世界名人堂 【紀錄片】《加略人：猶大的貪婪與背叛》- 他為何真的為了三十枚銀幣出賣耶穌？ ！

On a spring evening in around 30 AD, the religious teacher Jesus of Nazareth shares his Passover meal in Jerusalem with his twelve disciples. He informs the group that one of them will betray him. While each of the disciples protest their innocence, Judas Iscariot has already promised to reveal his master's hideout to the Roman and Jewish authorities who jointly govern the city, in exchange for the modest sum of 30 pieces of silver. After the dinner, as Jesus prays with his senior disciples at the Garden of Gethsemane at the foot of the Mount of Olives, Judas leads an armed party towards Jesus and kisses him on the cheek to identify him to the armed men. Jesus is arrested and delivered for separate trials before Jerusalem's chief priest Joseph Caiaphas and the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, who sentences him to death by crucifixion. Over the last 2,000 years, Judas has been vilified by Christians as the man who betrayed Jesus and facilitated his arrest and execution. But is there scope for a more positive appraisal of Judas' actions? This is the story of Judas Iscariot, Betrayer of Christ. The man known to history as Judas Iscariot was likely born around the turn of the 1st century A.D. According to mainstream scholarship, his surname, Iscariot, which is used in the Gospels of Luke and John to distinguish him from another disciple named Judas, indicates that he came from Keriot, a town to the south of Jerusalem in Judea. John's Gospel adds that Judas' father was named Simon Iscariot. However, this theory is not universally accepted, and the late biblical scholar Geza Vermes suggested that Judas' surname was derived from Kyria, a word simply meaning town, possibly referring to the city of Jerusalem itself. Another theory is that Iscariot is a corruption of Sicarius, a Latin term meaning dagger wielder, which gave its name to the Sicarii. This was a Jewish revolutionary organization known for assassinating Jewish elites whom they saw as collaborators of Rome. While the meaning of Judas' last name remains a mystery, his first name was common among Jews in 1st century Judea as the Greek form of the Hebrew name Judah. In the Old Testament, Judah was the fourth son of Jacob and the founder of one of the twelve tribes of Israel. The kingdom of Judah would emerge as the principal tribe of the Israelites and, accordingly, the Jewish people. The name Judas was therefore popular among Jews in the years after the death of Alexander the Great, as the region fell under the control of the Seleucid Empire, the Hellenistic successor state based in the city of Antioch. Seleucid rule came to an end in the mid-2nd century BC, following a Jewish rebellion led by Mattathias ben Johanan and his sons of the Hasmonean dynasty. After Mattathias died early in the rebellion, his son Judas Maccabeus was the pre-eminent rebel leader, and his success in retaking Jerusalem in 164 BC is still commemorated by the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. Another rebel, named Judas the Galilean, took part in an armed uprising against Roman rule in around 6 AD, making him a near-contemporary of Judas Iscariot. The etymological associations between the name Judas and the Hebrew term Yehud, meaning Jew, encouraged the anti-Semitic view among Christians that the Jewish people were primarily responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. This was despite the fact that Judas was neither more or less Jewish than Jesus, or the other disciples. The late American theologian John Shelby Spong, argued that Judas was invented by the gospel writers in the decades following Jesus' death to pin the blame for the crucifixion on the Jewish authorities rather than the Romans. While Judas plays an important role in Christian theology, biographical information is extremely thin and is largely contained within the four canonical gospels of the New Testament. Scholars using the gospels as historical sources have to take a number of considerations into account. Most scholars believe that the canonical gospels were written in the final third of the 1st century AD, between years 70 and 100. While they contain historical information about Judea and Galilee in the 1st century AD and demonstrate varying degrees of familiarity with Jewish scripture, the gospel authors are not interested in providing detailed biographies of Jesus or any other figures. Instead, they convey the theology of fledgling Christian communities across the Roman world at a time when the followers of Jesus were still in the process of splitting from mainstream Judaism. The gospel narratives focus on Jesus' teachings and his miracles, building up to the dramatic climax of his death and resurrection. Judas only comes to prominence in the final act, though earlier references to him already identify him as Jesus' betrayer. Christian tradition attributes the authorship of the four gospels to the twelve apostles and their close circle, though this is rejected by most modern scholars. The Gospel of Mark is believed to have been written in Rome by John Mark, an associate of apostles Peter and Paul, and is dated to around 70 AD, shortly after the Emperor Nero's persecution of the Christians in Rome. This, according to Christian tradition, claimed the lives of the two apostles. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke, written a decade or two later, are attributed to the apostle Matthew and a physician who attended to the apostle Paul, respectively. Since they include many episodes found in Mark, they are believed to have used Mark as a source, and the three gospels are collectively known as the Synoptic Gospels. Matthew and Luke also share many stories that are not present in Mark, suggesting that they relied on an earlier hypothetical source that is now lost. The Gospel of John, commonly dated to no earlier than 100 AD, is traditionally attributed to the apostle John, one of Jesus' closest disciples, though this would imply that he lived to 100. Both ancient and modern scholars associate the gospel with the early Christian community in Ephesus, in what is now western Turkey. In addition to the canonical gospels, there were dozens of other gospels in circulation, often attributed to other apostles, such as St. Peter or St. Thomas. These include a Gospel of Judas, which was rediscovered in Egypt in the late 20th century and translated into English in 2006. While these apocryphal gospels offered alternative interpretations of Jesus' life, they were excluded from the New Testament canon in the late 2nd century AD, in favor of the gospels written closest to Jesus' lifetime. While the gospels are the first texts to mention Judas Iscariot, they are not the earliest works of Christian literature. The earliest letters of the apostle Paul to the Christian churches he set up across the Roman world are dated to 50 AD. Paul was not among the twelve apostles, but had persecuted the Christians in Syria and Palestine, before converting to the new faith, after receiving a vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus. Unlike the Christian community in Jerusalem led by James, the brother of Jesus, which required believers to adopt Jewish law, Paul enthusiastically spread the word among the non-Jewish, gentile population without any restrictions. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul wrote of Jesus' last supper, on the night he was betrayed. Some scholars argue that the original Greek verb paradidomi should be more accurately translated as handed over or given up. There is no indication that Jesus was betrayed by any of his disciples. In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes, Since God did not spare his own son, but gave him up to the benefit of all, using the same Greek verb paradidomi, this suggests that the handing over of Jesus was on God's initiative and not a malicious act. Aside from the reference in the Gospel of John about Judas as the son of Simon Iscariot, the gospels contain no information about Judas' life before he joined Jesus in Galilee. The name Judas Iscariot is first mentioned in chapter 3 of Mark's Gospel. Here he is named among the twelve disciples, summoned by Jesus to the hills of Galilee, to join his inner circle. Judas not only appears at the end of the list, but is already labelled as the man who would betray Jesus. The writer Peter Stanford suggests that this might reflect an existing oral tradition in early Christianity as a reminder to readers that Judas would eventually betray Jesus. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke follow Mark in placing Judas at the end of the list of disciples and in describing him as Jesus' betrayer. John's Gospel does not include a list of the twelve, but instead introduces them over the course of the narrative. He first mentions Judas at the end of chapter 6, after Jesus' assertion that bread is his flesh and wine is his blood, caused many of his early followers to turn away from him. While Peter declares on behalf of the twelve his faith in Jesus' divinity, Jesus replies that even though he has personally chosen the twelve, one of them is a devil. The writer of John's Gospel explains that Jesus is referring to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, who, though one of the twelve, was later to betray him. According to the traditional interpretation of Iscariot as meaning from Kerioth, the Gospel writers emphasize Judas' status as an outsider from Judea. This is in marked contrast to Jesus and the other eleven disciples from Galilee. While Judea and Galilee had been ruled by King Herod the Great at the end of the first century BC, by the early first century AD, Judea had been formally incorporated into the Roman Empire as a province. Galilee, on the other hand, retained a degree of autonomy from Rome under Herod's son, King Herod Antipas. For much of Mark's Gospel, Judas is simply included among the twelve who accompany Jesus as he spreads his teaching and performs his miracles to communities around Galilee, operating from the fishing village of Capernaum on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. In the Gospel narratives, Peter serves as the spokesperson for the twelve and is part of an inner circle alongside James and John, the sons of Zebedee, while Judas remains on the fringes. He only comes to the fore in Mark's Gospel after Jesus and the twelve arrive in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. By the time he does so, the city's religious elders have already identified Jesus as a threat to their authority. Jesus had attracted large crowds and his message of humility and selflessness contrasted with what he characterized as a corrupt religious establishment. Mark begins chapter 14 with the chief priests scheming to kill Jesus, before describing a dinner in the nearby village of Bethany, where a woman pours a jar of expensive perfume on Jesus' head. While onlookers criticized her for wasting expensive perfume worth more than a year's wages, Jesus defends the woman and explains it as the anointment of his body in preparation for burial, foreshadowing his imminent death. Mark then abruptly reintroduces Judas, who goes to the chief priests and agrees to betray Jesus. While Mark states that the chief priests promised to give Judas money, he does not set out a motive for Judas' actions. Matthew, on the other hand, has the disciple asking, Matthew is the only gospel to name the price of the betrayal as thirty pieces of silver, which has become one of the most famous details of Judas' life. The sum appears to be a reference to two passages in the Old Testament in which thirty silver shekels is associated with the wages of a shepherd or the compensation paid to a slave owner for a dead slave, an indication of the disregard Jewish religious leaders had for Jesus. The Judas agreed to accept this modest sum indicates that he was not primarily motivated by money, even though thirty pieces of silver is now shorthand for greed and avarice. In the Gospel of Luke, Judas' betrayal of Jesus is not motivated by monetary considerations, but by him being possessed by the devil. Chapter 22 of Luke opens with the Jewish religious authorities planning to do away with Jesus and continues, Then Satan entered Judas, called Iscariot, one of the twelve. It is at this moment that Judas approached the chief priests and the officers of the temple guard to discuss how he would betray Jesus. As in Mark's gospel, the authorities were delighted and agreed to give him money without him asking for it. Attributing the world's evils to the devil is a common device throughout Christian literature. Judas is also closely associated with the devil in John's gospel. As mentioned previously, John mentions Judas for the first time when Jesus informs the twelve that there is a devil among them. In contrast to the other gospels, Jesus is already aware that one of the twelve would betray him at the start of his ministry in Galilee, but continues to work with him until his death in Jerusalem. In John's version of Jesus' anointment at Bethany, the dinner takes place at the house of Lazarus, the man whom he had recently raised from the dead. The expensive perfume is poured onto Jesus' feet by Lazarus' sister, Mary. John singles out Judas as the person who complains that the expensive perfume should have been sold at its proceeds given to the poor. However, John adds that Judas raised this objection not because he was genuinely concerned for the poor, but that he was the group's treasurer and frequently stole some of Peter Stanford observes that it would have been more appropriate to assign the duties of treasurer to the former tax collector Matthew. Stanford cites the French scholar René Girard's view that the portrayal of Judas as a thief reflected the gospel writer's efforts to present him as the scapegoat. Judas' actions, as John describes them, are also reminiscent of Jesus' criticisms of the Jewish religious authorities for misusing temple funds. This has encouraged anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish moneylenders over the centuries. While Judas appears in John more often than the other gospels, John does not mention Judas meeting the chief priests and receiving money from them to betray Jesus. Instead, John writes of Satan entering into Judas and tempting him during the Passover meal. Whereas Jesus readily identifies himself as the Son of God in John's gospel, he is more reticent to reveal his messianic destiny in the synoptic gospels. This may explain why Jesus does not reveal that he is to be betrayed by one of the twelve until the Last Supper, prompting them to protest their innocence by asking among themselves, surely you don't mean me? In Mark's gospel, Jesus avoids naming Judas specifically and instead singles out, the one who is dipping bread into the bowl with me, adding that it would be better for him if he had not been born. Jesus then proceeds to share his bread with all the twelve disciples. While Matthew's gospel echoes Mark in quoting Jesus' remark about his betrayer being better off not being born, he continues with Judas asking, surely you don't mean me, Rabbi? To which Jesus responds, you have said so. Jesus gives the same non-committal response later in Matthew when he appears before the Jewish Sanhedrin and is challenged to declare himself the Messiah. It is also worth noting that while the other disciples protest their innocence during the Passover meal by asking Jesus, surely you don't mean me, Lord? Judas addresses Jesus with the Hebrew term Rabbi. This subtly puts further distance between Judas and the other eleven, implying that while the others are prepared to acknowledge Jesus' divinity, Judas only recognizes him as a religious teacher. Nevertheless, Judas is among the twelve who receive the bread and wine from Jesus as his flesh and blood, instituting the Eucharist that has become a central element of Christian worship. While Mark and Matthew have the twelve sharing the meal together, despite knowing of a traitor in their midst, Luke's gospel reverses the sequence of events by having Jesus announce the presence of a traitor only at the end of the Passover meal, after the twelve had eaten the bread and drunk the wine. In John's gospel, Jesus institutes the Eucharist much earlier in the narrative during the aforementioned episode that causes many of Jesus' followers to turn away from him in disgust for his apparent encouragement of cannibalism. In John's version of the Passover meal at the beginning of chapter 13, Jesus is aware of his imminent death, and the author adds that the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. Here, John describes Jesus getting up from the table to wash the feet of the twelve. This includes Judas, and is a gesture of humility that has been re-enacted by churchmen and monarchs over the centuries on Maundy Thursday, during Easter week. Peter refuses to let Jesus subject himself to the indignity of washing his feet, and proposes that he should wash the other parts of his body as well. At this, Jesus told Peter that the rest of his body was clean, while observing, but not all of you, referring perhaps to one of the other disciples. This becomes clearer a few verses later, when Jesus tells the twelve that one of them would betray him. Like the other gospels, John has the twelve anxiously asking among themselves who the traitor was. In John's narrative, Peter asks the apostle John, who was reclining next to Jesus, to ask him to identify the traitor. Taking a piece of bread, Jesus answered him, It is the one to whom I will give this piece of bread, when I have dipped it in the dish. Jesus then passes the bread to Judas, an unambiguous accusation that is absent from the other gospel narratives. John then writes that as soon as Judas took the bread, Satan entered him, a sequence of events that suggests Jesus is orchestrating events, seemingly assuaging Judas' guilt. This sense is strengthened with Jesus' subsequent instruction to Judas, What you are about to do, do quickly. Having already identified Judas as the group's treasurer, John explains that the disciples believed that Jesus' enigmatic remark had something to do with buying supplies for the Passover festival or giving money to the poor. This misapprehension allows Judas to leave the dinner early, to report to the authorities and lead them to Jesus' hideout John leaves Judas' character and motivations open to interpretation, by accusing Judas of financial misconduct, while also suggesting that Judas was acting as an agent, not only of Satan, but of God and Jesus. After the dinner, the scene shifts to the garden of Gethsemane, just outside the city walls, and Jesus prays to God the Father as he prepares to fulfill his messianic mission. In Mark and Matthew, Jesus asks Peter, James and John to keep a lookout, but they repeatedly fall asleep until Jesus sees Judas approaching with an armed crowd and exhorts them, rise, let us go, here comes my betrayer. In a prearranged signal, Judas addresses Jesus as rabbi and gives him the infamous kiss, a common greeting among Jewish men of the period. Judas' biographers, Susan Gubar and Peter Stanford, observe that even in the darkness of night, it would have been straightforward for the authorities to identify Jesus in the group of twelve and arrest him without the kiss from Judas, and Stanford sees the inclusion of this detail as a sign of authenticity. In Matthew's account, Jesus instructs Judas, do what you are here for, friend. This is a line echoed by Jesus' remark to Judas during the Last Supper in John's Gospel and once again suggests a degree of understanding between the two men. In contrast, Luke describes Jesus taking evasive action when Judas attempts to kiss him before asking his betrayer, Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss? The Gospel of John does away with the kiss completely. John's Gospel contrasts with the Synoptic Gospels, where the party accompanying Judas to arrest Jesus are understood to be exclusively Jewish priests, officials, and temple guards. Instead, John refers to a detachment of Roman soldiers accompanied by Jewish officials. Rather than walking ahead of the soldiers to kiss Jesus, Judas simply stands among them while Jesus asks them who they are seeking to arrest, identifying himself as Jesus of Nazareth, while asking them to let his disciples go. The Gospels describe an attempt at resistance by one of the disciples, whom John names as Peter, who takes a sword and cuts off part of the ear of a Jewish official's attendant. Jesus, however, orders him to put down the sword, otherwise the disciples flee the scene in an undignified panic. All four Gospels famously describe Peter fulfilling Jesus' prophecy that he would deny him three times before the crowing of the rooster the following morning, but Peter would redeem himself by seeking forgiveness and building solid foundations for the early Christian Church. While Judas makes no further appearance in the Gospels of Mark, Luke, and John after Jesus' arrest, in Matthew's Gospel he shows remorse after learning that the Jewish son Hedron has handed him over to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who has final authority to rule on capital crimes. Matthew describes Judas seeking to return the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests, telling them, I have sinned, for I have betrayed innocent blood. The Jewish elders curtly reply, what is that to us? That is your responsibility. In contrast to the Christian promise of redemption for sinners who repent, the Jewish priests hold out no such promise. In despair, Judas throws the thirty pieces of silver into the temple and proceeds to kill himself. The Jewish elders recognize that the blood money could not be placed into the treasury, and instead use it to buy a field as a burial ground for foreigners, which came to be known as the Field of Blood, or Akeldama. Another account of Judas' death is found in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, believed to have been written by the author of Luke's Gospel. In chapter 1 of Acts, the remaining apostles reassemble in Jerusalem to elect a man named Pathias to fill the vacancy left by Judas. During the meeting, Peter explains that after buying a field with the money he received for betraying Jesus, Judas' body burst open and his intestines spilled out. The accounts of Judas in the four Gospels and chapter 1 of Acts have inspired different interpretations among scholars. Susan Gubar sees Mark and Matthew offering a sympathetic portrait of Judas as a wayward apostle compared to the sinister figure possessed by Satan in Luke and John. While Peter Stanford observes that only Matthew gives Judas the opportunity to repent for his sins, the extent to which Judas' betrayal of Jesus reflects his own personal failings, or makes him a passive agent in a wider divine plan, remains unclear. While modern historians and scholars have examined the Gospels with a critical eye, Christians have treated the four canonical Gospels as reliable witnesses to Jesus' life for much of the last 2,000 years. The prevailing perception of Judas throughout this period is therefore a composite from all four accounts, drawing heavily on the later and more detailed narratives in Luke and John. In the popular imagination, Judas is a fraudster who is motivated to betray Jesus by avarice, handing him over to the authorities with a duplicitous gesture of affection. He is unambiguously a traitor, with no mitigating circumstances such as being the unwitting agent of Satan, or as Jesus' active collaborator in the implementation of a divine plan. As mentioned earlier, the identification of Judas with Jewishness and avarice has inspired the pernicious anti-Semitic trope of the greedy Jew. In the same way, the intimate kiss that Judas planted on Jesus' face to seal his betrayal has been interpreted as a condemnation of the sinfulness of homosexuality. In modern times, as historians and scholars take a more critical approach to the Bible and other religious texts, the figure of Judas has been re-examined in a more positive light. This process was furthered in 2006 with the translation of the rediscovered Gospel of Judas. While the papyrus text in Egyptian Coptic was carbon-dated to the 3rd century AD, it is believed to have been written in Greek during the 2nd century AD, while gaps in the text present difficulties in interpretation. In 180 AD, Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons denounced the Gospel of Judas as heresy. The Gospel was attributed to a small sect known as the Gnostics, who prioritized inner knowledge and spirituality, and resisted the external authority of the Apostolic Church, which traced its teachings to those of the Twelve Apostles. The Gospel of Judas presents a conversation between Jesus and Judas three days before Jesus' death. Judas is presented as the most favored of the Apostles, owing to his superior understanding of God's plan. Jesus tells Judas that he would experience much suffering and would be excluded from the Twelve, referring to him as the Thirteenth Spirit. Later on, when Judas requests admission to the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus tells him, you will go through a great deal of grief when you see the Kingdom and its entire generation, suggesting that Judas himself would not join them. When Judas asks what benefit he would get, Jesus tells him that you will be the Thirteenth and you will be cursed by the other generations, but eventually you will rule over them. While the Gospel of Judas also shows him betraying Jesus and receiving money for doing so, Jesus' spirit has already ascended to heaven before his arrest and the crucifixion of his corporeal form is of little importance. Professor April Deconnick has challenged the positive interpretation of Judas by asserting that the accepted translation of Thirteenth Spirit should instead be rendered Thirteenth Demon. She argues that the Gospel was written by the Gnostics as a parody to challenge the concept of sacrifice and particularly the notion that God could kill his own son. While the Gospel of Judas has received particular attention in recent times owing to its rediscovery, other apocryphal texts also examine Judas in greater detail, though most of these cast him negatively. The third-century theologian Origen of Alexandria offers a more nuanced view of Judas, arguing that while he betrayed Jesus at a free will, the infamous kiss was a genuine sign of affection. Similarly, Judas' repentance and death in Matthew reflects the power of Jesus' teaching. A century later, the influential philosopher St. Augustine of Hippo concluded that Judas was an evil being who was unaware that God was employing him for the good of mankind. His contemporary St. Jerome, best known as the translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible, wrote that Judas is cursed, that in Judas the Jews may be accursed. As the power of the Roman Catholic Church increased at the expense of the Western Roman emperors in the 4th and 5th centuries AD, Pope Leo the Great labelled Judas the wickedest and unhappiest man that ever lived. The concept of Judas as a member of Jesus' circle who was condemned to hell after his betrayal served as a powerful tool for the Church to maintain its authority. The view of Judas as beyond redemption was further developed during the medieval period. An apocryphal text known as the Arabic Infancy Gospel, believed to have been compiled in the 6th century, describes Judas as a child being possessed by Satan and attempting to bite the boy Jesus. Meanwhile, the apocryphal Gospel of Barnabas, usually dated to the late medieval period, and believed to have been influenced by the Islamic belief that Jesus' death on the cross was a simulation. It claims that, after betraying Jesus, God transformed Judas as Jesus' body double, and it is Judas rather than Jesus who meets his end on the cross. Other Christian authors preferred to develop the image of Judas' death in acts by describing his body swelling to enormous size until bursting open. During the medieval period, depictions of Judas' gruesome death, often with him hanging from a tree while his guts burst out from him, adorned the walls of churches. A frieze on the 13th century Freiberg Minster in Germany show a hanging Judas with his bowels spilling out from him as silver coins fall from his hand. At Autun Cathedral in France, the hanging Judas is shown with two teams of devils pulling at the rope to tighten the noose. A similar concept appears on the ceiling of the in Florence, where Judas is shown in hell, hanging from a tree with a devil pulling on the rope. Devils also accompany Judas in depictions of the Last Supper, such as that on the pulpit in the cathedral of Volterra in Tuscany. While the other eleven apostles are shown seated at the table with Jesus, with the apostle John leaning against Jesus, as in the gospel attributed to him, Judas is shown under the table receiving his piece of bread from Jesus. To clear up any further doubt, the sculptor depicts Satan as a horned beast with a dragon's tail sitting behind Judas. Alongside the association with Satan and betrayal, the image of Judas with the thirty pieces of silver was often used in Italy as a reaction to the class of merchant bankers. These were often viewed as men who enriched themselves by lending money at extortionate rates to the church and nobility. The Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, dedicated to a saint who rejected worldly possessions, includes eleven depictions of Judas, perhaps as a reminder of the allure of worldly goods. Such visceral images of Judas' fate would have communicated the church's message most effectively in an age of widespread illiteracy. However, embellished accounts of Judas' depravity are also to be found in popular literature. In Dante's celebrated Divine Comedy, Judas is placed in the ninth circle of hell, the part reserved for traitors. Dante labels this part of the ninth circle Judeca, after Judas, but the same term was used in southern Italian dialects for Jewish ghettos. Judas appears alongside Caesar's assassins, Brutus and Cassius, being devoured by a three-headed Satan. The Roman poet Virgil, Dante's guide in the underworld, tells the poet, That soul up there who suffers most of all, is Judas Iscariot, the one with head inside and legs out kicking. Peter Stanford highlights another popular account of Judas' life in the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century collection of saints' lives by the Dominican prior Jacobus de Voragine, which was one of the most widely read books of the time. Jacobus inserts his Judas tale into his chapter on Saint Matthias, the apostle who replaced Judas. According to Jacobus, Judas' parents were a Jewish couple named Reuben and Siberia. One night, Siberia has a nightmare that she would give birth to a son who would destroy their race. When the baby was born, they put him in a wicker basket so he would die at sea. He washes up on an island called Scarioth, where he is found and adopted by the queen. While the tale is so far inspired by that of Moses, Judas is an aggressive child, who bullies the king and queen's own son. After being informed that he was adopted, Judas is humiliated and kills the prince. He flees to Jerusalem and becomes Pontius Pilate's chief minister. While on business for Pilate, Judas kills a landowner after a disagreement. Recalling the Greek myth of Oedipus, he transpires that the murdered man is Judas' father Reuben. Pilate not only transfers Reuben's property to Judas, but invites him to marry his widow. The couple remain unaware that they are mother and son until Siberia tells Judas about the baby she had abandoned. After realizing the horrifying truth, Siberia advised Judas to join Jesus and beg for forgiveness. Having stressed that the tale is apocryphal, Jacobus follows the canonical gospels in making Judas the treasurer and the man who betrays Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. Jacobus combines the two versions of Judas' death by suggesting that Judas attempted to kill himself, but his demonic spirit could not leave through the mouth that kissed Jesus. As a result, it had to exit his body along with his entrails via the rear passage. In addition to these representations of Judas, many medieval European communities observed Judas' day. This fell on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, during which the townsfolk burned effigies of the treacherous apostle. However, as early as the 14th century, the Spanish Dominican friar Vincent Ferrer, who would later be canonized, cast Judas as a tragic figure, who attempted to seek forgiveness from Jesus after returning the thirty pieces of silver to the temple, but was prevented by the crowds gathering to witness the crucifixion. Judas, therefore, decided to kill himself, so that he could intercept Jesus as his teacher ascended to heaven. Ferrer's position was a dangerous one, and he was only acquitted of heresy following the intervention of Antipope Benedict XIII, to whom he was confessor. While artists in Renaissance Italy began depicting Judas without satanic accoutrements, the Protestant Reformation doubled down on Judas as an instrument of Satan. Judas' reputation as the ultimate traitor was also evident in Russian orthodoxy. In 1709, Tsar Peter the Great awarded the Order of Judas to Ivan Mazepa, the Ukrainian Cossack leader who had served the Russian Empire before switching his allegiance to Charles XII of Sweden during the Great Northern War. Later in the 18th century, Enlightenment thinkers began challenging centuries of accepted Christian doctrine. The revolutionary writer Thomas Paine, who himself rejected Christian belief, wrote, Why do not Christians, to be consistent, make saints of Judas and Pontius Pilate? For they were the persons who accomplished the act of salvation. In the mid-19th century, the English writer Thomas de Quincey cast Judas as a political revolutionary, who sought to overthrow Roman rule and informs on Jesus in an effort to force a rebellion. The composer Edward Elgar's 1903 oratorio, The Apostles, also presents Judas as a social reformer, concerned about improving the lives of people on earth. Judas betrays Jesus to the Jewish priests, in the hope that they would make common cause against Rome, but after Jesus is handed over to Pilate, Judas becomes depressed and takes his own life. While Judas was transformed into a revolutionary hero in radical circles, popular opinion continued to regard him as a traitor beyond contempt. While Enlightenment philosophers promoted religious tolerance, the rise of nationalism during the 19th century witnessed a revival in the scapegoating of Judas and the Jews. A wave of anti-Semitism in France, following defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, culminated in the infamous Dreyfus affair, in which Jewish artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus was imprisoned following accusations of passing military secrets to the Germans. In 1894, the anti-Semitic journalist Edouard Droumont's newspaper La Libre Parole carried a headline referring to Judas Dreyfus. Other right-wing newspapers characterized Dreyfus' defense as the Kiss of Judas Iscariot. The Dreyfus affair dominated French politics at the turn of the 20th century, and eventually resulted in Alfred Dreyfus' acquittal in 1906. The rise of fascism in Germany a few decades later saw Nazi propagandists again emphasize the link between Judas and the Jews. In 1934, Hitler visited the village of Oberammergau in Bavaria for the 300th anniversary of the Passion play, which blamed Judas and the Jews for Jesus' death. The notorious 1940 propaganda film Ju-Sus uses Judas as the prototype for Josef Sus Oppenheimer, an 18th century Jewish financier and advisor to the Duke of Württemberg. Württemberg was accused of corruption and ultimately hanged. Susan Guba observes, Judas stars in Nazi propaganda films not because he betrayed Christ, but because, having done so, he was depicted for centuries in European art with traits that became the stock in trade of antisemitism. The late Jewish-British scholar Haya Maccabee goes even further, claiming that 2,000 years of European antisemitism, fuelled by images of Judas, led directly to Hitler and the Holocaust. After World War II, the stereotype of Judas the Jew was relegated to the fringes of political and religious discourse, and Christians began to acknowledge their shared history with Judaism. This created the space for the further re-examination of Judas and his motivations. The Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis' 1953 novel, The Last Temptation of Christ, portrays Judas working alongside Jesus to achieve God's plan. Kazantzakis' Judas rejects Jesus' advice to turn the other cheek, and prefers violent resistance to the authorities. Despite this, he recognises that Jesus is the Messiah, and it is God's will for him to be crucified. Throughout the novel, Jesus has human doubts about whether his sacrifice for humanity would ultimately be worth it. When Jesus decides that he must die, he instructs Judas to hand him over to the Romans. In a controversial episode that outraged Christians around the world, particularly after it was adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese in 1988, Kazantzakis described Jesus having a dream on the eve of his crucifixion, in which he married Mary Magdalene, and lived to an old age with his apostles. Judas rebukes him for having such considerations, and urges him to fulfil his messianic destiny. Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1973 musical, Jesus Christ Superstar, places Judas on centre stage, presenting the twelfth apostle as a worldly, rational man, who reluctantly betrays Jesus, in order to save the Jews from harsh Roman reprisals. Meanwhile, the 2005 play, The Last Days of Judas, by award-winning American playwright Stephen Adly-Girgis, posits that, if God's capacity to forgive is unlimited, then Judas also deserved to be redeemed. Within established Christian communities around the world, Judas continues to be regarded negatively, though he is no longer so prominent as a scapegoat. In 2000, Oberammergau revised the script of its famous passion play, to hold out the promise of God's forgiveness for Judas. In 2007, shortly after the publication of The Gospel of Judas, Pope Benedict XVI published an analysis of Jesus' life, in which he acknowledged Judas' willingness to repent, though argued that he remained condemned by succumbing to despair and taking his own life. While Judas Iscariot remains a byword for treachery in the 21st century, his guilt is by no means clear. What do you think of Judas Iscariot? Was he an agent of Satan, or an instrument of God? Was his betrayal of Jesus motivated by his evil nature and his love of money, or was it an unsuccessful attempt to instigate rebellion that he regretted? Please, let us know in the comments section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.