The Death of Judas

Judas Iscariot was no stranger met by the roadside. He was one of the Twelve, the one who held the common purse, an intimate who had eaten the bread received from Christ’s hand and had let his feet be washed on the last night. It is this man who hands his master over for a price. The account of the betrayal is known; what Scripture keeps with care is the aftermath, the last hours of a man who had done the irreparable and no longer knew where to carry its weight. That aftermath is divided between two hands, the Gospel of Matthew and the book of Acts written later, and the two accounts, set side by side, say together what neither says alone.

The price of a slave

The initiative comes from Judas. He himself goes to the chief priests and asks a wholly commercial question: “What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?” Matthew 26:15 The answer is a figure, thirty pieces of silver, and the figure is not thrown out at random. The Law of Israel had fixed it for a precise case: when an ox gores another man’s slave to death, its owner must indemnify the master. “If the ox gores a slave or a servant, the owner is to give thirty pieces of silver to the master, and the ox is to be stoned.” Exodus 21:32 Thirty pieces of silver is the legal price of a dead slave, the indemnity for a life this society held to be replaceable. Judas sets Christ on the scales, and what comes off the other side is the tariff of a slave killed by a beast. The traitor did not grow rich; he was marked with a price of contempt. Money nonetheless had a hold on him: John notes that he kept the purse of the Twelve and helped himself to what was put in it. “he was a thief: he kept the common purse, and he used to help himself to what was put into it” John 12:6 The wholly commercial question he puts to the chief priests comes from there.

The wage of the rejected shepherd

This figure was already written centuries earlier. Zechariah plays the part of a shepherd whom the people reject and who asks for his wage. “So they weighed out my wages: thirty pieces of silver.” Zechariah 11:12 God then commands him to do one precise thing with it. “Throw it to the potter, this fine price at which they valued me! So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of the Lord, to the potter.” Zechariah 11:13 Three traits stand in this oracle: the number, the house of the Lord, and the potter, for the Hebrew names a potter where the Latin read a statuary, and the Gospel will name the potter’s field. The three will return in the end of Judas and be fulfilled there, without any of those who set them in place seeking to make them match.

The remorse that does not return

When Judas sees Christ condemned, a reversal takes place in him. Matthew names it by a Greek word, metamelomai, which must be distinguished from another. Metanoeō means conversion, the turning of the whole being that abandons its path and returns to God; it is the word of the call to repent. Metamelomai means remorse, the weight of the consequence, the pain of one who wishes he had not acted so but who does not return for all that. Matthew chooses the second: Judas feels remorse, not conversion. Yet he confesses his fault aloud before the authorities: “I have sinned: I have betrayed innocent blood.” Matthew 27:4 The seller has become the witness to innocence. But the priests no longer need him, and their answer is of a bare coldness: what is that to us, look thou to it. Then Judas rids himself of the money like a live coal. “Then, throwing the pieces of silver into the sanctuary, he withdrew and went off and hanged himself.” Matthew 27:5 The place where he casts the silver is not the court open to all: the Greek word names the naos, the reserved sanctuary, which he himself had no right to enter. Remorse drove him toward the priests, then toward the sanctuary, then toward the rope; never toward Christ.

The shadow of Ahithophel

The verb Matthew uses for the hanging of Judas, apēnxato, is so rare that in the whole Greek Bible it is read only twice. The other use goes back to the story of Ahithophel. Ahithophel was the counselor of King David, the most heeded, the one whose advice passed almost for a word of God, a familiar of his table. This man betrayed David by joining the revolt of Absalom, the king’s own son. When his counsel was set aside and the plot lost, he settled his affairs and took his life. “Ahithophel… saddled his donkey and went home to his own city; after setting his house in order, he hanged himself and died.” 2 Samuel 17:23 By taking up this rarest of verbs, Matthew traces a line from one man to the other. David, the king anointed by God, betrayed by the friend who ate his bread, prefigures the Son of David, the Christ, that descendant of King David whom the prophets announced, likewise betrayed by the friend who ate his bread. David had sung it beforehand: “Even my friend, in whom I trusted and who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me.” Psalms 41:10 Christ takes this verse and applies it to the very table where Judas sits, eating the bread received from his hand. The Gospel goes further on this man: at the moment the morsel is given him, “Satan entered into him.” John 13:27 And in his great prayer, Christ says he has lost none of his own “except the one destined to be lost” John 17:12: the Greek reads the son of perdition, a title the rest of the New Testament gives again only to the Antichrist, the man of sin of the last times.

The two deaths

Matthew closes his account thus: Judas hanged himself. The book of Acts gives another image, gathered later. “Now, with the wages of his crime, this man had bought himself a field; then he fell headlong, his body burst open down the middle, and all his entrails spilled out.” Acts 1:18 On one side a hanging, on the other a fall and a body that bursts. The two scenes meet through the very matter of the facts. A hanging does not end at the instant of death: the body remains suspended, and in the heat of the Jerusalem spring, around the Passover, it swells quickly; whether the rope gives way or the branch breaks, after hours it falls and bursts upon the rock. Matthew reports the act, Acts the result, and the reading joins the two edges into a single death; the assembly holds, and the ancient memory of a monstrously swollen body has accompanied the end of this man since the first centuries.

The field of blood

The money does not vanish. The priests gather it and strike against an impediment: “It is not lawful to put it into the Temple treasury, since it is the price of blood.” Matthew 27:6 The price of blood defiles the offering; it cannot enter the sacred treasury, the corban. They use it to buy a potter’s field, to bury there the strangers who die without a grave in the city. A question of belonging remains: the priests conclude the purchase, but the money was Judas’s, his wage; this is why Acts says that Judas himself acquired the field. Matthew shows the hand that signs, Acts the purse that pays. The place received a name that both accounts keep: “this field was called in their language Hakeldama, that is, the Field of Blood.” Acts 1:19 According to the ancient tradition of Jerusalem, this field lay on a slope of clay descending toward the valley of Hinnom, in Hebrew ge-Hinnom, whose name, become Gehenna, will serve Christ himself to name the final lot of the lost. The three traits of Zechariah then fall into place: the number paid, the money cast into the house of the Lord, the potter’s field bought.

Jeremiah or Zechariah

In marking this fulfilment, Matthew attributes it to the prophet Jeremiah: “Thus was fulfilled the word of the prophet Jeremiah: They took the thirty pieces of silver…” Matthew 27:9 Yet the oracle of the thirty pieces and the potter is read in Zechariah, not in Jeremiah. Two explanations agree. In the order in which the Jews arranged the prophets, Jeremiah opened the scroll: to name Jeremiah could designate the whole collection, as one names a collection by its first title. And Jeremiah has his part in the image: it is in him that one goes down to the potter’s house to watch the clay turn, in him that a field is bought at a weighed price of silver, in him that the valley of Hinnom is defiled by innocent blood. Matthew then weaves the two prophets into a single scene, the number and the house of the Lord coming from Zechariah, the potter, the field, and the blood called for also by Jeremiah.

Judas and Peter

That same night, another of the Twelve falls heavily. Peter denies three times, swearing he does not know the man. Two disciples fall in the same night, and what separates them is not the height of the fall, but the direction in which each then runs. Peter weeps bitterly and returns toward the face he has denied. Judas feels the weight and goes away for ever. It is the exact distance between the two Greek words: metamelomai, the remorse that crushes, and metanoeō, the conversion that brings back. Of remorse Judas had more than enough; the way of return he did not take.

The account, not the verdict

Christ had said of the traitor a grave word: “It would be better for that man if he had never been born.” Matthew 26:24 And Acts, in designating the one who will take his place, says that Judas went “to the place that was his own.” Acts 1:25 These words weigh with all their weight, and Scripture lets them weigh. The final judgment, however, belongs to God alone, who judges with a perfect justice and whose mercy surpasses all measure. The Church holds to this: she proclaims saints, that is, declares men established in the glory of God, and she has never declared anyone in hell, not even Judas; she gives the account and leaves the verdict to God. What Scripture delivers is a man who had everything in his hands, three years beside Christ, his word, his bread, his gestures, and who yet chose to turn away. The tragedy of Judas is not to have gone too far, but to have been so near and to have lost himself all the same. One can sit at Christ’s table, carry the purse, hear every word, be called friend on the very night of the betrayal, and turn one’s back on him. What Judas lacked was not knowledge, but the turning.