by Benedicta Cipolla
In "The Inferno," Dante makes the fate of Judas abundantly clear. In return for betraying Jesus, he is eternally damned to the darkest, deepest circle of hell, devoured continuously by Lucifer and described as the soul in the greatest pain of all.
But what if someone came to the great traitor's defense in a trial to win his entrance into heaven?
The playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis imagines just such a scenario in "The Last Days of Judas Iscariot," directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and running through April 3, 2005 at the Public Theater in New York City."What's been with me for a while is that confusion about God's justice versus God's mercy," says Guirgis, the author of acclaimed Off-Broadway plays such as "Our Lady of 121st Street" and "Jesus Hopped the A Train." "As a kid I just didn't understand: if I could forgive someone, why couldn't God? As I got older, I just came to believe, or hope, that God's mercy and forgiveness should extend to everyone."
Guirgis sets his play in a Purgatory courtroom presided over by a disgraced Civil War veteran. The case is argued by an obsequious prosecutor and an agnostic defense attorney who has won writs from both St. Peter and God himself to continue the appeal. At stake is the soul of the Bible's Benedict Arnold, who has been reduced to a catatonic state, unable or unwilling to communicate.
"Judas" marshals a parade of witnesses, from Satan (played by Eric Bogosian) to Mary Magdalene, Mother Teresa, and Pontius Pilate, many of whom speak in the contemporary parlance of the urban street. The strongest defense of Judas (played by Sam Rockwell) comes from fellow disciple Simon the Zealot, who proffers the theory that Judas handed Jesus over to the chief priests in order "to throw Jesus into the deep end of the pool." By forcing Jesus' hand, the theory goes, he "would have to act," thus sparking a revolution against the cruel Roman occupation of the Jewish homeland.
New Testament scholars, however, believe there is scant evidence to back the hypothesis up. "We get these tantalizing little bits of information in the Gospels, and we get some things in some and not in others," says George Parsenios, professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. "The difficulty is that people then try to fill in the gaps. It's always been done, even in antiquity."
The gaps about Judas are enormous. In Mark, the earliest of the four Gospels, all we learn is that Judas approached the chief priests to arrange for Jesus' apprehension. In return, he is offered money.
Both Matthew and Luke, whom experts believe based their narratives on Mark, expand the story. Luke says the devil entered into Judas just before his meeting with the chief priests. Matthew ups the ante by having Judas ask for money in return for delivering Jesus. He also directly names Judas at the Last Supper as the one who will betray Jesus and describes both his attempt to return the silver after Jesus is handed over to Pilate and his subsequent suicide.
John goes even further, hinting that Judas was stealing all along from the common purse, which he carried for the disciples, and implying that he set up the betrayal to replenish what he had stolen and thus avoid discovery.
"As the Gospels continue from the year 70 to the year 95 there is a rather steady escalation of the culpability of Judas and an attempt more or less to explain it at least by saying, well, he wanted the money," says John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus of religious studies at DePaul University and the author of WHO KILLED JESUS? "But that's the classic reason that is given whenever you're trying to describe someone who did something bad. We do not know the motivation of Judas."
As for the theory that Judas acted to force Jesus' hand in emancipating the Jews, "from the Bible we don't have a clue," says Crossan. "The only question is, can you make a good play out of it?"
In modern times, with the explosion of interest in historical Jesus studies, both scholars and popular writers have sought to fill in the gaps surrounding Judas. Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Jesus Christ Superstar" portrayed the disciple as disillusioned with Jesus, upset that his mission did not extend to wresting Judea from the grasp of the Romans. In Nikos Kazantzakis's 1955 novel THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, Judas essentially betrays Jesus on Jesus' own orders (which garnered the author excommunication from the Greek Orthodox Church).
In the new Judas play, Simon the Zealot points to the disturbance at the temple, when Jesus threw out the money changers, as a moment that led the disciples to believe a revolution was coming. Simon's name, "Zelotes," indicates that he may have been part of a group seeking to liberate the Promised Land. And some posit that Iscariot, Judas's last name, might be related to "sicarii," a band of terrorists that attacked Romans and Roman collaborators.
