Three Versions of Judas

Richard G. Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134940684
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Judas Iscariot, known for his betrayal of Jesus, is a key figure in the Gospel narratives. As an insider become outsider, Judas demarcates Christian boundaries of good and evil. 'Three Versions of Judas' examines the role of Judas in Christian myth-making. The book draws on Jorge Luis Borges' "Three Versions of Judas" to present three Judases in the Gospels: a Judas necessary to the divine plan; a Judas who is a determined outsider, denying himself for God's glory; and a Judas who is demonic. Exploring the findings of biblical criticism and artistic responses to Judas, 'Three Versions of Judas' offers an analysis of the evil necessarily inherent in Christian narratives about Judas.

Chapter 1
From the Gospel to Borges and Back Again

The Beginning is Not the End¹

For the Christian canon, the story of Judas is over before it begins. Judas is the “bad guy” in the gospels. He is the one who “handed” Jesus “over”² (Mk 3:19; Mt. 10:4), the one who became a traitor (Lk. 6:16), or the demonic unbeliever (Jn 6:6471). Nothing good—at least, for Judas—can come of such an introduction.³ From the beginning, the canonical Judas is the hero’s disloyal friend, the one opposed to the things and to the people of God. Inside the canon, he is the outsider. Not surprisingly, he comes to his “just desserts” (Acts 1:1626).

This story is so dominant that the name “Judas” still stands for perfidy and betrayal in cultures influenced by the Christian Bible (see Hand, 1942). Nonetheless, the canonical Judas has puzzled many and, therefore, theological, artistic, historical, literary, and political readings of Judas have multiplied.⁴ Despite the canonical finality, stories of Judas proliferate.

Jorge Luis Borges’ “Three Versions of Judas”—and Borges’ aesthetic worldview generally—provides this work’s perspective on that multiplic ity. Borges’ short story is a posthumous review of the work of a fictional, modernday gnostic, Nils Runeberg, who spends his life obsessing over the canonical story of Judas (1962: 151–57).⁵ Runeberg’s first work on Judas, Kristus och Judas (Christ and Judas), begins with Thomas De Quincey’s famous claim that everything supposedly known about Judas is false. Following certain German theologians, De Quincey contends that Judas betrayed Jesus in order to force Jesus to act to free Israel from Roman occupation (De Quincey, 1897: 8:177–82).⁶ Borges’ Runeberg offers a more metaphysical solution.

Assuming the Christian Bible’s perfection, Runeberg reasons that all acts therein are predetermined parts of the divine drama of redemption. The mystery, then, is Judas’ precise role in that redemption.⁷ Making another assumption with a more gnostic flavor—that the earthly mirrors the heavenly—Runeberg further contends that Judas’ role as betrayer is to provide a mirror of the incarnate Word’s sacrificial descent into flesh. To complement the divine sacrifice, Judas commits the most dishonor able transgression and, then, deliberately destroys himself.⁸

After orthodox critics impugn him, Runeberg turns from theology to ethics to explain Judas in a different way. Asserting that an interpreter should assume the best about one that Jesus chooses to participate in his preaching and healing ministry, Runeberg contends that a spiritual asceticism, rather than greed, motivates Judas. The resulting Judas still mirrors Jesus, but now the reflection is inverted. Knowing goodness and happiness to be divine prerogatives, Judas knows evil and sorrow to be his all too human lot. Accordingly, Runeberg’s second Judas humbly eschews virtue and commits the worst offenses to depict the greater glory of God as in an inverse mirror (cf. 1 Cor. 1:31).

Pursuing these ideas further, Runeberg publishes Dem hemlige Fralsaren (The Secret Savior) to which he attaches Jn 1:10—“the world knew him not”—as an epigraph. For Runeberg, the “him” is Judas, who replaces Jesus as the incarnate one. To justify this assertion, Runeberg argues that Isa. 53:2–3—“despised of men and the least of them”—describes Judas far more precisely than it does Jesus. In Runeberg’s logic, to become a man means to become able to sin and to suffer ultimate degradation—for example, the ignominy of betrayal—not merely to suffer for a mere after noon. Judas, not Jesus, truly plumbs the depths of human suffering.

The story’s denouement segues from Judas to Runeberg, as Runeberg becomes his Judas. At least, Runeberg’s fate mirrors that of his Judas. Ignored by the world, Runeberg becomes convinced that God is punishing him for revealing the secret name of God (Judas). In a final reversal, Runeberg in his last pathetic days hopes to share hell with his Redeemer. Not surprisingly, Runeberg dies.⁹

Reading (Interpreting) the Gospel Judas with Borges

Borges’ Runeberg struggles with the gospels in order to interpret the canonical Judas. His endeavors make “Three Versions of Judas” a micro cosm both of the act of interpretation generally and of interpretations of Judas specifically. In fact, one can understand many, if not most, of Borges’ stories in this interpretative mode.¹⁰ An overview of Borges’ aesthetics, with particular attention to his interpretative play with previous stories and with “reality,” may clarify this claim. At least, the overview of Borges’ aesthetics will set the stage for this work’s attempt to read the gospel Judas(es) as Borges’ precursor.

Borges’ first collection of prose, A Universal History of Iniquity, con sists of stories derived from his reading of “true detective” stories (1999a: 1–64). In a preface to a later edition of the collection, Borges dismisses these early stories as “the irresponsible sport of a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories, and so amused himself by changing and distorting (sometimes without aesthetic justification) the stories of other men” (1999a: 4). Despite Borges’ reductive tone, the description aptly summarizes Borges’ lasting tendency to create new stories out of and about earlier literature. The process creates stories alongside one another. As a result, no one story reigns uncontested. In A Universal History of Iniquity, the style transforms “true stories” into fiction or, more accurately, into Ficciones. From a Borgesian perspective, all interpretation—even that of the gospels and of their Judas(es)—func tions similarly.

In his literary autobiography, Borges claims he began to write his internationally famous short fictions only after he suffered a nearfatal injury. Uncertain that he could write as he had before as a journalist and in A Universal History of Iniquity, he opts for a new style and creates the famous “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” (1962: 45–55). Despite his assertions about his new aesthetic directions, however, Borges still creates stories out of story. Like Runeberg, Menard is a fictional creation and is obsessed with a classic. Unlike Runeberg, Menard does not wish to write a new, better story. He wishes to remain Menard and to rewrite— “to channel,” not to copy—Don Quixote verbatim. He aspires to be an absurdly faithful tradent.

In a posthumous review of the understandably fragmentary results of Menard’s lifework, Borges’ narrator selects Menard’s exact reproduction of a section of chapter nine of Don Quixote as an example of his work:

[truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.] (1962: 53)

Borges’ narrator, however, observes that Menard’s exact reproduction fails to mean as the original did:

History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what took place; it is what we think took place. The final clauses – example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future – are shamelessly pragmatic. (1962: 53)

In short, the same words mean differently because the words occupy a new cultural location. Even verbatim repetition creates stories. It does not simply reprise “the original.” It adds to it.

Matters turn more quixotic in Menard’s reproduction of part of chapter thirtyeight of Don Quixote. There, Cervantes’ Don Quixote prizes arms above letters. Borges’ narrator cannot imagine Menard, the artist, arriving at a similar position, so he attributes Menard’s thirtyeighth chapter to Menard’s ironic disposition, to his habit of saying the opposite of what he meant. Now, the same words mean the opposite of what they once meant because of their new speaker. Once again, even “exact” repetition transforms the precursor. Finality vanishes. Stories proliferate.

In the preface to Ficciones, which includes the story about Menard and which was the first international collection of his famous short fictions, Borges describes his creative method:

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary….I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books. (1962: 15–16)¹¹

Anthony Kerrigan, the editor of Ficciones, accordingly describes Borges’ “notes” as “a species of international literary metaphor” (1962: 9).¹² Borges deliberately places his stories alongside earlier—real or imagined—lit erature, and his stories take their meaning by commenting upon and, thereby, revising this earlier literature. In this process, Borges, the inter preter, creates and betrays his precursors. “Three Versions of Judas,” for example, does this to the canonical gospels. In Borges’ view, each author/ interpreter—even if he repeats his precursors’ words as exactly as Menard does—acts similarly.¹³

As a result, whether the canon/classic is read by the heretical Rune berg or by the absurdly orthodox Menard, the results are always multiple stories. Despite canonical fixity, Judas is always already in another story. Canon always becomes interpretation.¹⁴ Unfortunately, scholarly readings often deny this necessity as they proffer the one, true interpretation (of Judas).¹⁵ Reading the canon from the aesthetic perspective of Borges helps avoid such hubris. From the perspective of Borges, interpretation cannot uncover the one, true Judas. Interpretation necessarily multiplies Judases. The justification for such interpretative and artistic plurality lies in the death of Runeberg (see below) or, more broadly, in Borges’ aesthetic worldview.

Borges' Aesthetic Worldview, Fantastic Fiction

A look at Borges’ “Funes, the Memorious” introduces Borges’ aesthetic worldview more fully. In that story, Borges depicts a young man crippled by an accident and, more horribly, afflicted by an infallible perception and memory (1962: 107–15). For Funes, the result is an insomniac life of details, a life incapable of thought, because “[t]o think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details” (1962: 115).¹⁶ When Funes dies, the story’s denouement attributes his death to a pulmonary congestion, but Funes seems to die from a surfeit of reality.

Borges sees “reality” as something akin to Kant’s noumena or the mystic’s ineffable infinite. For Borges, this reality is ultimately incomprehensible and is apathetic toward humans, if not vaguely destructive (see Barrenechea, 1965). What Borges says in an essay, the point of which is the refutation of time, concisely expresses his complex view about reality as a whole: “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges” (1964: 234).

Nonetheless, many of Borges’ protagonists, like Runeberg, strive to grasp reality, the absolute truth (e.g., about Judas), or God. Most of them die without achieving their goal. Those who do reach the goal of their quest lapse into something other than normal human life; they fall, like Funes, into the silence of infinity. Thus, when the imprisoned priest in “The God’s Script” finally finds the magical sentence that God wrote on the day of creation that might ward off the eschatological devastation of his people, he does not speak it because he has lost himself:

Whoever has seen the universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot think in terms of one man, of that man’s trivial for tunes or misfortunes, though he be that very man. That man has been he and now matters no more to him. What is the life of that other to him, the nation of that other to him, if he, now, is no one. (1964: 173)¹⁷

While Borges sees this dissolution in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 FROM THE GOSPEL TO BORGES AND BACK AGAIN
• Chapter 2 THE CANONICAL JUDAS: ORACULAR BETRAYAL
• Chapter 3 THE COOPERATIVE JUDAS: TRUE BELIEVER, PHANTOM OF THE INFINITE
• Chapter 4 THE ASCETIC JUDAS: JUDAS THE SCAPEGOAT AND JUDAS THE JEW
• Chapter 5 JUDAS THE GOD
• Chapter 6 ADDING EVIL TO THE SON
• Bibliography
• Index of Borges' Writings
• Index of Authors
• Index of Scriptures
• Index of Films