BIOGRAPHY: Judas: A BiographyBy Susan Gubar WW Norton, New York, 453pp. $27.95
THIS BOOK IS a cultural biography of one of the most famous characters in history: Judas Iscariot, the man who betrayed Jesus Christ. Susan Gubar, who is a Professor of English at Indiana University, explores the work of historians, artists, novelists and scholars to give an overview of how Judas has been portrayed over the centuries by different people in various cultures.
Through this collage of representation the author presents us with, what she calls, a “first” biography of Judas from youth to old age, throughout “the extensive span of his multimedia existence”. The portrait is not drawn by delineating the figure or the face of her subject but by shading in the surrounding canvas until a figure emerges. However, the strange and disturbing face that appears is not Judas Iscariot’s but yours and mine.
Gubar’s life of Judas is a reflection of his image as this has been portrayed in Western culture since he was introduced to humanity as the betrayer of Jesus in the first century of our era. The biography, therefore, is ours as much as his, from the first century to the 21st. The difficulty is that as the canvas stretches over such a vast area, the work of filling in the details in all that space is a Herculean task. She does an excellent job. Her capacity to put on display the various representations: visual, literary, theatrical, cinematic, even musical, of Judas Iscariot and to comment incisively on these is breath-taking.
However, it is probably too vast a canvas for any one person to paint, and there is too lengthy and tedious a defence of her methodology and too repetitive and prolonged an explanation of her project in terms of what we normally think of as biography.
Abraham Heschel has been quoted as saying that the Bible is not so much a theology for humankind as it is an anthropology for God. It shows God just how complicated and ornery we are. This book is not so much a biography of Judas Iscariot as a litany of the worst we think about ourselves, and which we then gather up like spitting mambas and hurl at the hate object we have placed in the stocks of our collective imaginations.
Projection is a most profound and subtle psychological process which apparently colours much of what we do and say. It is difficult to detect because of its hidden nature. It is, we are told, the fundamental mechanism by which we keep our selves misinformed about ourselves. These hidden instinctual defence mechanisms are our rotating arcuballistas and levered catapults, always aimed and loaded, which we use constantly to batter to death our own worst fears about ourselves.
Whatever we find threatening or unacceptable about our deepest feelings we repress and then attribute to someone else. Most of us have our own personal Aunt Sally whom we pillory for all we are worth and blame for our shortcomings and misfortunes, but when we are presented, as we are here, with a universally approved object of our wrath, and watch in detail the catalogue of missiles we have hurled at him over the centuries, we begin to get a much clearer image of how ghastly we are ourselves, and how devastating are our catapulting mechanisms of insult and injury which make up some of our sadistic and destructive psychological reflexes.
Susan Gubar has amassed a huge, brutish and often repulsive catalogue of how Christian imagination has vented its spleen on the disciple who betrayed Jesus. Even more disturbingly she demonstrates how Judas became identified with “‘Jewry” and took on the frightful torture inflicted on a people accused of being God-betrayers and killers.
His name in Hebrew, Yehuda, is what the Israelite kingdom is also called, from which the very word “Judaism” derives. The ugly face of anti-Semitism appears in most depictions of Judas Iscariot throughout history. He has become the scapegoat for our deepest, most atavistic and racist tendencies. If Judas never existed, our psyches would have had to invent him to carry the burden of our self-hatred.
Gubar shows how slender the evidence is and how tiny the basis for such a mountain of prejudice. New Testament accounts, although minimal in themselves, were sufficient to give carte blanche to succeeding ages to vent their bile.
Reading what Martin Luther and even Karl Barth wrote about Judas is stomach-turning. But Gubar’s biography purports to show a certain maturity in our 20 centuries of vituperation, wherein we progress from regarding Judas as a loathsome pariah, to even regarding him as something of a misunderstood idealist, a rebel without a cause.
Revisionists tend to ascribe to him socio-political awareness instead of an overdose of avarice and greed. What is interesting also, from an Irish point of view, is the analysis she gives to Brendan Kennelly's The Book of Judaswhich appeared in 1991.
Using a somewhat implausible, yet nonetheless thought-provoking, juxtaposition between The Book of Judasand Althusser's 1969 presentation of ISAs (ideological state apparatuses) she reads Kennelly as a prophetic voice describing Christy Hannity, as it emerged in Ireland during the 20th Century, as an institutional embodiment of the spirit of Judas rather than the spirit of Jesus.
Everywhere in our churches, our schools, our banks, our politics, our legal, family, trade-union, communications and cultural systems, the Judas-effect of greed, avarice and betrayal is more in evidence, as recognisable hall-marks, than is the ethos of the Sermon on the Mount. It is a sobering thought; and this book makes for sobering reading.
Mark Patrick Hederman is abbot of Glenstal Abbey in Limerick. His book Walkabout,published by Columba Press, contains an alternative reading of The Book of Judasand some pertinent correspondence with Brendan Kennelly