An illumination of Judas stealing the fruit and killing his father from a manuscript of the Klosterneuburger Evangelienwerk (Schaffhausen, Stadtbibliothek, Gen. 8, fol. 224r, 14th cent.)—a German prose version of the Gospels and various apocryphal traditions.
Surely Judas is one of the most infamous characters in the Christian Bible. From at least the late medieval period, the word “Judas” was used as not only a proper name but also a common pejorative term for traitors. Even earlier, during the beginnings of Christianity, adherents to the new religion regarded Judas with some amount of fascination, and that interest has persisted to the present. One of the earliest Christian authors to comment on Judas, Papias of Hierapolis (ca.60–ca.130 CE), is reported to have said, “Judas walked about in this world as a weighty example of impiety.” [1]
Of course, the most sensationalized modern discovery related to Judas is the Coptic Gospel of Judas in the Codex Tchacos, first found in 1978 near El Minya Egypt and published in translation for the general public in 2006.[2] Yet Christians did not stop writing apocrypha about Judas after the first few centuries, and the Middle Ages have plenty to offer on the subject.[3]
My contribution for the second volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures is a translation of the earliest Latin Life of Judas, published along with Mari Mamyan’s translation of an Armenian version of the same work.[4] The general narrative of this apocryphon is rather simple. Before Judas’s birth, his father has a prophetic vision of being killed by his son, so when Judas is born, his parents bind his legs and abandon him outside the gates of Jerusalem. He is raised by a woman in Scariot and, as a young man, enters the service of King Herod. One day, Judas steals some fruit from an orchard to give to Herod, but he is confronted by the farmer, whom he kills. Unbeknownst to Judas, the farmer is his birth father. The townsfolk are angered by the murder. To appease them, Herod has Judas marry the farmer’s widow—who, of course, is Judas’s birth mother. Sometime later, the mother sees Judas naked and recognizes scars on his legs that occurred when he was bound as a baby. All is revealed. Judas flees, seeking penance, and meets Jesus. The story concludes with a brief summary of Judas’s life as an apostle (as in the canonical Gospels), his betrayal of Jesus, and his suicide.
Certain aspects of the Life of Judas will be familiar to readers. Judas’s abandonment as an infant is similar to the story of Moses from Exodus (in some versions, Judas is even set adrift in a basket). The larger arc of prophecy, predestination, and incest presents a parallel to the story of Oedipus. This combination of narrative elements from the Hebrew Bible, Christian traditions, and Classical legend offers a striking synthesis of literary features.
The Life of Judas seems relatively quaint and obscure to us now, but only as an accident of modern reception. In the Middle Ages, this apocryphon was popular and widespread. Free-standing versions have been identified in over three dozen Latin witnesses (especially in preaching collections), a medieval Greek version found in four manuscripts and a nineteenth-century pamphlet, and eleven Armenian witnesses—though there is no full census of witnesses in these languages or for the larger tradition.[5] The story found an even wider audience due to its incorporation into the entry about Matthias in Jacobus of Voragine’s Latin hagiographic compendium known as the Golden Legend, which survives in over a thousand copies.
An illumination from a manuscript of the Klosterneuburger Evangelienwerk depicting the abandonment and rescue of Judas as a baby. (Schaffhausen, Stadtbibliothek, Gen. 8, fol. 223v).
Today, however, the Life of Judas is relatively obscure. This is due, in part, to the traditional scope of apocrypha studies, which has tended to focus on the first few centuries of Christianity. As mentioned, more has been made of early traditions about Judas (like the Gospel of Judas) rather than later developments. With their more expansive scope, the MNTA volumes offer translations of works like the Life of Judas from beyond early Christianity. Attention to this wider scope means that the MNTA volumes include medieval apocrypha that were more central to mainstream religious beliefs and practices than some of the well-known works from early Christianity (such as so-called “gnostic” gospels) that are often sensationalized in the modern popular media.
My new translation of the Life of Judas is based on the earliest extant Latin text found in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 14489, fols. 109v–110r, copied between about 1160 and 1170.[6] This version, which is often simpler than the later versions, stands close to the beginning of the textual tradition of the Life of Judas, as it was probably composed in Latin sometime in the twelfth century. Mari Mamyan’s contribution is the first English translation of the Armenian version, based on witnesses from the Matenadaran in Yerevan, with reference to eleven other Matenadaran manuscripts—all dated to the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. It is likely that the Armenian version (as well as a few Greek texts) derive from the earliest Latin version, although they present curious cases worth further exploration.
Across the identified witnesses, the Life of Judas is highly variant, surviving in several versions with differing details—made all the more complicated by its multilingual transmission. For example, in the Armenian version, Judas is put into a chest and sent down the river, Judas goes to work for his father (unknown to them both) rather than Herod, he accidentally kills his father in self-defense, and his mother recognizes him not by scars on his legs but by his account of abandonment and adoption. In the version included in the Golden Legend, Judas’s father and mother are named Reuben and Cyborea, Judas is raised by a queen along with her younger biological son, and Judas enters the service of Pilate instead of Herod. Another late medieval adaptation in a fifteenth-century manuscript (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Lat. 12262) expands the text with a series of passages about Judas from the canonical Gospels, resulting in a longer narrative. Many more instantiations and adaptations of the Life of Judas could be enumerated across other European languages, such as Middle Welsh translations and poetic renderings.[7] What is apparent is that each version offers a new adaptation that demonstrates the continued relevance and use of the story in local contexts across medieval Europe and the Near East.
Such a complicated textual tradition is not altogether rare among apocryphal literature. In this sense, the Life of Judas is not idiosyncratic for its variant, fluid, and multilingual transmission history but representative of the types of issues encountered with many apocrypha, including some of those translated in the MNTA volumes. This case presents one intriguing example of a work that likely moved from Western Europe into Near Eastern contexts (rather than the reverse, as scholars often expect), but the afterlives of many apocrypha follow similarly complex cross-cultural paths.[8]
Other culture-crossing apocrypha appear throughout the MNTA volumes. In fact, various contributions present capacious transmission histories, as they survive in multiple redactions and translations across languages. One striking example is the Legend of the Thirty Pieces of Silver (from MNTA vol. 1), which survives in an Eastern version (in Syriac, Armenian, and Arabic) and a Western version (in Latin) without clear relationships or an intermediary between them. Another is the Life of Mary Magdalene, translated by Christine Luckritz Marquis in MNTA vol. 2, which incorporates elements from lives of Mary found in both Latin and Greek traditions.[9] These works, as well as the Life of Judas, are just a few instances that demonstrate a wide network of interrelated apocryphal texts and traditions deserving of further study.
Brandon W. Hawk is Associate Professor of English at Rhode Island College.
[1] This translation is from Geoffrey S. Smith, “The Death of Judas according to Papias,” in More New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 1 (ed. Tony Burke and Brent Landau; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016) [hereafter MNTA 1], 309–13, at 313.
[2] Rudolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst, eds., The Gospel of Judas (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2006).
[3] Other medieval works related to the Life of Judas in subject are the Ethiopic Book of the Rooster and the Legend of the Thirty Pieces of Silver; an English translation of the latter is found in Tony Burke and Slavomír Čéplö, “The Legend of the Thirty Pieces of Silver,” in MNTA 1, 293–308.
[4] “The Life of Judas,” in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 2 (ed. Tony Burke; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020), 208–22.
[5] The best census of manuscripts containing the various versions of the Latin text is in Paull Franklin Baum, “The Mediaeval Legend of Judas Iscariot,” PMLA 31 (1916): 481–632. See also Brandon W. Hawk, “The Literary Contexts and Early Transmission of the Latin Life of Judas,” Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 44 (2018): 60–76, at 62–63.
[6] Printed in Edward Kennard Rand, Mediaeval Lives of Judas Iscariot (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1913), 313–14; and Baum, “Mediaeval Legend,” 490–91.
[7] For the best general overview, see Baum, “Mediaeval Legend.” For some manuscripts containing the Middle Welsh versions, see Brandon W. Hawk, “Life of Judas,” e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha.
[8] For discussion of other examples and wider implications, see Brandon W. Hawk, “Biblical Apocrypha as Medieval World Literature,” The Medieval Globe 6.2 (2020): 49–83.
[9] Comparison may be made to the Latin Eremitic Life of Mary Magdalene (my translation of which will appear in MNTA vol. 3), which is both not totally unrelated and also quite different.