pau Pilatus him come wid ten hundred cnistes," and he repeats his boast for good measure. Christ replies, "Stille pou be, Peter! Wel I pe icnowe; pou wolt fursake me prien ar pe coc him crowe." And there the ballad ends.
The "dramatic economy" of this narrative is evident: the terse dialogues, the minimal transitions, the suggestiveness of action which invites the reader to fill in for himself a world of gestures, nuances, visual effects. Yet here the "economy" seems to have been carried too far. This is not, after all, Lord Randall or Twa Corbies. It is an invented preface to the central drama of Christian history. As such, we would expect it to deepen our understanding of the Passion that will follow; indeed, the ballad seems meant to do this. Yet the four pared-down scenes seem less than enough.
We connect them, of course, but still our minds move restlessly through them, and through the spaces between them, asking questions that, at first, get no answers. Why, for example, should this supreme villain of medieval lore, Judas the arch-traitor about whom nothing good had ever been said, be presented here as a man humanly frightened and confused, with even a sort of mad integrity? Why is he made to go up on that high rock and to fall asleep? Why is he willing to sell his master's life only for those thirty pieces of silver that were stolen from him, no more, no less? Why, in this account, do the thirty pieces originally come, as it were, from Christ's own pocket?[10] And why does the emphasis in the tale shift from Judas to Peter? Finally, we begin to wonder what impelling purpose justified the invention of this sequence of events at all. Certainly, medieval authors dearly loved to humanize and personalize biblical stories-the mystery plays and innumerable lyrics are proof enough of that but, in Judas, this impulse has surely found a strange subject.
In beginning an explanation, let us turn to the problem of dramatic focus in the ballad, since this question is, I think, the easiest to resolve. At first, we seem to be confronted with a narrative failure which is rare in the world of ballad storytelling where narratives usually proceed in a single-minded way. After our attention has been consistently drawn to Judas throughout the beginning and middle of the work, we suddenly discover that the final focus is on Peter. This shift, more than anything else, suggested to Baum that the ballad, as we have it, is a fragment and that in its complete form it would have recounted Judas' subsequent suicide (p. 189).[11] Yet I believe that this "off-balance" ending can be explained more reasonably. We are actually dealing with a highly original variation on the circularity of structure that characterizes so much medieval narrative, though not usually ballad narrative. Judas begins with Christ implicitly anticipating Judas' betrayal, goes on to describe the fulfillment of that anticipation, and ends with Christ's explicit anticipation of Peter's betrayal. Because we are on familiar biblical ground now, we are meant to fill in for ourselves the rest of the narrative turn in which that anticipation is also fulfilled.
More important, however, this structural device supports the real concern of the work, which has less to do with Judas than with a powerful thematic concept, namely, the universality of the human guilt that brought Christ to the Cross. The medieval ballad singer seems to have understood what most people, then and now, never quite learn; it is our weaknesses-or, in medieval terms, our natural sinfulness-that we mortals have most in common with each other. To the extent that Judas is traditionally the personification of pure wickedness, he tends to exonerate the rest of us from our share in Christ's suffering. However, the weak and frightened Judas who fears and loves but does not understand the God he serves is kinsman to us all. This idea would be lost, of course, if the ballad ended where it began, with Judas. It is Peter, the best of the disciples, who must drive this point home. Like Judas, he wants to do the right thing, but nevertheless, he will betray Christ in his turn.
This theme, though we cannot fully understand it when it is first presented, is suggested in the exceptionally visual image of Judas climbing up onto the high rock, where he falls asleep in the arms of his sister/mistress. Only later, when the whole of the story has been taken in, does that scene set up an echo chamber of associations: the rock can suggest Gethsemane, or Calvary, or even, perhaps, Peter; the woman, in this medieval context, can be Eve and the serpent and the personification of all easy ways out; the sleeping man can be not only Judas but Peter and the apostles who will not stay awake one hour in the garden, or he can be the failed Adam or the sleeping soul in all of us. We could go on, but the point, it seems to me, is clear. With this image of Judas sleeping, not plotting, the storyteller has cast his net wide and caught us all. Judas seems no worse than most of us, just as, at the end, Peter seems no better. We sympathize with these two, with the bleeding head and the fear of the one, the well-meant boast of the other, and, in our sympathy, we are implicated in the death of Christ.
However, it must be said of this explanation that it does not explain enough. Although it accounts for much of the action and imagery of Judas, particularly for the ending of the piece, it does not justify the apparently illogical actions and motives of Judas himself. Specifically, it does not account for the third scene in which Judas inexplicably insists on getting back his thirty pieces of silver, even if he must sell his lord to do so. It is not enough to say, "so it was," not when the entire narrative has been invented and the thirty silver pieces have been introduced in the opening lines just so that this apparently irrational, even ridiculous, transaction can take place. How then can it be explained? The answer, I think, lies in the fact that, in reading ballad literature generally, and this ballad in particular, we must remember that what is not said is often as important as what is.
In Judas, that which is not said is the most important statement that Christ made on Maundy Thursday. I refer, of course, to the moment that must immediately follow the conclusion of the story, when Jesus at the Last Supper says of the "mete," "Take ye, this is my body" and "This is my blood of the new testament, which shall be shed for many" (Mark xxiv.21). It should be remembered that the New Testament offers no rationale for this marvelous utterance. Of course the Savior will sacrifice his body and blood for mankind on the following day, but what is the logical connection, the cause and effect, between that sacrifice in the immediate future and the food and drink which he and his apostles are about to share? The answer is that no connection exists. The ritual of the mass that would link bread and wine with the body and blood of Christ would come after the crucifixion, taking its cue from the New Testament; but in the New Testament's account, as the apostles gather for the Passover meal and listen to Christ's words, only the vaguest connection between physical sustenance and spiritual sustenance can explain Jesus' enigmatic reference to bread and wine as his body and blood.[12] It remains for Judas to provide the literal motive where the Bible does not. The link between the food served at the Last Supper and the thirty pieces of silver that Jesus had given Judas suddenly becomes clear, and Jesus' words, just as suddenly, become profoundly ironic. The "mete" on the table has cost Jesus his life-his body and blood: he has been sold to buy it.
There remains the question of how well the poem serves the purpose just described. We have seen that in the portraits of Judas and Peter the ballad suggests that the worst and the best of us are not all that many moral leagues apart; we are all implicated in the betrayal of the Savior. And we have also seen that Judas' unlikely bargain with Pilate is the necessary incident that motivates Christ's "offstage" speech about his body and blood. But in good poetry, as in good ethics, the means must not only justify the end but the means as well. Granting the poet's ingenuity in contriving Judas' bargain as the means of explaining Christ's pronouncement, does any logical justification inhere in the bargain itself? Does it make poetic and narrative sense?
At first glance, the answer would seem to be no. Judas' willingness to sell Christ merely to get back the thirty pieces of silver violates our sense of what is plausible. And yet a thematic logic does become clear if we recognize the prescient mood that colors all the events of the narrative. In the first scene, Jesus foretells that Judas will meet his "cunesmen" in the broad street, thus suggesting everything that will happen to the feckless disciple. When Judas is with his sister, even his assumption that Jesus does not know what is being said ("Wiste min Louerd Crist, ful wel He wolde be wreke") reinforces our awareness that the opposite is the case. The prophetic mood deepens when Christ tells the apostles that he has been "iboust ant isold" that day and reaches its final ominous intensity in the foretelling of Peter's betrayal.
The cumulative effect is one of almost Pauline determinism. It is not the storyteller who seems to be saying "things happen this way because this is the way they must happen," but God himself. The anonymous balladeer and his audience would have viewed the process of the Passion as inevitable, their hindsight corresponding to God's foresight. So far as they were concerned, the script had already been written and all the actors, including Judas and Peter, must play their parts even if Christ himself should warn them of the consequences. Thirty pieces of silver, not "enes cunnes golde," is what the script requires and what Judas must ask for. The logic that motivates him in the bizarre transaction is, therefore, the logic of preordained events. In this atmosphere, to which every detail in the ballad contributes, mere psychological reality is irrelevant. Even the fact that this deterministic view is at odds with the scholastic doctrine of free will seems not to matter. The storyteller and his audience know better: God has a job to do, and everything must go according to plan.
This fateful logic suggests a further explanation of the sympathetic characterization of Judas in the ballad: he has been chosen for his role because he is the weakest of a group of men, the best of whom is all too weak. Once chosen, however, he becomes not merely the exemplar of our human frailty but the helpless instrument in a sequence of events so stark in their inevitability that they have almost the ring-or at least the echo-of classical tragedy. If a post-Sophoclean storyteller had told us the tale of Oedipus from the perspective of Laius' well-meaning herdsman, the effect of his account might have been similar to this, assuming that he were gifted enough to bring it off. Indeed, it is not too farfetched to compare the dramatic method we have been discussing here with that of Tennyson's Oenone or Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, although, to my mind, in Judas the technique has more resonance.
We are required by the off-center perception of a familiar story to respond to it in an unfamiliar way. Our imagination and knowledge of biblical lore must be used to fill in the spaces that the ballad singer has deliberately left empty; he has finished the song before we discover that we have finished its story for him. Suddenly everything is in its place, the old history of the Passion is seen as something wholly new. It is a considerable achievement, and on the basis of it one can surely argue that Judas is at least as important for being a very fine ballad as for being a very old one.
University of New Orleans
New Orleans, Louisiana
Notes
1. This text of Judas is based on Kenneth Sisam's edition in Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose (1921; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), pp. 168-69. I have, however, Americanized and corrected quotation marks and reproduced line repetitions rather than indicating them with a bis. The longline couplets could also be modernized as ballad quatrains with alternating 4 and 3 stress lines.
2 A minority view among scholars holds that, in the strict technical sense, Judas is more exactly described as a religious carol than as a ballad, but even this view acknowledges the balladlike effect of the work.
3 The Medieval Lyric (New York: Harper, 1969), p. 69.
4 E. K. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1945), p. 153.
5 Paul Franklin Baum, "The English Ballad of Judas Iscariot," PMLA, 31 (1916), 184-89.
6 Or, as Francis J. Child puts it, "The ballad-singer might answer, So it was, and rest contented," The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882; rpt. New York: Folklore, 1965), p. 243.
7 The tradition that Judas was treasurer for Christ and the apostles comes chiefly from John xii.6.
8 There is, of course, no biblical reference to Judas' sister, nor is there any surviving account of her in medieval tradition except in this ballad. An Eastern tradition does assign Judas an avaricious wife (see Baum, pp. 185-86) but the situation is not analogous.
9 Dronke suggests that "soster" is to be understood as 'mistress" (p. 68). On the other hand, Sisam's assertion, after he checked the original manuscript, that the word "tunesmen" in the Child edition is actually "cunesmen" (p. 257) tends to diminish Dronke's argument. But the image we have of the woman's behavior with Judas does suggest the leman, and there is precedence in medieval literature for euphemisms of this sort.
10 The inspiration for this situation is discernible, just barely, in John xiii.29, where Jesus gives Judas the sop and predicts his treachery, telling him to do what he must quickly. Some of the disciples think that Jesus has commanded Judas to buy food for Passover or to give money to the poor, but in fact Jesus has not given him such instructions.
11. It may be worthwhile at this point to discuss further Baum's theory that Judas is a fragment and that it was meant to end with Judas' suicide. Baum cites as evidence of the suicide ending a Wendish (German) ballad which begins with Christ, at the home of a poor widow, giving Judas money to buy bread. Judas loses the thirty pieces gambling, and the Jews advise him to sell Christ to make up the loss. Christ accuses him, and in despair Judas rushes to hang himself on an aspen after failing to do so on a fir tree. Though there is a vague parallel with the Judas narrative, none of the details correspond. In the Wendish ballad there is no high rock, no sister, no theft, no bargain with Pilate. Moreover, far from predating Judas, the Wendish ballad survives only in a 19th century version. Baum himself acknowledges that there is nothing in the parallels "that cannot be accounted for by coincidence" (p. 185). Finally, there is no indication in the English manuscript that the ballad was broken off or left unfinished. Since the 13th-century scribe had no reason to reproduce a fragment, he must have been satisfied that he was transcribing a finished work.
12 Jesus speaks about the "bread of life" in John vi. 32- 51, but the occasion is the miracle of the loaves and fish. In I Cor., Paul accounts for Christ's words at the Last Supper in an after-the-fact manner, but his discourse concerns only the symbolic validity of the words, not a specific motive that might have inspired them.