What Jews Should Know About Judas

Rabbi Melanie Aron

March 9, 2001

As a Reform congregation, we study the Torah both as sacred scripture and as a historical document. When we look at a text we ask both about its religious meaning and about its origins in the history of our people. Reading the Torah in this way often provides us with special insights, as we understand that community circumstances and needs, along with inspiration shaped our scripture.

Recently I had the opportunity to study the New Testament from the vantage point of Liberal Protestantism, which allows for a historical understanding of their sacred texts. Studying the Jewish Bible, we are deeply into ancient history, and can often only guess at the time and place a particular section of the Torah was written. We can hypothesize about Jeremiah's role, for example, in the writing of the Book of Deuteronomy and wonder about the great Redactor of the Babylonian Exile, but we have few documents to provide us with real information.

What was fascinating to me about studying the New Testament in this critical way, is that we are already in historical times, with many existing documents, and can often match sources to a particular year or decade 50 CE or 70 CE, for example rather than a time period 586-324 BCE. In addition because the first 100 years of the development of the Christian scriptures were a time period marked by so many dramatic events, many texts can be dated before or after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, the Diaspora revolt in 110 CE, or the great revolt of Bar Kochba in 135 CE. It would be like a historian of the 20th century, being able to place things in sequence by their relationship to the two world wars, the great depression, the fall of the Berlin wall, and so forth.

Through this study of the New Testament, I learned two interesting things, one that I would like to share with you briefly and the second at greater length.

The first thing that I learned was something I should have known. Jesus's last supper was not a Passover Seder. I had known that there are different traditions within the New Testament concerning whether Jesus's last supper on Thursday night, was or was not on the eve of Passover. Early sources like Paul describe it as an ordinary meal, while Mark, writing later, sees it as the Passover meal, and John writing even later, presents the view that the Passover meal was the Friday night after Jesus's crucifixion.

However this is all beside this point, because of something I knew but didn't really think about until this year.

The seder as a home ritual came into Jewish practice after the destruction of the Temple to replace the Biblically mandated sacrifice of the paschal lamb which could no longer be celebrated. The Temple was destroyed in the year 70. Jesus was put to death in the year 30. Jesus did not celebrate the Passover seder, because the Jews of his time still hadn't developed it. There was a Passover meal before the destruction of the Temple, with the sacrifice of the paschal lamb, the eating of matzah and marror and retelling the story of the exodus, but there was no seder with its complex stage-by-stage sequence of steps and prayers, songs and stories.

That seder developed almost a half a century later, to replace the Temple sacrifice, and to give the Jewish community something meaningful to comfort them for the loss of a major Jewish celebration at the Temple. From the simple words of Rabban Gamliel, around the year 90 CE, explaining the three symbols of the Passover, the Haggadah grew over centuries to become the celebration we know today.

That Jesus could not have had a seder was something that I should have known by putting two and two together, but had never really thought about. But recently as I have witnessed the proliferation of Churches holding seders, and advertising them as an opportunity to participate in the seder ceremony that Jesus and the apostles celebrated, I began to wonder about it. A seder at a Church can be a wonderful opportunity for a group of Christians to learn about Judaism, particularly about Judaism's development over the past 1900 years. It can be a time to connect with Christianity's Jewish roots. However these seders should be recognized as Jewish rituals, developing out along the Jewish branch after the parting of the ways.

The second things I learned, I found even more interesting. It had always seemed to me an unfortunate aspect of history that the story of Judas betraying Jesus was so prominent in the New Testament. I viewed it as a source of much of the Christian anti-Semitism that followed.

What I learned recently is that the story of Judas's betrayal was unknown for the first 20-40 years after the death of Jesus, that it is a relatively late addition to story of Jesus's final days, and that, rather than causing anti-Semitism, it was probably a reflection of existing anti-Jewish sentiment.

Judas as a betrayer of Jesus is unknown in First Corinthians, which dates to the 50's of the first century. In Paul there is no mention of betrayal at all, only the words that Jesus was paradidonai- meaning literally, delivered up, to death, though some translators today translate that word betrayed, reading into Paul, later stories. In addition we have the early tradition that Jesus speaks to all twelve apostles after his resurrection and gives them each roles and missions. Would Judas have been included if these stories viewed him as the betrayer? No, they do not single him out at all.

It was only later that the motif of betrayal entered into Christian scripture. It was shaped around traditions about King David who was betrayed by Achitofel who subsequently hung himself. It is with regard to David that his betrayer is called "my companion, my familiar friend," and the discussion of "the kisses of an enemy" is found. At first when the theme of betrayal enters Christian tradition it is non-specific and not identified with Judas.

It is Mark who identifies Judas as the traitor, probably working on the parallel of Judah, known in Greek as Judas, who betrayed his brother Joseph suggesting that he be sold to the Midianites for pieces of silver. It was very difficult at that time, the closing years of the first century, for Christians to explain to their potential converts how Jesus, as the powerful son of God, became prey to mere mortals. This story then fulfilled a number of contemporary needs not only in speaking to potential converts but also for the Christian community fearful of informants, wishing to appear less anti-Roman and more anti-Jewish. They did not want the Romans of their time, a time of Jewish rebellion against Rome and the crucifixion of rebels, to identify Jesus as a subversive. Therefore they wanted to shift the blame for the crucifixion from Rome to the Jews. Rabbi Michael Cook, of the Hebrew Union College, sums it up in this way: Thus Jesus, a Jew, put to death by Rome, became seen instead as a Christian put to death by Jews. The story of Judas's betrayal reflected the feelings of the end of century Christian community about the Jewish communities continued refusal to accept their Messiah.

Had the story of a human betrayal not entered the Gospels, or had it remained as it was originally without the association with Judas, the entire history of Jewish -Christian relations through the centuries, and particularly around the Passover-Easter time, would have been drastically different. In essence, the Catholic Church post Vatican II and the Mainline Protestant denominations, each in their own way, have come full circle, removing blame from the Jewish people, and returning to an understanding of Jesus's life more closely parallel with those who lived closest to his own times.