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| Dennis R. MacDonald |
Professor Dennis R. MacDonald has been a participant in the SBL Q Section for a long time, and even though--always a man who goes his own way--he almost never shares the views of almost anyone who presents there, he is nevertheless a decidedly friendly presence. I can't say I know Professor MacDonald but we have exchanged pleasantries from time to time and I've always found him delightful. I took the picture of him above at the San Francisco Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature as we both sat listenting to Paul Foster and John Dominic Crossan going at it hammer and tongs on the subject of the Gospel of Peter. My purpose here is to give a little friendly push back in response to something he posted at Easter time 2016.
On March 28, 2016, Professor MacDonald got a little miffed (“I’ve had enough”) and wrote a blog disputing the historical existence of Judas Iscariot and Mary Magdalene. Writes MacDonald:
"Throughout Holy Week…I heard no one challenging the presumption that such characters [Judas and Mary Magdalene] actually existed, even though the earliest Christian records don’t mention them, namely the authentic epistles of Paul and the lost Gospel Q, which I prefer to call the Logoi of Jesus. They both first appear in Christian texts in the Gospel of Mark, and every single reference to them later issues—whether directly or indirectly—from that single work."
I am going to focus on MacDonald’s argument against Historical Judas, leaving his argument against a Historical Mary Magdalene for perhaps another time.
If Judas Never Existed, Where Did The Idea That He Did Come From?
Professor MacDonald claims that Mark invented the character Judas, modeling him after a character in Homer’s Odyssey named Melanthius, son of Dolius, whose name, MacDonald informs us means, “Blacky, son of Deceitful.” The reason MacDonald makes this connection between Judas and Melanthius is that the latter character “first appears in the epic as he drives goats into the city.” The key phrase is into the city, a meaning MacDonald discovers as the real meaning of the name “Iscariot,” which he says also means “into the city,” such that Judas’s name is actually “Judas Into-the-City”. MacDonald argues that Mark came up with “Iscariot,” as a nickname for Judas by combining the Greek word meaning “into” (eis) with the Aramaic word meaning “city” (qirietha).(1)
I view this suggested derivation of Judas’s name as fanciful, and suspect it would be no exaggeration to suggest that many or even perhaps most other New Testament scholars would as well. If Mark had really wanted to make up a name that meant “Into-the-City,” why didn’t he do it in either Greek or Aramaic, why attempt a hybrid of both? Further “Iscariot” in Greek begins not with eis- but with is- (Mark 13:19, 14:10). Are we then to consider this as some sort of abbreviation? Had Mark wanted us to catch the allusion and read eis, then why didn’t he include an inconspicuous eis- as part of his name creation?
And even if Mark had intended to nickname Judas, Judas "Into the City", would it be in any sense obvious that his motive in doing so was to create an allusion to someone as remote as Homer’s Melanthius? After all many characters, good, bad, and indifferent, have always gone "into cities" from time to time, both in books ancient and modern and throughout history.
The most common suggested derivation for Iscariot is from the Hebrew “ish Qarioth,” that is to say, “Man of Qarioth,” Qarioth being a town in Moab mentioned in Jeremiah 48:24 and remarked upon as such in the 3rd/4th writer Eusebius of Caesarea’s Onomasticon 120.1.(2) We also see this understanding in the some early variant readings in the Greek Manuscripts of the Gospel of John where Judas is described as apo Karyotou (from Kayriot). A variant of this derivation would be “Man of Towns.”(3)
There are in fact a number of suggested derivations of the name Iscariot, none of which is satisfying to all, so that it may very well be the case that, as William Klassen noted in his Anchor Bible Dictionary entry on Judas, “the last word has not been said or written about the meaning of this word.”(4) Nevertheless most of them, I would argue, are more likely true than MacDonald's.
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| Betrayal of Jesus, Melk Monastery, Austria (Photo: R.V. Huggins) |
One of the first things to understand in evaluating the ideas of MacDonald is that uses terms differently than other New Testament scholars. So for example, while Q scholars would not necessarily affirm with MacDonald that Q in its final form is earlier than Mark, it doesn’t matter, because the Q referred to by MacDonald in not at all the same Q New Testament scholars refer to Q. When MacDonald speaks of the “lost Gospel Q, which I prefer to call the Logoi of Jesus,” it might give the impression that what other scholars call Q, MacDonald prefers to call the Logoi of Jesus. That, however, is quite wrong. No Q scholar that I know of means by "the Lost Gospel Q" what MacDonald means by it.
For clarity's sake, let me pause here to give a brief explanation as to what New Testament scholars generally do mean by "Q," and why they think it must have existed. At the most basic level Q is defined as the common source of material shared by Matthew and Luke that they didn’t get from Mark. Underlying this definition are two assumptions: (1) that Mark was written before Matthew and Luke and was used as a source by both, and (2) that Matthew and Luke didn't know one another’s work (as evidenced, for example, by significant differences between the two gospels suggesting that neither author attempted to harmonize his work with that of the other). If Mark was not written first (to serve as a source for Luke and Matthew), or if Matthew knew Luke or Luke knew Matthew the need (and foundation) for the hypothetical document Q would simply evaporate.
MacDonald’s Q, however, has no relation to the Q that emerges from the two assumptions I've just described, nor with the line of reasoning that led scholars to propose its existence . MacDonald believes, for example, that Luke actually both knew and used Matthew as a source, rendering Q as traditionally defined by scholars an unnecessary redundancy.
So then, whether or not Q as described in the standard New Testament introductions is earlier than Mark or not, MacDonald’s Q is. And, since he invented his own Q, he can say about it whatever he likes. Nor does MacDonald leave us in doubt as to what he thinks his hypothetical Q, or Logoi of Jesus contained. He provides a full Greek/English edition in his book Two Shipwrecked Gospels: The Logoi of Jesus and Papias’s Exposition of the Logia about the Lord (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), 561-619.
The Exclusion of Judas from MacDonald's Q Amounts to Special Pleading.
Okay here things get a little tricky. Judas isn’t mentioned in Q as it is generally understood. But the irony is that he probably should have been included in MacDonald’s version of Q had MacDonald not rather dubiously excluded him at a key point, namely, from the list of the Twelve Apostles chosen by Jesus. The first three gospels all provide a list of the Twelve, each including Judas as the last mention on the list, and each mentioning his role in betraying Jesus (Mark 3:19, Matt 5:4, Luke 6:16). The list of the Twelve offered in the Ebionite Gospel as preserved by Epiphanius, also includes Judas Iscariot, although it says nothing of his being a betrayer.(5) In contrast, even though MacDonald included a list of the Twelve in his version of Q (Logoi), he apparently did not want Judas included. So he remarkably goes against all the early evidence and simply bumps Judas Iscariot off his list of the Twelve.
Here’s how he manages it. One of the Apostles in Matthew and Mark’s list is named Thaddeus (Mark 3:18/Matthew 5:3). In Luke’s list Thaddeus is missing, and in his place we find instead Judas Son of James (Jacob) (Luke 6:10, cf. Acts 1:13). This difference between the lists of Matthew and Mark on the one hand, and Luke on the other, led to the traditional way of referring to this member of the Twelve as Jude-Thaddeus. MacDonald exploits the opportunity provided by this name difference by replacing Judas Iscariot with Judas son of James (Jacob) from Luke's list, yet at the same time keeping Thaddeus from Mark's and Matthew's list as well as a way to make the numbers work.(6) He tries to justify this by claiming that "Mark seems to have created from 'Judas the son of Jacob,' the name Judas Iscariot, which then informed the later Evangelists."(7)
But here I must cry foul, and very heartily too! In the first place MacDonald wants to date Luke-Act well into the second century, later than almost all current New Testament scholars. But then he wants to take Judas Son of James from Luke's late version of the apostolic list and add it to the list in his hypothetical Q (Logoi of Jesus), as a way of patching the hole left by his not wanting Judas Iscariot to be in that hypothetical list because if he was on that list, then Mark couldn't come along later and invent him on the model of Melanthius, son of Dolius! Certainly here MacDonald's hand can't be said to have been forced by the evidence to remove Judas from the list of the twelve in his hypothetical Q source. The whole process in which he supposedly arrives at the conclusion strikes one as contrived and as special pleading.
Judas and Paul
But let us turn to MacDonald’s claim about Paul. Was Paul really silent about Judas, like MacDonald claims he was? Many scholars do grant that Paul is earlier than Mark. So if Mark invented Judas, we surely would find no reference to him in Paul. However, although Paul does not name Judas in his letters, he does make reference to the betrayal of Jesus in connection with the tradition he passes on concerning the origin of the Lord’s Supper: “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks….” (1 Corinthians 11:23-24).
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| Anonymous, The Taking of Jesus (c. 1620), Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Photo: R. V. Huggins) |
Is "Every Single Reference" to Judas From Mark?
MacDonald claims that “every single reference” after Mark, “issues—whether directly or indirectly—from that single work.” But that claim, no matter how foundational to his argument, simply isn’t true. Again for clarity sake, let's begin by asking what precisely MacDonald might have meant by "directly or indirectly?" He clarifies this in his conclusion:
"Every reference to Judas… later than Mark relies on it either directly, as in Matthew, Luke, and John, or indirectly on canonical Gospels. There is no exception; their existence relies entirely on one’s assessment of Mark."
In other words, this claim would not serve as proof that Mark invented Judas if Matthew, Luke, and John contained material about Judas that did not ultimately derive from Mark. As such the term “indirectly” must be assumed to mean merely that even though someone after the Gospels may have derived their material on Judas from Matthew, Luke, or John, the ultimate origin, the ultimate source of that that material was really Mark, with Matthew, Luke, and John serving as intermediaries.
In fact, however, Matthew, Luke, and John all have Judas material that cannot be shown to derive from Mark. Furthermore there is also additional Judas material not included in or derived from the Gospels. We begin by comparing Mark with Matthew, Luke and John in parallel passages involving Judas. These include the scene at the Last Supper where Jesus reveals that one of the twelve is going to betray him, and the scene where Judas arrives in the Garden and betrays Jesus with a kiss. Some of the examples are more difinitive than others, and some may only amount to redactional embellishments by this or that author. I attempt here to give both kinds of examples. Even so the reader will see that in some cases at least we clearly have material in the other Gospels that did not come from Mark.
“One of You Will Betray Me!”
Mark 14:17-21 // Luke 22:14, 21-23 // Matthew 26:20-25
In this passage both Luke and Matthew follow Mark quite closely, although Luke rearranges and abbreviates things a bit. In 26:25, Matthew adds an interaction between Jesus and Judas that is not in Mark or Luke: “Judas, who betrayed him, said, “Surely not I, Rabbi?” He replied, “You have said so.” It is admittedly a small addition, but it did not come from Mark.
While all New Testament scholars agree that some kind of literary relationship exists between Mark, Luke and Matthew (referred to collectively as the Synoptic [i.e., the ‘seen together’] Gospels). The direct literary dependence of John on Mark (or on Luke or Matthew) is something much more difficult to prove. The parallel passage in the Gospel of John 13:2-5 is not obviously dependent on the Synoptics (i.e., Mark, Luke, and Matthew), and differs in many particulars, indeed there is a significant difficulty when it comes to attempting to harmonize John’s chronology in this section with that of the other three Gospels. Such difficulties point to non-dependence, since, as noted earlier, they indicate that no attempt was made, for example by John here, to harmonize his chronology with those of the other three Gospels. But to continue.
After Jesus washed the disciples’ feet in John, an action of Jesus not recorded in the Synoptics at all, he accompanies it with a saying that is also not in the other Gospels: “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you” (vs. 10). John explains that Jesus’s words “though not all of you,” implied that Jesus already “knew who was to betray him” (vs. 11). John also discerned a reference to Judas in an earlier statement of Jesus that, again, he alone among the Gospels records as coming from Jesus: “Did I not choose you, the twelve? Yet one of you is a devil.” (6:70). John notes once again immediately after, “He was speaking of Judas son of Simon Iscariot” (6: 70). Notice as well that John adds an additional piece of information about Judas not mentioned in the other Gospels, namely that Judas's father was named Simon. (see also 13:2). But to return to John’s account of the scene of Jesus’s prediction of this betrayal by one of the twelve, in response to Jesus’s troubling words, Peter motions to the author, who was sitting next to Jesus, to ask Jesus who he meant (13: 25):
Jesus answered, “It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” So when he had dipped the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas son of Simon Iscariot. After he received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, “Do quickly what you are going to do.” Now no one at the table knew why he said this to him. Some thought that, because Judas had the common purse, Jesus was telling him, “Buy what we need for the festival”; or, that he should give something to the poor. So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night. (13: 26-30).
There are several details here that are not found in the other Gospels, which point to John’s independence, or non-reliance on Mark, Luke and Matthew. Again we have the unique way of referring to Judas as the “son of Simon Iscariot,” John also tells us that the gathered twelve did not understand what Jesus meant by the words “Do quickly what you are going to do” (13: 27). In addition he notes that Judas had been put in charge of the common purse (13:29), a detail not found in Mark or the other two Gospels. John also speaks of Judas’ role in keeping the purse in connection with the story of the woman who anoints Jesus with expensive perfume. In Mark and Matthew, we read that this takes place in the house of Simon the leper, and of a general disgruntlement among the disciples over the cost of the perfume, which, it was suggested, ought to have been sold and the money given to the poor (Mattthew 26:6-11/ Mark 14:3-9). In John’s version, in chapter 12 of his Gospel, the incident (or one very like it) takes place in the house of Lazarus, and it is his sister Mary who anoints Jesus with expensive perfume. Unlike Matthew and Mark, however, John singles out Judas as the one objecting to such “waste.” John adds that Judas “said this not because he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it” (12:6).
When reading this unique Johannine account, some might sense the immediateness of a comment as one that might reflect the keenly felt sentiments of a hostile eye-witness, leading them to agree, for example, with Schleiermacher, who insisted that "the Gospel of John is an account by an eyewitness, and the whole Gospel is written by one man.”(8) Or, contrariwise, the story might appear as John just making up these additional details as the typical kinds of elaborations people naturally make about what people they don’t like or trust are likely to say and do. But in the present case, in the argument I am making here, it doesn’t matter how it strikes one. It only matters that John didn't get it from Mark. One can treat all this as invented material that does nothing more than expand on Mark's general portrayal of Judas as a betrayer. But to do so is oversimplistic. There really are additional things in John that go beyond that and that didn't come from Mark.
Judas Agrees to Betray Jesus
Mark 14:10-11 // Luke 22:3-6 // Matthew 26:14-16
Here we start with the relatively minor details and then move to the more significant ones. In the first place Matthew notes that Judas actually asked the Jewish leaders for money to betray Jesus, while Mark only indicates that they promised him money. Matthew also indicates the precise amount:
Then one of the twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, “What will you give me if I betray him to you?” They paid him thirty pieces of silver. (Matthew 26:14-15, contrast Mark 14:10-11).
Matthew later sees the 30 pieces of silver as a fulfillment of Scripture (see 27:10), and as such plays a part in a larger piece of non-Marcan tradition Matthew presents in his account of the suicide of Judas, where we will treat the issue further.
In the meantime, Luke’s addition to Mark in this section is simply the detail that the body Judas approaches with his offer of betrayal includes not just the Chief Priests (Mark 14:10=Matthew 26:14), but also “officers of the temple police” (Luke 22:4).
Betrayed with a Kiss
Mark 14:43-52 // Luke 22:47-53 // Matthew 26: 47-56.
In this section Luke’s and Matthew’s additions to material they derived from Mark are relatively minor. Luke has Jesus respond to Judas’ kiss by saying, “Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?” (22:48), and Matthew, “Friend, do what you are here to do?” (26:50). The latter is reminiscent of what John quotes Jesus as saying to Judas at the last supper: “Do quickly what you are going to do.” (John 13:27)
Death of Judas Matthew 27:3-10 //Acts 1:15-20
One incident that Mark says nothing about is the suicide of Judas, and yet the Gospel of Matthew and the Book of Acts, the latter of which is usually understood to have been written by the author of the Gospel of Luke, contain two accounts of Judas’s death which share details but which differ enough for MacDonald himself (in another context) to declare them contradictory). I reproduce them here:
Matthew’s account of the death of Judas
When Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. He said, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.” But they said, “What is that to us? See to it yourself.” Throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself. But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, “It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since they are blood money.” After conferring together, they used them to buy the potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners. For this reason that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, “And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of the one on whom a price had been set, on whom some of the people of Israel had set a price, and they gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.” (Matthew 27:3-10)
Death of Judas in Acts:
In those days Peter stood up among the believers (together the crowd numbered about one hundred twenty persons) and said, 16 “Friends, the scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit through David foretold concerning Judas, who became a guide for those who arrested Jesus—for he was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry.” (Now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness; and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out. This became known to all the residents of Jerusalem, so that the field was called in their language Hakeldama, that is, Field of Blood.) “For it is written in the book of Psalms, ‘Let his homestead become desolate, and let there be no one to live in it’; and ‘Let another take his position of overseer.’ (Acts 1:15-20)
Matthew describes Judas as dying by hanging himself (27:5) and Acts says that he died “falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out” (1:18) Both accounts agree in reporting an early community knowledge that there was this field somehow associated with Judas’s death called "the field of blood." The two authors, however, seem to give somewhat differing accounts of how it got its name. Matthew says it was called that because it was purchased with blood money, Acts seems to imply that Judas himself purchased it. The differences imply that the two accounts were written independently. There is no indication that either author was aware of the account of the other and was attempting to frame his account in such a way as to harmonize it with the other. MacDonald himself (in another work) describes them as “two incompatible accounts.”(9)
In the early second century Papias of Hierapolis, an avid but not altogether competent harmonizer of Gospel traditions, passed on a very lame story that appears to have been invented as an attempt to sort out and harmonize the seeming discrepancies in these two accounts concerning Judas's death. It is found in a fragment of Papias’s writings preserved in the fourth-century writer Apollinaris of Laodicea, who prefaces it by pointing to the reference in Acts and then remarks that “Judas did not die by hanging but lived on, having been cut down before he choked to death.” Apollinaris then quotes Papias’s story as follows:
"Judas was a terrible, walking example of ungodliness in this world, his flesh so bloated that he was not able to pass through a place where a wagon passes easily, not even his bloated head by itself. For his eyelids, they say, were so swollen that he could not see the light at all, and his eyes could not be seen, even by a doctor using an optical instrument, so far had they sunk below the outer surface. His genitals appeared more loathsome and larger than anyone else’s, and when he relieved himself there passed through it pus and worms from every part of his body, much to his shame. After much agony and punishment, they say, he finally died in his own place, and because of the stench the area is deserted and uninhabitable even now; in fact, to this day no one can pass that place unless they hold their nose, so great was the discharge from his body and so far did it spread over the ground. "(Fragment 18.4-7 in Holmes’s edition)
We cannot tell with certainty from this explanation whether Papias is referring to the account of Acts itself (as Apollinaris supposed), or to an independent tradition similar to it. The passage does look like a dramatized version of Judas’s bowels gushing out as per Acts 1:18, but there are other things about the account that do not easily fit the larger context of Acts. According to the Book of Acts, Judas was already dead when Peter spoke about him in the period between the Passover when Jesus died and the day of Pentecost less than two months later (cf. Acts 1:16,18,25); precious little time for the colorful series of nasty things Papias says befell Judas. Still virtually all of Papias’s other attempted harmonizations suffer from similarly inept implausibilities. In any case what we do have is a tradition traveling in various forms that most certainly did not come from Mark at all. MacDonald himself tries to dispense with the problem by saying that Matthew initially invented the story, that Papias knew of Matthew’s account and that Luke knew of both Matthew’s and Papias’s account. The idea that Luke was written after Papias is not one that the vast majority of scholars would credit. Still even if they did MacDonald’s idiosyncratic sequence of source dependencies does nothing in terms of making it more likely that the author of Acts knew of Matthew’s account of the death of Judas, this despite the fact that MacDonald remarkably presents the differing accounts of the death of Judas represent some of the “best evidence for Luke’s use of Matthew.” (10)
Other Non-Marcan Judas Material.
Once we get outside the New Testament we continue to encounter further Judas material which also does not rely on Mark. There is, for example, and interaction related by Papias in which Judas expresses doubt concerning some eschatological teachings allegedly given by the Lord: “When Judas the traitor did not believe and asked, ‘How, then, will such growth be accomplished by the Lord?” the Lord said, ‘Those who live until those times will see.’” This is preserved in the second-century writer Irenaeus (Against Heresies 5.33.4). The same author, Irenaeus, reports the existence of a Gospel of Judas used by a group called the Cainites (Against Heresies 1.31.1), which came to light and was published with great fanfare in 2006.
Conclusion
Did Judas Exist? Well, yeah, he probably did. Yet the present discussion wasn’t really interested in “proving” Judas existed, only in asking whether MacDonald succeeds in proving he didn’t. Another way of framing this is to ask whether or not, supposing Judas actually never did exist, MacDonald has provided us with a persuasive and credible way of getting at that fact? Has he truly blazed a passible evidential trail for other scholars to travel in order to arrive safely at the same conclusions he believes he has arrived at. My answer is that he has not. There is a “criterion of authenticity” Historical Jesus scholars regularly appeal to known as “Multiple” or “Independent Attestation,” which holds that when an Early Christian tradition or teaching (or in our case a person) is found in two or more independent early sources it is more likely to be authentic. MacDonald’s claim that all references to Judas ultimately derived from Mark represents a rather conspicuous attempt on his part to rob Judas of any claim to being multiply and independently attested in the early sources. Once this had been (in his view) established he could then dispense with the historicity of Judas altogether with his argument that Mark had created him after the pattern of Homer’s character Melanthius. But does MacDonald really show that Judas is not multiply attested? I don't think he does.
Now there seems very little doubt that MacDonald would show himself ready and able to mount a counter response to everything I have said here about independent non-Marcan Judas material. Surely anyone capable of pulling Judas out of the Homer’s hat, will have little trouble pulling all subsequent Judas traditions out of Mark’s hat. If you're able to swallow the camel of the first move, then surely all subsequent moves are really only a matter of straining out a few gnats.
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1. Dennis R. MacDonald, Mythologizing Jesus: From Jewish Teacher to Epic Hero (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 105.
2. Although it was not evident from Eusebius’s remark that he is familiar with the location outside the reference of what Jeremiah had said.
3. We see this variations in Bible translations as well, so for example, does Jeremiah 48:41 refer to the town of Kerioth (as English translations usually transliterate), KJV, NASB, ASV, NIV or simply to “towns/cities” RSV, NRSV, ESV, HCSB, NAB, JB, NJB?
4. Quoted in Joan E. Taylor, “The Name Iskarioth (Iscariot),” Journal of Biblical Literature 129.2 (2010): 367-83 (367 quoted), which provides a very helpful overview of the topic.
5. Epiphanius, Panarion 30.13.3, For English translations see, e.g., The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis Book (I Sects 1-46) (Nag Hammadi & Manichaean Studies 63; 2nd ed., rev.; trans. Frank Williams; Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2009),141, and Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 215.
6. Logoi of Jesus 3:34-38 (Two Shipwrecked Gospels, 571).
7. Two Shipwrecked Gospels. 203.
8. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Life of Jesus (ed. and intro., Jack C. Verheyden; trans. by S. MacLean Gilmore; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975 [1832]), 433.
9. Two Shipwreched Gospels, 30.
10. Ibid., 76.
When reading this unique Johannine account, some might sense the immediateness of a comment as one that might reflect the keenly felt sentiments of a hostile eye-witness, leading them to agree, for example, with Schleiermacher, who insisted that "the Gospel of John is an account by an eyewitness, and the whole Gospel is written by one man.”(8) Or, contrariwise, the story might appear as John just making up these additional details as the typical kinds of elaborations people naturally make about what people they don’t like or trust are likely to say and do. But in the present case, in the argument I am making here, it doesn’t matter how it strikes one. It only matters that John didn't get it from Mark. One can treat all this as invented material that does nothing more than expand on Mark's general portrayal of Judas as a betrayer. But to do so is oversimplistic. There really are additional things in John that go beyond that and that didn't come from Mark.
Judas Agrees to Betray Jesus
Mark 14:10-11 // Luke 22:3-6 // Matthew 26:14-16
Here we start with the relatively minor details and then move to the more significant ones. In the first place Matthew notes that Judas actually asked the Jewish leaders for money to betray Jesus, while Mark only indicates that they promised him money. Matthew also indicates the precise amount:
Then one of the twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, “What will you give me if I betray him to you?” They paid him thirty pieces of silver. (Matthew 26:14-15, contrast Mark 14:10-11).
Matthew later sees the 30 pieces of silver as a fulfillment of Scripture (see 27:10), and as such plays a part in a larger piece of non-Marcan tradition Matthew presents in his account of the suicide of Judas, where we will treat the issue further.
In the meantime, Luke’s addition to Mark in this section is simply the detail that the body Judas approaches with his offer of betrayal includes not just the Chief Priests (Mark 14:10=Matthew 26:14), but also “officers of the temple police” (Luke 22:4).
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| The Kiss of Judas, 14th cent., Museo Nazionale di Ravenna (Photo: R. V. Huggins) |
Betrayed with a Kiss
Mark 14:43-52 // Luke 22:47-53 // Matthew 26: 47-56.
In this section Luke’s and Matthew’s additions to material they derived from Mark are relatively minor. Luke has Jesus respond to Judas’ kiss by saying, “Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?” (22:48), and Matthew, “Friend, do what you are here to do?” (26:50). The latter is reminiscent of what John quotes Jesus as saying to Judas at the last supper: “Do quickly what you are going to do.” (John 13:27)
Death of Judas Matthew 27:3-10 //Acts 1:15-20
One incident that Mark says nothing about is the suicide of Judas, and yet the Gospel of Matthew and the Book of Acts, the latter of which is usually understood to have been written by the author of the Gospel of Luke, contain two accounts of Judas’s death which share details but which differ enough for MacDonald himself (in another context) to declare them contradictory). I reproduce them here:
Matthew’s account of the death of Judas
When Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. He said, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.” But they said, “What is that to us? See to it yourself.” Throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself. But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, “It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since they are blood money.” After conferring together, they used them to buy the potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners. For this reason that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, “And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of the one on whom a price had been set, on whom some of the people of Israel had set a price, and they gave them for the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.” (Matthew 27:3-10)
Death of Judas in Acts:
In those days Peter stood up among the believers (together the crowd numbered about one hundred twenty persons) and said, 16 “Friends, the scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit through David foretold concerning Judas, who became a guide for those who arrested Jesus—for he was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry.” (Now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness; and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out. This became known to all the residents of Jerusalem, so that the field was called in their language Hakeldama, that is, Field of Blood.) “For it is written in the book of Psalms, ‘Let his homestead become desolate, and let there be no one to live in it’; and ‘Let another take his position of overseer.’ (Acts 1:15-20)
Matthew describes Judas as dying by hanging himself (27:5) and Acts says that he died “falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out” (1:18) Both accounts agree in reporting an early community knowledge that there was this field somehow associated with Judas’s death called "the field of blood." The two authors, however, seem to give somewhat differing accounts of how it got its name. Matthew says it was called that because it was purchased with blood money, Acts seems to imply that Judas himself purchased it. The differences imply that the two accounts were written independently. There is no indication that either author was aware of the account of the other and was attempting to frame his account in such a way as to harmonize it with the other. MacDonald himself (in another work) describes them as “two incompatible accounts.”(9)
In the early second century Papias of Hierapolis, an avid but not altogether competent harmonizer of Gospel traditions, passed on a very lame story that appears to have been invented as an attempt to sort out and harmonize the seeming discrepancies in these two accounts concerning Judas's death. It is found in a fragment of Papias’s writings preserved in the fourth-century writer Apollinaris of Laodicea, who prefaces it by pointing to the reference in Acts and then remarks that “Judas did not die by hanging but lived on, having been cut down before he choked to death.” Apollinaris then quotes Papias’s story as follows:
"Judas was a terrible, walking example of ungodliness in this world, his flesh so bloated that he was not able to pass through a place where a wagon passes easily, not even his bloated head by itself. For his eyelids, they say, were so swollen that he could not see the light at all, and his eyes could not be seen, even by a doctor using an optical instrument, so far had they sunk below the outer surface. His genitals appeared more loathsome and larger than anyone else’s, and when he relieved himself there passed through it pus and worms from every part of his body, much to his shame. After much agony and punishment, they say, he finally died in his own place, and because of the stench the area is deserted and uninhabitable even now; in fact, to this day no one can pass that place unless they hold their nose, so great was the discharge from his body and so far did it spread over the ground. "(Fragment 18.4-7 in Holmes’s edition)
We cannot tell with certainty from this explanation whether Papias is referring to the account of Acts itself (as Apollinaris supposed), or to an independent tradition similar to it. The passage does look like a dramatized version of Judas’s bowels gushing out as per Acts 1:18, but there are other things about the account that do not easily fit the larger context of Acts. According to the Book of Acts, Judas was already dead when Peter spoke about him in the period between the Passover when Jesus died and the day of Pentecost less than two months later (cf. Acts 1:16,18,25); precious little time for the colorful series of nasty things Papias says befell Judas. Still virtually all of Papias’s other attempted harmonizations suffer from similarly inept implausibilities. In any case what we do have is a tradition traveling in various forms that most certainly did not come from Mark at all. MacDonald himself tries to dispense with the problem by saying that Matthew initially invented the story, that Papias knew of Matthew’s account and that Luke knew of both Matthew’s and Papias’s account. The idea that Luke was written after Papias is not one that the vast majority of scholars would credit. Still even if they did MacDonald’s idiosyncratic sequence of source dependencies does nothing in terms of making it more likely that the author of Acts knew of Matthew’s account of the death of Judas, this despite the fact that MacDonald remarkably presents the differing accounts of the death of Judas represent some of the “best evidence for Luke’s use of Matthew.” (10)
Other Non-Marcan Judas Material.
Once we get outside the New Testament we continue to encounter further Judas material which also does not rely on Mark. There is, for example, and interaction related by Papias in which Judas expresses doubt concerning some eschatological teachings allegedly given by the Lord: “When Judas the traitor did not believe and asked, ‘How, then, will such growth be accomplished by the Lord?” the Lord said, ‘Those who live until those times will see.’” This is preserved in the second-century writer Irenaeus (Against Heresies 5.33.4). The same author, Irenaeus, reports the existence of a Gospel of Judas used by a group called the Cainites (Against Heresies 1.31.1), which came to light and was published with great fanfare in 2006.
Conclusion
Did Judas Exist? Well, yeah, he probably did. Yet the present discussion wasn’t really interested in “proving” Judas existed, only in asking whether MacDonald succeeds in proving he didn’t. Another way of framing this is to ask whether or not, supposing Judas actually never did exist, MacDonald has provided us with a persuasive and credible way of getting at that fact? Has he truly blazed a passible evidential trail for other scholars to travel in order to arrive safely at the same conclusions he believes he has arrived at. My answer is that he has not. There is a “criterion of authenticity” Historical Jesus scholars regularly appeal to known as “Multiple” or “Independent Attestation,” which holds that when an Early Christian tradition or teaching (or in our case a person) is found in two or more independent early sources it is more likely to be authentic. MacDonald’s claim that all references to Judas ultimately derived from Mark represents a rather conspicuous attempt on his part to rob Judas of any claim to being multiply and independently attested in the early sources. Once this had been (in his view) established he could then dispense with the historicity of Judas altogether with his argument that Mark had created him after the pattern of Homer’s character Melanthius. But does MacDonald really show that Judas is not multiply attested? I don't think he does.
Now there seems very little doubt that MacDonald would show himself ready and able to mount a counter response to everything I have said here about independent non-Marcan Judas material. Surely anyone capable of pulling Judas out of the Homer’s hat, will have little trouble pulling all subsequent Judas traditions out of Mark’s hat. If you're able to swallow the camel of the first move, then surely all subsequent moves are really only a matter of straining out a few gnats.
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1. Dennis R. MacDonald, Mythologizing Jesus: From Jewish Teacher to Epic Hero (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 105.
2. Although it was not evident from Eusebius’s remark that he is familiar with the location outside the reference of what Jeremiah had said.
3. We see this variations in Bible translations as well, so for example, does Jeremiah 48:41 refer to the town of Kerioth (as English translations usually transliterate), KJV, NASB, ASV, NIV or simply to “towns/cities” RSV, NRSV, ESV, HCSB, NAB, JB, NJB?
4. Quoted in Joan E. Taylor, “The Name Iskarioth (Iscariot),” Journal of Biblical Literature 129.2 (2010): 367-83 (367 quoted), which provides a very helpful overview of the topic.
5. Epiphanius, Panarion 30.13.3, For English translations see, e.g., The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis Book (I Sects 1-46) (Nag Hammadi & Manichaean Studies 63; 2nd ed., rev.; trans. Frank Williams; Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2009),141, and Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 215.
6. Logoi of Jesus 3:34-38 (Two Shipwrecked Gospels, 571).
7. Two Shipwrecked Gospels. 203.
8. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Life of Jesus (ed. and intro., Jack C. Verheyden; trans. by S. MacLean Gilmore; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975 [1832]), 433.
9. Two Shipwreched Gospels, 30.
10. Ibid., 76.
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