The Judas story in (and outside) the Bible -- Jesus Christ Superstar (2 of 5; Episode 25) Artwork

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The Judas story in (and outside) the Bible -- Jesus Christ Superstar (2 of 5; Episode 25)

September 23, 2025 • Dr. Jon Bruschke, PhD • Season 1 • Episode 25

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It is 1432 and the small, medieval French village is abuzz. There’s a travelling theater troupe and they’re going to perform what is, far and away, the most exciting show the town will ever see. It happens every year, but only once a year, and everyone – from the smallest child to the oldest farmer – is going to see it. It’s like a modern musical; you’ve seen it before, but the performance itself is so spectacular you see it again.

The crowd is absolutely alight before the show even starts. There is energy and chatter; think of a heavy metal concert crossed with a soccer match. And it’s a heavy metal show with a huge amount of fake blood. There’s man who gets lashed over and over, his side is pierced with a spear, nails are driven through his hands, thorns are dragged over his scalp. His tormenters take turns pulling out his beard until his flesh comes off with it.

This tale, gory as it is, does come from original source material. But there is one key change. In the original version, the people killing this poor victim are Roman soldiers. In this play, they are Jews. And it’s not hard to tell they are Jewish – the features of the performers are grossly exaggerated so everyone, including those small children, can tell who they are. They live on the edge of the village and you’d never hire them to work for you, but they never go away, either.

The crowd is pumped by the action. The tormenters are pure evil; the victim is pure good. This is a passion play of Christ, and Judas the villain is portrayed so convincingly, and his identity is so linked to his race, that everyone knows what to do when the show is over. They move as a vigilante mob to the Jewish sections and dispense street punishments for these children of Judas, beating them, breaking their possessions, burning what they can, and of course a few will die actual deaths to atone for the staged death that everyone has just witnessed. It will happen this year. It happened last year. It will happen next year. This is just how the village celebrates the miracle of Easter. But looking back over history, it’s not hard to conclude that this was less a celebration of Jesus than a condemnation of Judas, a man who’s name is synonymous with betrayal, a man who bears the most hated name in all of western history.

Eight centuries later two Anglicans would take up the story again, with modern and elaborate staging, but with two important differences. Their story would include music, and their story would be told from the perspective of Judas.

They couldn’t be more opposite in their sympathies, but neither the passion plays of the middle ages nor the modern rock opera JCS are the Biblical story of Judas – and maybe, neither one could be.

What is the Biblical story of Judas? It is NOT the same in all of the gospels…and a large chunk of what is considered the Judas story was added after the Bible canon was written. What was the historical Judas, who was the Judas in the Bible, how does all that connect to JCS, and what does it tell us about life and theater? We’ll take our own reflective walk through Gethsemane together on this episode of THM.

[footnotes in episode 24]

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Jesus Christ Superstar, episode 2, Musical versus the Bible

Opening

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You have heard this plea in every podcast you’ve ever listened to, which can be tedious but actually I find heartwarming, because of the entirely grassroots nature of podcasting: This show can only survive with your support. With very rare exception, podcasts are not huge commercial operations with big budgets. They are people sitting in closets and covered patios, fending off cats who are stepping on keyboards, and trying to share some research and ideas with the world. It works if, and only if, those ideas catch on with an audience and – this is the important part – the audience enjoys it enough to take some minimal effort to keep the show running. If you would drop a 5-star rating, post an episode you enjoy on your social media or some facebook group you use, or tell a friend, you will be doing more than you know to keep this show going. I am forever grateful that you are listening now.

When I make mistakes, and there are a disturbing number of those, I post the corrections in the show notes. Just to show off my massive 10-word Latin vocabulary I call those errata – just like any good actual academic journal would do, but given the expense I don’t always re-record everything. I have mangled some pronouns in past episodes and those are now noted on the site, and I have mangled some pronunciations, which I don’t think there’s anything to do about. However, I have at least included the correct spellings in the transcripts. Those are the procedurals; on to the business at hand.

To catch up to where we are at: JCS is a re-telling of what is commonly called the “passion of Christ,” which starts with his triumphal entry to Jerusalem, proceeds to the Last Supper, his tortured evening in the garden of Gethsemane, his betrayal, arrest, trial, crucifixion, and finally his death and burial. The word “passion” is a little misleading to our modern ears, and it comes from a Latin word – one that is outside my 10-word vocabulary – that means suffering. The overall concept is that is shows that Jesus loved humanity so much that he was willing to suffer and die to redeem all us sinners.

And the hook of the JCS musical is that this story is offered from the perspective of Judas, who you’ll remember as the guy who turned Jesus over to either the high priests or the Romans. Note the use of the word “either” in there – why would I need that word? Isn’t the Bible pretty clear on who Jesus got turned over to? Much, much, much more on that later. But what we’ve got is a musical that is based on the Bible but tells the story in a new way and, very conspicuously, from a different perspective. So to understand what the show is doing, and what it’s doing that’s different or unique, which has to be a big part of why it was so successful, it is well worth reviewing what the Biblical story of Judas is. The agenda for today is a primer on the Biblical story of Judas, by which I mean the various biblical stories of Judas, and then a comparison of where the musical fits in these various versions of the story.

To understand the original story of Judas, you of course have to read the Bible, and to understand the Bible, you have to understand how that book came to be. We reviewed this in the last episode and the main points are that (a) there are no original texts written by the original authors that survive; so like there is no book of Mark written by Mark, although there are later copies that were made, but no real way to see how close the copies are to any original; (b) the big turning point was the work of Jerome in 367 CE; he published the first complete new testament as we know it, written in Latin, (c) Latin is not the original language of either the original documents or the copies, which were almost certainly a common version of Greek, and (d) as more documents and texts and fragments are coming to light the task of compiling a Bible true to an original form is basically choosing which versions of which existing documents you are going to use, most of which are fragments and not complete books, and (e) there are 5,000 such documents, no two of which are identical. This discussion is largely drawn from professor Stephen Harris of Sacramento State.

That, by the way, is the institution where Shaquille O’Neill currently serves as the general manager of the basketball team. Something that unlikely is, the mind of this CSU Fullerton professor, clear evidence of divine intervention. Come on down to Fullerton, Shaq. Don’t make us reach out to Hakeen Olajuwon or Dwight Howard. You are welcome here!

And then there is the question of how the 27 books of the new testament were accepted as cannon and who decided what they should be. Also according to Professor Harris, there was no single decision and no one vote. The books came together as part of a common practice, but even the people who were compiling the original lists did think that there were plenty of other documents worth studying. And a big part of that equation was that there were lots of groups vying for the mantle of Christianity. Four that will be of interest to us are the original apostles from Jerusalem, who of course had met Jesus and according to the gospels themselves went on the adventures with him. There was also the ministry of Paul, that was more focused on Rome than Jerusalem, and had the disadvantage of being based on a guy who had never met Jesus. A third were called the gnostics, and they had their own set of books and revelations and gospels, and a very different creation story of the universe, starting with Gensis 1:2. But, they definitely acknowledged Jesus, definitely thought he was a spiritual being, and definitely thought he knew, met, and was given over by Judas. And fourth, of course, are the Jews, the group that Jesus was purported to be the King of. All these groups would have their own, and contrasting, beliefs in who Jesus was and what his ministry meant. And, it turns out, they all had different versions of Judas and who he was.

There are so many places to start, and this can get confusing really fast. So I’ll structure this around three main chunks. First, we’ll talk about the Biblical accounts of Judas. In here, we’ll find that there are actually different versions of the Judas story in different gospels, and they’re not really compatible. The differences might trace to the Jerusalem/Rome split. Second, we’ll talk about how subsequent history has treated Judas. Third, we’ll try to figure out how the JCS narrative fits into the Biblical narrative, or more precisely, which Biblical story the musical is the closest to. Here we’ll explore at least one Jewish answer to the question, and it might align with the Jerusalem group of the Christian church. The Paul-based church, called the “Pauline” church, has its own version. And the gnostics…we’ll get to in a later episode. But what they contribute is a doozy.

So on to point number one, what is the Biblical story of Judas? Well, almost every scholar of the new testament starts by putting the books in the chronological order in which they were written, and there’s pretty much consensus on what that order is. Here I’ll draw on Hyam Maccoby who wrote the book titled “Judas Iscariot and the myth of Jewish Evil” in 1992. He is an interesting guy with more than a passing interest in antisemitism and the holocaust. As you might have guessed, he’s Jewish. From 1942-1945 he worked in the decoding center at Bletchly Park, so fighting the Nazis on the intelligence front, then was a librarian at Leo Baeck College in London, for reform and liberal rabbis. He then worked at the Center for Jewish Studies at Leeds University starting in 1998 and passed in 2004. It’s his work that I’ll be leaning on most heavily. Back to putting the New Testament in chronological order.

Starting with the oldest books. There is a general consensus that the books written first were Paul’s letters to the various churches, which come with the fancy name “epistles.” This produces the phrase “epistles of the apostles” which was always a hit in my Sunday school class, and should have been turned into a song for Danny Kay. You really can’t beat the phrase “Moses supposes the apostles wrote epistles.” Alas, lost to the dustbin of history.

Anyway, they are written first, and it’s worth keeping in mind that which books were written first is not the same as the being the oldest available manuscript. The books are dated by lots of things, largely the references they make to events with confirmed historical dates. So its possible, for instance, that we have an older manuscript of the book of apocryphal, gnostic book of Bob, even then though the book of Dylan was first. Those examples are for illustrative purposes only, there is no gospel of Bob or Dylan.

It probably sounds familiar to hear the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and you might know that the next book is called the Acts of the Apostles. Now Acts isn’t exactly a gospel but has many accounts of Jesus and includes the Judas story. But the order in which they were actually written goes this way: Mark in 70 CE, or about 40 years after the death of Jesus, Matthew in 80, so about 10 years after that, Luke in 85, Acts in 90, and John in 100 CE. When the books are put in chronological order, then, you have Paul’s letters, then Mark, THEN Matthew, Luke, and Acts, and finally the book of John.

So Paul’s letters come first, and they don’t say anything about Judas betraying anyone. Hyman Maccaby says, “we find that Paul does not seem to have heard of the role of Judas in bringing about the death of Jesus.” He further makes the point that the letters only make one reference to the betrayal at all, and even that is suspect because the word – perididoto – might mean “handed over” without a connotation of betrayal. And Paul does say that after Jesus was resurrected he was seen by the “twelve” apostles, which almost has to include Judas. Peter Stanford, a Catholic author who wrote a book titled Judas: The most hated name in history, makes the same point, has read Maccaby, and agrees with him. So the first books ever written that would become part of the new testament are Paul’s letters, they definitely don’t mention Judas as a betrayer (that’s if they even mention a betrayal at all), and there’s some evidence that on its face suggests that Judas did NOT betray Jesus.

We then get to the gospels. Mark comes first, and everyone agrees that his account is the most bare-boned. He’s just saying what happened, and doesn’t elaborate much, and really doesn’t talk about the motives of anyone hardly at all.

So everyone agrees – or more accurately, there is general scholarly consensus -- about the order that the books were written in. There is also general agreement that the first 3 books, Mark, Matthew and Luke, tell pretty much the same story and generally agree with each other. They are often called the “synoptic” gospels. Acts has got a different plot line, but many consider it to be written by the same author as the gospel of Luke, and in very rough terms it continues the same story line. In fact, these first three books are so similar that many think they must have come from a common source. That source is called, like a James Bond intelligence agent – “Q.” It is important to say that nobody has ever found Q, and the assumption is just that the first 3 are so similar that they must have been drawing

on a similar source. In fact, a huge chunk of the book of Matthew is mostly a reproduction of the gospel of Mark, often word for word. Anyway, the first 3 books are mostly similar with only minor differences.

But John is a very different thing – Hyram Maccaby writes: “The Gospel of John is remarkably different from the other three gospels. Not only does its sequence of events differ widely from that of the three “Synoptic” Gospels (so called because of their similarity), but the portrayal of Jesus himself is such that John’s Jesus is a very different person. Jesus’s ministry lasts two years, instead of one, he spends six months in Jerusalem instead of one week, and the location and timing of the events often varies. Jesus, in John, is given to long speeches absent in the Synoptics, but his parables are entirely missing. Most notably, Jesus in John claims divine status, while in the Synoptics he does not. John is the most antisemitic of the Gospels, portraying Jesus as in conflict not with the Pharisees or Sadducees, but simply with ‘the Jews.’” (p 61)

We’ll unpack most of that later, but for now just note that John is very different from Mark, Matthew, Luke and Acts, and a key difference is that Jesus is now unambiguously saying that he is divine. And, to get a little ahead of ourselves, John is more strongly associated with the teachings of Paul and the church that is forming in Rome, and the other books are more strongly associated with the original apostles in Jerusalem.

And there’s also some agreement that as the gospels get along in time, more details are added to the minimalist descriptions in Mark. Here is the box score, just the raw differences. I’ll rely heavily here on Michael Kochenash, who has an MA from Yale and PhD from the Claremont School of Theology, writing in a periodical called the Journal of Early Christian Studies. The other source here is, again, Hyam Maccaby.

In Mark, there is no speculation about Judas’ motivations. It says that Judas goes to the

high priests to betray Jesus and says that they promised to give him money. It doesn’t really say how much, it implies the money was offered and not bargained for, and it doesn’t say what he did with it. There is no mention of 30 coins. It ends with an empty tomb. There is only one Judas, and he’s listed as one of the 12 apostles. There is a last supper, but Judas isn’t singled out as the one who will betray Jesus. The context suggests the betrayal is inevitable and preordained, but it’s not explored much. Judas shows up at Gethsemane to betray Jesus with the famous kiss and then he simply disappears from the narrative.

In Matthew, Judas doesn’t betray Jesus until he is promised 30 pieces of silver, so he seems less proactive in this account but a little more greedy. I will note that there are historical sources that show that 30 pieces of silver wasn’t all that much money, but Maccaby says it’s about 5 months worth of food, so maybe its enough. There is still just one Judas mentioned. Unlike as in Mark, Jesus specifically identifies Judas as the betrayer. Fate and predestiny play a stronger role, and not only is Jesus betrayed with a kiss, this time he responds to Judas with something like “do what you must do.” Importantly, he greets Judas like friend rather than a traitor, giving the whole thing a strong sense that Judas is just fulfilling a prophecy or playing a predestined role he doesn’t have much choice in.

Matthew also says that after the crucifixion Judas has remorse, returns the silver by throwing it on the floor of the temple, and then hangs himself. The priests, and not Judas, use the money to buy a graveyard for foreigners. The entire “what happened to Judas” section is in Matthew but not in Mark.

In Luke, Judas does get some unspecified amount of money, but the main thing is that he’s possessed by Satan, and that’s what drives him to betray Jesus. Like in Matthew, he has remorse. Unlike Matthew, in Luke it is Judas who buys a field with the 30 silver coins, but his end is more dramatic than a suicidal hanging. Judas runs into the recently purchased field, and explodes. That last thing is weird enough I’ll quote it directly, and it’s Acts 1:18, this from the NIV version. “With the payment he received for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out.” The new King James version sounds a little more formal: “Now this man purchased a field with the [a]wages of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his [b]entrails gushed out.” Almost all the translations I’ve browsed through use the phrase “burst open” and they all have his stomach spilling or gushing out. There is no mention in Luke or Acts that the land purchased is a graveyard like there is in Matthew.

Luke now lists 2 Judases, Judas son of James and Judas Iscariot. Also, Judas is now definitely possessed by Satan. The exact phrase is “Then Satan entered Judas Iscariot.” That’s a much stronger motive than a bunch of coins. Like Mark and unlike Matthew, Judas is not called out a the last supper. At Gethsemane there’s now a crowd led by Judas, not a group of priests as in Mark and Matthew.

In John, there’s no hint of a financial motive. There are 2 Judases, one who is Iscariot and one who is “Judas, not Iscariot” but who is not immediately recognizable as the Son of James. Jesus is more clearly aware of his fate and an active participant in it than in the previous gospels, and there is much more clearly a spiritual war going on between Jesus and Satan. At the Last Supper there is no eucharist, that is, no “this is my body, this is my blood” as the first communion. No mention of Judas meeting with Priests before the betrayal; in this telling Judas is presented as the treasurer for the first and only time in any gospel, but there’s no mention being made of 30 silver anythings. The betrayal happens because he is clearly possessed by the devil, once again the phrase is “Satan entered into him,” although this time it’s implied maybe it’s because he was miserly and greedy and thus an easier target for demons. The parts where Jesus washes the feet of the disciples shows up only in John. There is no kiss of betrayal. In this telling the soldiers show up and Jesus just goes up to the arresting force and says “I am he.” Judas is with the force, but doesn’t kiss anyone. The arresting force includes Romans, which isn’t in any other gospel. Maccaby, by the way, believes that as a historical fact the high priests didn’t even have their own police force of any note, so it had to be the Romans who arrested Jesus. Unlike other gospels, he’s not tried before the Jewish council, but briefly questioned and sent straight to Pilate.

As we piece all this together, let’s reflect on the inconsistences – that is, things in some versions but not others but that could logically co-exist – the contractions, that is, different stories that are not possible to logically reconcile, one big unanswered question, and finally different frames, that is, different versions of who Judas is.

Inconsistencies. Why is Judas possessed by the devil in 2 versions but not the other two? That’s a pretty big detail to leave out. Why is he a treasurer in only one gospel? Why are there two Judases (actually, as we’ll get to later, there are actually three) but only one in the earliest versions? Why do some discuss what happened to Jesus after the resurrection, but others don’t? Why do some discuss what happened to Judas but others skip it? Why do some mention the exact amount of money Judas was paid but others leave it out altogether? Why is Judas named by Jesus at the last supper in some versions, not named till Gethsemane in others, and not named at all in Mark – he just kind of shows up and betrays Jesus?

It could be that some authors are just emphasizing different things than others are, but often the details left out are a pretty big deal. It’s definitely at least a head scratcher.

And it’s a sideshow, but a related question is who Judas really was, and there are at least four different answers to that question, including that he never existed at all AND that he was the biological son of Jesus who shared Mary and Joseph as parents. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter too much since everyone agrees that it was Judas Iscariot who handed Jesus over to the Romans, but when we start asking what sins JCS may have committed its worth taking a moment to notice that even who Judas was and whether he existed is a bit of a mystery, as is true of most historical figures from centuries ago.

The implication of all these different versions of the story is not, at least for my purposes here, to throw stones at the Bible as a divinely inspired document or to question its truthfulness. But for the purposes of JCS, I do think it matters that there are different versions of the story and they definitely choose to focus on some key parts rather than others. It is possible that some divine hand inspired both the individual words and exact text of each different story, AND also the way they were all put together so that the whole picture comes out when you read them together (setting aside for the moment the question of whether they are consistent), so if that’s your jam you’re not going to be enlightened by anything I have to say. But if you don’t buy that all that happened, there does seem to be room in the Christian tradition to take up a story and fill in some blanks.

On to the contradictions. These are things that just can’t be true at the same time, at least not without a lot of special pleading and some really, heavily bent logic. Who bought the field, the priests or Judas? The hanging story has him throwing the coins on the floor, so it just doesn’t seem possible that he could throw the coins down, then go buy a field, then hang himself. And if he did all that, how did he explode from the waist? Those stories just seem like they can’t both be true. At the core, it just doesn’t seem possible to Judas die both by hanging AND explosion, so only one version can really be accurate.

Was Jesus betrayed by a kiss from Judas, or did he turn himself in without Judas doing anything? The mathematical law of non-contraction says that you can’t both be something and not be it at the same time, and the the junior high school equivalent is that you can’t both kiss and not kiss someone.

This, at least, supercharges the interpretation problems; for those who believe in the inerrancy thesis of the Bible, which holds that it is true and internally consistent, these are problems. But for those who ARE Christian but don’t hold to strict inerrancy beliefs this just, once again, highlights that inherent in any set of beliefs is human beings translating the Bible, human beings copying the Bible, and human beings trying to interpret the Bible. Viewed this way, maybe writing a musical with another Judas tale isn’t that big a deal.

Third, the big question, is what’s the betrayal? This is pushed hard by Hyman Maccaby in his book, and he makes the pretty straightforward point that if you wanted to arrest Jesus in Jerusalem in 32 CE you didn’t really need a spy to tell you who he was. Just days earlier, for crying out loud, he had ridden into town in what was basically a parade. Even the keystone cops could find that guy. But, and this is what makes it a bit of a puzzle, every version of the gospels agrees that Jesus was betrayed and that Judas was the guy who did it. In fact, even the gnostic gospels, which I promise we’ll get to soon, said the same thing. What none of them explained is why the Romans or the pharisees or the Sadducees or ICE or whoever they were needed any help finding Jesus.

At this point we know there are different stories, they include inconsistencies and contradictions, and they don’t answer why Jesus needed to be betrayed. This discussion has not strayed from what the traditional Bible has to say about Judas. But the Bible has always come with commentary, it requires interpretation, and during the reign of Constantine, in the 300s, there is now an official Catholic church. Before then, there are lots of different groups advancing their own beliefs in who Jesus was and what his life and ministry meant, but in the 300s it is getting consolidated into one common sect that will be the Roman Catholic church, or the Holy Roman Empire. There’s more on that in the last episode and we’ll get to more of it in our forthcoming discussion of the gnostics, but the important thing is that there is now a central entity, with a clear group of leadership, who is issuing official, or at least very influential, interpretations of what the new testament is, and what the new testament means.

And thus there are a lot of new tales about Judas, although they didn’t make it into the canon. They did definitely shape Christian opinion of the Jews. Per Maccaby, there is a really gross story in circulation about Judas dying by bloating, where he exudes noxious gases and worms from his genitals. This is more than a bit of a stretch and identical to more reliable accounts of how Herod died, but it does show that there were writers, and presumably speakers, who were leaning hard into the “Judas is evil” theme and trying to link him to tyrants and evil historical figures.

A book called the “Gospel of the Savior’s Infancy,” which was written in Arabic, told a story about how Judas was possessed by a demon as a child and was seriously afflicted, basically running feral, a menace to everyone, and in particular was biting people a lot. But then he happened upon Jesus, mysteriously found he couldn’t bite him, did have some physical contact, and the demon immediately left him. Then, of course, he grows up to be an apostle and eventually betray Jesus. But “Judas was possessed by a demon as a boy” is definitely not part of any gospel although it was part of the common discussion about Judas.

According to Maccaby’s footnotes – and yes, this s a guy who documents what he has to say with footnotes, god bless him – the story is difficult to date, might have come about as early as 500 CE, but definitely was translated from Arabic to English in 1697. In other stories Judas has depraved sexual relations, committing incest with his mother or maybe his daughter, depending on the storyteller.

These are illustrations of what is happening to the Judas narrative, not a complete list, but as a general rule things are getting worse.

The low point is the passion plays, which are really prominent by the 1300s. I will let Maccaby narrate: “it was undoubtedly the passion plays that contributed most both to the development of the Judas-image and its potency as an instrument of antisemetic indoctrination. The passion plays began in the 13th century and became so popular in the 14th that they have been compared in popularity to the football matches of our own days. The villains of these plays were always the Jews, the performances were violent, ribald and often obscene. All work in a town or village would stop, and the spectacles were often followed by a pogrom in which the local Jews were indiscriminately killed and maimed in a religious fervour, though the political authorities usually prevented all-out massacres. The tortures of Christ were enacted with extreme realism and abundance of artificial blood, and the Jews were always depicted as relishing these tortures, spitting on the agonized Christ, and always thinking up fresh indignities. Earlier, the tortures were shown as performed by Roman soldiers, in accordance with the gospels, while the Jews only rejoiced and advised; later, the Jews were represented as performing the tortures themselves.”

He concludes: “Thus the Christian populace indulged in any orgy of dramatic sadism, performed by imaginary Jews, for whose imaginary cruelty the real Jews were punished with real cruelty.” Judas haggling over the money was an integral part of the play, entrenching a key anti-Jewish stereotype that would be exploited by antisemites across centuries, including and especially the Nazis. There was other traveling theater, including so-called mystery plays, that had similar antisemetic tropes, and very much advanced a character called the “wandering Jew.”

Maccaby notes that this served to indoctrinate children – they would see the passion plays, the stereotypical Jewish characteristics would be exaggerated on the stage, and when a child would then see a Jewish person they already had been given a stereotype and a reason to hate them. And I will add that, given the literacy rates of the 13th century and the availability of books, these church-sanctioned plays undoubtedly did way more to cement a version of Judas in the popular mind than anything written in Latin in the gospels.

There’s not a full timeline, and there are some other key events and dates to know about, although this list won’t be completed either. A tract published in 167 called “Peri Pasha” placed blame for the death of Christ squarely on the Jews – and pointedly not the Romans. Later, the Bishop of Constantinople, noted as a fanatical anti-semite, was writing at the turn of the 5th century and is generally considered the guy who most prominently advanced the concept of “deicide” – and explicitly linked the death of Christ to collective Jewish guilt. Those passion plays are prominent by the 13th century, and the stereotypes of course played a huge role in purported Christians committing the genocide during the holocaust. There was a statement from the Council of Trent in the 17th century that broadened it a little bit to say it wasn’t really just the Jews who collectively bore responsibility for the death of Jesus, but the sinful side of all humanity. But it was not until 1965 – 1965, fully two decades after the holocaust – that in a document called the Nostra aetate that the Pope fully repudiated the view that Jews were collectively guilty for the death of Jesus.

Ug. That was heavy. The history of the way Jews have been treated is pretty ugly.

We can now take a step back and see all the different stories, and try to figure out what camps do they fall into. Just about all scholars have identified that the Judas story has evolved, and it is a no-brainer to say that it got consistently worse. The earliest writings in the letters of Paul don’t blame Judas at all and might not even say there was a betrayal by anyone. In Mark, there’s a bare-bones account that Judas was the betrayer, but it was the later gospels that would add all the details about a potter’s field or silver coins or hanging or explosion. And frankly, that’s a pretty confused mass of stories. By the mid-100s there are propagandists pushing the idea that the Jews are to blame for the death of Christ, by the mid-300s there is a central church with key figures making explicit that Jews should be condemned as collectively responsible for betraying Jesus, and by the 1400s there is live theater grossly exaggerating everything in shows that ended with soccer-style riots, but with violence very pointedly directed at local Jewish populations. It was like a mini-Kristallnacht held every Easter. And Judas was by now the central stand-in for all Jews, the archetype for what a Jew was. By the 1930s the idea has expanded to blame the Jews for everything, and not until 1965 did the Catholic Church get around to telling everyone to knock it off.

I just can’t let this moment pass with pointing out how absurd all of this is. There is just no good reason to focus on Judas as being Jewish, since all the disciples were Jewish, as of course was Jesus. And, as we’ll talk about in a moment, there’s no reason at all to blame the Jews more than the Romans for the death of Jesus, since after all it was Roman soldiers that crucified him. Pilate getting a full pass for washing his hands never made sense to me, since he knew exactly what his stance was going to mean for Jesus. He could have stopped it, but he didn’t. And it wouldn’t really have cost him anything to rule Jesus innocent if that’s what he really thought. So – blaming or scapegoating any one group, especially for a single event where they were the minority and didn’t even really have their own police force, is just not cool. This isn’t a true history podcast and I’m not trying to bust myths, but converting the Judas story into a reason you get to hate Jews is just antisemitism by another name.

OK – back to the main task. There are different Judas stories, they change over time, and they generally get worse for Judas and the Jews. Why?

Well, if you are looking for a divine explanation, you’re done. Everything in the Bible is divinely inspired – down to the last word. We covered this territory in the previous episode, but if you are of this camp you think that the Bible is absolute truth, any discrepancies like whether Judas threw the coins at the priests and hung himself, or used the coins to buy a field and then exploded, are handled by putting it in the category of a mystery that just hasn’t been revealed to us yet. And sure, maybe, there will be uncovered an original copy of the book of Mark written by Mark that will explain this. As to why this overall narrative resulted in the holocaust, well, that’s what happens when mortals misunderstand or misapply divine guidance. That is the fault of a sinful humanity, not a divine God. While this gets us back to how an omniscient and all powerful God lets bad things happen to good people – see the book of Job –the way the Judas tale has been deployed against innocent groups is just another instance of that and not a special case that needs any Judas-specific explanation. Evil humans gonna do evil in the name of God. The job of the true believer is to see past the evil and do good.

If you are looking for a non-divine explanation, than both Maccoby and Stanford have one. They point out that at the time the books of the new testament were being written there was no single, central Christian church that had a lock on what the true canon was. Those books are documents meant to persuade a bunch of different groups that their version of Christianity was correct. Maccoby, in the main, has an explanation that goes like this: Jesus was a purported King of the Jews, but just like David and Solomon were before him. A mortal, on earth, leading the people chosen by God. He wasn’t divine or a Trinity; he was a political leader. This is largely how he was understood in Jerusalem, by both the surviving apostles and Jewish leaders at the time. Paul had a version of Christianity that was different, and he needed a way to explain why he, who had never met Jesus, knew more about the real Jesus than the apostles. So his writings emphasize two things: First, that Jesus was a deity, the son of God, maybe part of a 3-part Godhead including the father, son, and Holy Spirit. I say “maybe” because, famously, the word “Trinity” does not appear in the new testament.

So for Paul, point number one, to separate himself from those in Jerusalem, was that Jesus was divine, and he knew that because it had been revealed to him on the road to Damascus. Jesus told him so himself, which of course is only possible if Jesus was a divine spirit and resurrected. This can explain why the resurrection story is so minimalist in Mark, the first gospel, but becomes much more elaborate and detailed in subsequent gospels. It’s like later writers are emphasizing that Christ should be understood as a divine and not a political figure.

The second way Paul distinguished his Roman approach to Christianity was the issue of the Jews: Jesus was Jewish and so were all of his disciplines, so was this new religion a Jewish religion or something else? Paul made it very clear that it was not a Jewish religion. No small part of this was the Jewish-Roman war fought between 66 to 73. This was a total victory for the Romans and resulted in the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem. It was one of three Jewish uprisings that would continue till 136. This was almost exactly the time period when Paul’s letters and the gospels were being written, and it meant that if you were living in or close to Rome, which Paul was, it was politically wise to de-emphasize the guilt of the Romans and the heavily emphasize the guilt of the Jews.

Why does Pilate get a pass in the gospels? It doesn’t make a ton of sense legally or morally, but politically it makes sense if the authors were trying to favor Rome and distance themselves from the Jewish uprisings.

Then there is the presence of some deeply antisemetic bishops right at the formation of the central church canon, and doctrine, under Constantine, and the die is cast from there.

Maccaby’s take is more nuanced. He starts by noticing there’s not much betrayal in the early writings, and an increased emphasis both on the betrayal, and the kiss, and collective Jewish guilt as time goes on. He also notes that there’s not much practical reason that anyone needed to betray Jesus to the authorities, who should have had no problem finding him.

In his view, the best explanation is that it is an important myth – myth, not in the sense of being false, but in the sense of being a master narrative. A master narrative is that Jesus is a sacrifice, that sacrifices must be offered up, and that being betrayed by an intimate completes the mythical narrative of a sacrifice. Judas was specifically identified as Jewish out of pure antisemitism, like, it’s clear the name Judas and the Jewish race were clearly linked, for a couple of reasons that won’t really help us here, by why focus on him being Jewish? All the other apostles were Jewish too. Why not say it was because he was from Kerioth (one possible meaning of “Iscariot”) or that he carried daggers (another possible meaning). Those were at least 2 things that weren’t true of all the other apostles as well.

So for Maccaby, the explanation is that the story came about to make a satisfying myth, one that, in Maccaby’s view, was pretty common in Roman stories anyway, and that it focused on Judas as a Jewish betrayer out of sheer antisemitism. And this core, mythic belief accounts for the supercharged antisemitism throughout the ages, up to and including the holocaust. In his view, the very Christian origin story is the root of the maltreatment of Jews once Christianity and politics became fully linked in the Holy Roman empire.

Stanford won’t go that far. But he does think that the Judas story evolves, and he does think that studying history can help explain why, and he’s fully on board to conclude that the Judas story has played a key role in antisemitism across time. It’s hard to know anything about the passion plays of the middle ages and not see that the Judas story is a key element of any strain of antisemitism.

At the end of all of that – our brief foray into early Christian history, our look at how the Bible was formed and how it is translated and interpreted, our review of the Biblical Judas story with its inconsistencies, contradictions, and unanswered questions, and our traipsing into the non-Biblical expansions, extrapolations, and outright fabrications, what we are left with are a few different versions of who Judas was. I’m gonna number them.

1. Judas is an innocent victim of gossip and propaganda – Jesus was never betrayed by anyone, and certainly not Judas. This is probably closest to Maccaby’s view.

2. Judas did betray Jesus, but he did so to play his unpleasant role so that humanity could be saved. He and Jesus were in on it together, and there was no real duplicity. To presage the future a little bit, this is closest to the gnostic view.

3. Judas did betray Jesus, but he did so to play is role in something that had to happen , he didn’t really want to, and it took a toll on him. Judas had to play his role in destiny but he really didn’t want to be a central character in the death of his friend and teacher.

4. Judas did betray Jesus, but it was because he was possessed by Satan, so it wasn’t really his fault. The devil made him do it, and he is no more to blame than Linda Blair is for the death of Damien Karras. For those who haven’t seen the exorcist, she’s the little girl and he’s the priest who takes the demon out of her and into himself and then jumps out a window and dies.

5. Judas did betray Jesus, probably for jealousy or money or some bad reason, but he deeply regretted it and killed himself out of remorse.

6. Judas did betray Jesus, probably for some bad reason, might have been remorseful but it didn’t matter, he had to be punished, and so he was stricken down and was basically cursed.

7. Judas did betray Jesus, for really bad reasons, wasn’t remorseful, and was stricken down and basically cursed. This is basically the passion play version.

8. Judas did betray Jesus, and he was possessed by Satan when he did it, but Satan possessed him because he’s evil, so it’s still his fault.

So where, in all of those possibilities, does Jesus Christ Superstar land? Well, I’ll let Peter Stanford place the plot in the context of the historical treatment of Judas: “[The show’s] Judas is a composite of the19th and 20th-century interpretations that follow the structure of the gospel narrative but turn him once more into a misunderstood anti-hero. He is the rebel who feels let down when Jesus embarks on a divine rather than political mission, but he is also in love with Jesus – he reprises ‘I don’t know how to love him’, Mary Magdalen’s ballad from earlier in the show. His insistence on following his own conscience, however mistaken he may be, casts him as victim, not villain, and leads to his lonely death by hanging from a tree, but it is mitigated when he rises to join the final chorus.” (p 223) This puts the narrative close to our #3 – Judas does betray Jesus but is reluctant to do so and feels such great remorse that he hangs himself. And, there’s of course more to it than that and more on how Jesus is portrayed in the show in the next episode, but for now we’re just interested in what the show has to say about Judas.

A curious twist – and a strange turn on the “everything is connected” theme – is that for Rice and Lloyd-Webber the particular reason Judas can’t embrace a divine Jesus is that he thinks Jesus should be a political leader – which essentially is Maccoby’s exact thesis, except that in the musical Judas is wrong for this conclusion, and in Maccaby’s view, Judas is right for believing this. Now, the show was not responding to Maccoby – the musical came out in the early 1970s and Maccoby didn’t publish his book until 1992. He was also a central figure in Jewish studies while Rice and Lloyd-Webber were both Anglican, and there’s no reason to imagine their upbringing and education included a compare and contrast of Jewish versions of the Judas story. Plus, they both repeatedly said they weren’t trying to make a theological point. More on that later. But even if they were, they were not trying to emphasize Maccaby’s point, although that is exactly what they did.

But their artistic choice still falls along the theological continuum, and in a very weird place. It is very redemptive of Judas, who among other things gets to be the central character, maybe even moreso than Jesus. And he’s definitely not evil, and both his choice and end are tragic and sympathetic. This is not a Judas of the passion play, and maybe an in-your-face to the 5th century Bishop of Constantinople who portrayed Judas as just evil. Judas is just as Jewish as anyone else in the story, and that identity plays no role in the betrayal, although the Romans once again are curiously off the hook. Pilate washes his hands and sees an innocent man die, but he’s not wrought with guilt about it and definitely doesn’t hang himself over it. But, somehow, all that’s cool. So – it’s definitely a sympathetic portrayal of Judas, and it locates the point of difference on the political vs. divine issue, just as Maccaby believes it should.

And maybe even more than that, it still doesn’t answer the question. If you think Jesus should be a political leader, why turn him over to the Romans so they can kill him?

Some might consider this a plot hole – if Judas isn’t wrong about Jesus being divine, why kill himself? If you do think Jesus should be a political leader, why turn him over to be killed? The show famously, or infamously, asks questions that it doesn’t answer, and the closing chorus is a question and not a declaration: “Jesus Christ, Superstar, Jesus Christ, Superstar, Do you think you're what they say you are?” and later “Don’t get me wrong…only want to know.”

The Judas in the musical is a guy who believes Jesus should embrace being a political leader, and then without a ton of motivation turns him over to be killed, and then really just wants to know – like those in the early church with strong different opinions – whether Jesus is a deity or not. In a way, this is a perfect theatrical staging of the debates that were raging in the pre-Constantine church. Was Jesus a political leader, like the Jews and at least some apostles in Jerusalem thought he was, or was he a deity, as Paul was very sure he had to be. In superstar, Judas just wants to know.

You might love it, you might hate it, but there’s no doubt that the frame of Jesus Christ Superstar is the same frame as the most heated parts of the first and second century Christian debates before there was a central Christian Church. And the answer in the show is even more ambiguous than what the early church came up with.

Why did this ambiguous story line have such mass appeal? We will take up that question in the next episode. But our question, for now, is not “Who was Jesus,” but “who was Judas?” What does our answer say about theater and life?

Here’s what I think it says about life. The musical is ambiguous about who Jesus was, but it’s crystal clear about who Judas was. He was a human, who loved his friend and leader, disagreed vehemently about a key decision, and was torn apart by the differences between himself and Jesus. Setting aside the question of whether that’s enough motivation to turn someone you are very intimate with over for death, what strikes me here is the demonstration of how much human relationships exist in conflict. If you’ve ever had a group of 4 people and tried to decide where to go to dinner or which movie to watch, you know how quickly smart people can look at the same thing and come to very different conclusions.

Some of these disagreements are over really big things, like the meaning and purpose of life, and sometimes they are over smaller things, but human beings MUST take action – as even Hamlet figured out – because life demands that we do. Should we sell or buy a house? Which house shall we buy? Evening will come and you’ll need a place to sleep, so you have to do something. On decisions like this and all others – what job should I apply for? What church should we go to? Do we want to go to a church? Do we want kids? How many? Shall we have a pet? Why on earth would you say we should have a dog when cats are so much better? – humans look at the issues as they perceive them, and use our big, sexy brains that made us the dominant life force on this planet, and come to massively different conclusions.

In the communication biz it is common to say that conflict is inevitable. And there is very good research to show that the single best predictor of whether your marriage or other intimate relationship lasts is how well you and your partner handle conflict. It is also the best predictor of how satisfying you find a relationship to be. To be human is to socially connect to other humans through language – which is a thing that human really do more than any other animal – and to communicate is to have conflict.

And JCS is about nothing if its not about conflict. Judas with Jesus, everyone with the Romans, everyone with the priests, everyone with Jesus, Jesus with the apostles, Jesus with Judas, Jesus with Jesus, and Judas with Judas. The Biblical story is pretty much understood to be that Jesus’ death was inevitable, or at least it was after Jesus chose it, and Judas played a sad, tragic, or perhaps evil role, but one that was necessary. But the JCS story is more complicated; Jesus and Judas are constantly struggling over the different meanings of the ministry of Jesus, and ultimately Judas just can’t shake the belief that Jesus needs to stay a political leader and declaring himself a religious or divine figure will bring down the wrath of Rome and lead to ruin. The story ends in tragedy because Judas and Jesus – who are both massively uncertain about what the right answer is – can’t come to agreement. Like Credo, Judas shot first, and the one clear part of the ending is that Jesus gets crucified.

But the central conflict, IS conflict. So much of current politics is about casting the other side as the bad guys to win fights with them, while so much of human life is about solving conflicts with friends. Telling the story of Jesus through the eyes of Judas highlights that an integral part of human life is handling conflict with friends, and they key to an awful lot of happiness is handling it well. Judas and Jesus did not, and that’s why it’s a tragedy. And that’s a pretty big shift in the Jesus story, isn’t it? It’s been taught as a feel-good, triumphant redemption of humanity story for centuries. In JCS, it ends in tragedy. That is certainly how it looks through the eyes of Judas, and that is a logical outcome if you decide to tell the story through the eyes of Judas.

Shifting to our second question, the lesson for theater is that theater really matters. The worst strain of the Judas tale is the passion play and the very direct, powerful, and persistent role that they played in antisemitism, pogroms, and the literal deaths of Jews. When politics and culture collide, culture always wins. The antisemetic message of the passion plays was carried through theater for centuries. Theater is a retelling of stories, and the stories we tell and retell shape who we are and what we believe. The lesson that the story of Judas has for theater is that what we do in theater is powerful.

If Judas is the downside, there is an upside. Right now masked and unmarked agents of the federal government are rounding up people with dark skin and arresting and detaining them on dubious legal grounds, detaining them without notifying their families, without the right to a lawyer, and without due process. For days nobody knows what happened to them; sometimes that’s indefinite. If you are not comfortable with that, let me just say that if you replace the word “ICE” with “British solider” then almost all the founders would agree with you. There might be a time and place for law enforcement that severe, but it’s when you are taking down criminal gang lords. ICE is patrolling Home Depots and street vendors. They aren’t getting the bad guys, they are getting the hard workers who can’t navigate a Byzantine immigration system.

If you’re cool with that, I’m glad that you are listening to this podcast and do feel welcome to stick around. If you’re not OK with that, we agree with each other, and there is a sense of hopelessness that can come when it seems like a sitting President can do whatever they want, and if due to some crazy gerrymandered electoral college a minority viewpoint can hold a majority of seats in Congress, and the Supreme Court has been stacked with people who will sign off on anything, there’s very little anyone can do. I’m sure you’ve noticed that Democratic governors talk tough, but they aren’t stopping the ICE raids. They file lawsuits, for sure, but those end up in the Supreme Court and if the President just ignores any ruling against him, well, it’s not clear what’s left in the government to stop him.

But that leaves culture. Let’s take a moment to talk about what will NOT happen. Just decades ago the conservatives were bashing Title IX and women’s sports. And right now, let me assure you that NOBODY is going to try to take away the Tennessee women’s basketball team. Like, not the darkest red Republican in the red state of Tennessee. Or the LSU women’s basketball team. Or South Carolina. Those aren’t just perennial final four contenders, those are teams in the most conservative areas of the nation. When Title IX came up in 1972 John Tower of the University of Texas tried to amend it to leave out “revenue generating” sports, which would have gutted it. They did what they always do – first they argue against it, then they try to amend it to make it toothless, then if it passes they sue, and then if the lawsuits fail the slow-roll the implementation as much as possible. And they did all that when Title IX was first coming into existence.

But just try to take funding away from women’s sports in Texas now. Texas Tech – not even the University of Texas – has the first-ever million-dollar women’s softball player.

And neither is anybody going to try to take away the women’s national soccer team. Having lost the culture war on women, the conservatives are now bashing transgender people, but women’s sports is a genie that is not going back in the bottle.

If, in 1965, there had been a musical about Alexander Hamilton that had George Washington played by a black man there would have been riots and bans. But the show was a massive success within this past decade and it’s not going anywhere.

If sports and theater are both part of an enterprise we can call “entertainment,” which shape a thing we call “culture,” then the lesson of the Judas story for theater is that art and culture are where we shape who we are and what we think of ourselves and others, and it has a profound, deep, and lasting effect. We know, from the passion plays, that this power can be used for evil, but in the name of Steven Spielberg and Schindler’s List, let’s use this power for good.

And that is enough Biblical history to get us back to the show – how and when did Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber meet? Where did their ideas first take hold, and what did the religious figures who first saw the ideas come together think? Their choice was to take the story of the crucifixion and re-tell it from the perspective of the person who had, at the time and in the words of Peter Stanford, the most hated name in history…was this a bold attempt to redeem the guy? Was it an artistic choice? Was it an attempt to say something about theology or religion at all? Did the original staging have as a crucial set piece a gigantic set of false teeth? Like internet conspiracy theorists and Rice and Lloyd-Webber themselves, I’m just asking questions here. Unlike JCS, I’ll answer more of them in our next episode of THM.