Judas – the first to leave the Last Supper party
I expect everyone knows that Judas Iscariot left the Last Supper party swearing that it wasn’t he who was planning to betray Jesus Christ – and went straight to Caiaphus and the Chief Priests with his plan of how and where he was going to do exactly that!
This is a rather nice interpretation of the scene as Judas slips out , in his yellow cloak , leaving the others to contemplate the accusation and seemingly ignoring the implication of Christ’s “You said it” response to Judas’ question “Is it me?” If they had only followed him and prevented him from carrying out his plan how would religious history have been changed?
As an aside given that John was the brother of James the greater – there must have been a huge age difference for everyone else to be so long bearded and the other with a face so completely hair free – maybe the 19th century painter Carl Block had also read the Bible stories about a woman being part of the initial group of disciples?
After his treacherous kiss in the as a result of which Jesus’ was arrested and taken away, Judas , full of remorse, was reputed in Matthew 27:3–10 to have returned the money bag with his 30 pieces of silver to the priests
and then committed suicide by hanging himself – allegedly on a cercis siliquastum , now also known as The Judas Tree .
The priests were unable to put this “blood money” back into the Temple’s funds so they used the returned silver coins to buy the potter’s field , which also fulfilled another prophecy from Zechariah.
The relatively simple death by hanging was perhaps not sufficiently macabre to satisfy everyone’s need for such a scurrilous rogue to come to an appropriately “bad” end, so other versions of Judas’s death have been suggested – such as in the Acts of the Apostles, Judas used the money to buy a field , called Akeldama, but fell down in it and “burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out”. This field is now called Field of Blood.
In the non-canonical Gospel of Judas it tells us that Judas had a vision of the disciples stoning and persecuting him – but this is not entirely inconsistent with him deciding to meet his maker under his own steam and hanging himself in remorse because he was terrified of meeting his erstwhile friends again?
Another account was presented by an early Christian leader called Papias who wrote that:- “Judas walked about in this world a sad example of impiety; for his body having swollen to such an extent that he could not pass where a chariot could pass easily, he was crushed by the chariot, so that his bowels gushed out.
Whichever way you look at it, to know you would go down in history as Judas Iscariot would be a heavy cross to bear. I think Tim Rice put it rather well in Jesus Christ Superstar – see snippet below!
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