True Jew: How Jesus Really Ended up on a Roman Cross, How We Still Cover It Up

By Leon Zitzer

Done, done, and done. This book solves three important problems: What role did Jewish leaders play in the death of Jesus (it certainly wasnt to help Rome execute him)? What was Judas role (he certainly was no traitor)? And how does Barabbas fit into this? These problems were solved in the authors previous book, The Ghost in the Gospels, but here even more evidence is presented and in a more compact way for a faster ride. The first chapter is a knock-out punch, proving it is absolutely impossible that Judas betrayed Jesus. Not merely improbable. Impossible. Absolutely. What Judas actually did awaits a later chapter, after reviewing the historical context from Josephus and all the evidence in the New Testament that exonerates Jewish leaders of any blame in Jesus death. What has blinded us to the evidence is theology: An obsession with surrounding Jesus with Jewish enemies and portraying him as an alien and threat to his own culture. Pure theology. Thats all it ever was. No solid pattern of evidence in the Gospels ever supported it. Could the great majority of scholars have been wrong about this for the last two centuries? Yes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450275330

Leon Zitzer

The author is an independent scholar with a BA in math, an MA in philosophy, and several years paralegal experience in the NYS Attorney General’s office. Analytical skills are one prerequisite for uncovering history and another is to look at the evidence with wonder and without preconceptions.

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Copyright © 2011 by Leon Zitzer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Contents

Acknowledgments and Preface

1 Let’s Begin with Judas

2 The Evidence from Josephus

3 Jesus and Jewish Leaders: Going Where the Evidence Takes Us

4 Barabbas

5 Bringing It All Back Home

6 Falling in Love, Falling into History

7 ’Twill

Bibliography

Thank God for you, Frank McCourt, thank God, thank God

Without you, I would not have had the strength to write,

and reason to go on,

a blessing on your head.

Acknowledgments and Preface

Originally, I was not going to have an Acknowledgments section for this book, except to say that what I wrote for The Ghost in the Gospels applies here as well. Everyone that helped on the road to Ghost also helped to deliver this one. The two books are twins really, even if they were born four years apart. It seems you never quite lose all your prejudices and blindness. There is always more to discover. Hence, this book.

And something else would be missing if I did not single out a few who kept me going. I would not still be here if it were not for my sister Ruth and friend Susan Rowley. They have been generous in my endless state of financial trouble. Ruth and her husband Art Mann also got me a new computer, on which this book was typed up, when my previous one died on me. It turned out to be a blessing, not having a computer for a few months. The first draft of this book was written entirely by hand at a very fast pace. That ensured a better flow of ideas and story, the story provided by the evidence. And then I had a brand-new computer when I needed it.

Mark Felber and Sean Moran have kept up my spirits with lots of conversation. With Mark, over the phone, and with Sean by email, since he lives in the land of Tyndale, Shakespeare, and Darwin. I am grateful too to Susan for pitching in with her encouragement.

I need to make up for a few omissions from Ghost. I had forgotten that Karen Nordin at Jewish Family Services helped to secure one month’s rent for me back in the late 1990s. This is my very belated public thanks for that. I also neglected to mention some of the writers who inspired me when I began this study, twenty-eight years before Ghost finally appeared. Three in particular were very meaningful to me: Paul Winter for his dedication to getting rid of any anti-Jewish assumptions in the study of this history and for his poignant struggle to understand just why Jewish leaders would have involved themselves in Jesus’ fate; Jules Isaac for teaching me that you can write passionately about history and still be objective; and C.G. Montefiore for his fearless interest in Jesus’ Jewishness and his abundant use of rabbinic literature. My apologies to anyone else I might be forgetting.

More than anything else, this book is about academic freedom and how to achieve it in a field where it does not exist. The first step towards that is the recognition that the freedom to dissent and the freedom to criticize mainstream thinking are utterly lacking in historical Jesus studies. You have to know something is missing before you can do anything about it. The only three scholars I know of who ever presented a serious challenge to the mainstream have been effectively silenced. You will meet them in this book (they would be Richard Husband, Haim Cohn, and William Klassen, with an honorable mention for Shlomo Pines). My hope is that people outside New Testament scholarship will take an interest in what is going on here.

Do not let the so-called experts control our history and our future. Just as a judge instructs a jury that it has the right to evaluate expert testimony, so too I hope more and more people will evaluate the arguments of New Testament scholars and the arguments in this book. Above all, do not let evidence be suppressed. Think about it, think for yourselves, and stay alive and alert to the rich array of evidence in this history that has the potential to redirect our culture.

1

LET’S BEGIN WITH JUDAS

Without your knowledge, other people usurp stories or fragments from your life … modify them, adapt them according to their whim or how carefully they listened, or for a certain comic or slanderous effect … Far from you, scenes from your life are relived, and in them you’re a fiction, a secondary character in a book …

— Antonio Muñoz Molina (118)

Where do you begin a story? Which fact gets the honor of kicking things off? What’s the most important thing to know first? We were told long ago, Begin at the beginning. But where is the beginning? What grabs you? What if it all grabs you? Everything screaming, Me first, me first, I’m the most important thing, nobody will understand the rest of the story unless they hear about me first.

You might think historical events lend themselves to an easy answer. This is history, so let’s begin with what happened on Day One and then proceed to the next day and the next until we come to the end. But certain historical situations come wrapped up in a very peculiar problem. What if there have been centuries of scholarship—centuries of previous storytellers—who have spent all their energy to make sure that the beginning of this story is never told? Not the beginning, not the middle, not the end. Nobody wants this history told well or told truly, so it has been laced with deceptions at every turn. Now where do we begin? Do we leap over the deceptions to the original historical events, or do we begin with the cover-up? Could we do both at once?

It is impossible to get at history without discovering the many attempts (by scholars no less!) to prevent it. As Jorge Luis Borges put it, The past is indestructible. Sooner or later things turn up. One of the things that turns up is a plan to destroy the past. There is a past, history is accessible, even in the Bible, and the tactics to block access can be exposed. The plans to destroy the past might end up being the most interesting part of this story.

In the case of the historical, very Jewish Jesus, and particularly on the matter of his death and all the circumstances leading to his Roman execution, there has been such a strong, persistent cover-up—of the evidence, of the proper methods of rational investigation, of the continuing history of prejudice in this field—that not only is it difficult to figure out what really happened (those prejudices having come to operate in all of us, even if you are Jewish), but when you do get glimpses of the historical truth, it becomes almost impossible to tell it because those forces to suppress the real story make it difficult for anyone to hear it and to listen to a fresh take on the evidence. Those forces are internalized in each and every one of us. No sooner does a new insight form and we struggle to get the words out than we hear a voice inside of us crying, Shut up! Don’t tell this! It can’t be! So we turn our heads away. We must not look at this evidence. Nobody wants to hear it, don’t you dare tell it.

How did these forces come to be and how do they continue in an academic field that is supposed to be rational, yet is anything but? This is not about religious beliefs and why religion promotes certain ideas. This is about academics who call themselves historians, but in their view of any history found in the Gospels, they have given themselves the task of strangling the evidence that would give us this history. To destroy the past, as Borges said.

How do you tell the story of this irrationality? It is stranger than anything in Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll would have a hard time absorbing it. Alice would never have escaped if she had been trapped in the wonderland of New Testament scholarship. And if she had, nobody would have believed what she had witnessed.

The story of how Jesus really ended up on a Roman cross is a human one and every bit as fascinating as the traditional one. Jesus remains as sublime as ever. It will not damage Christian faith in the slightest (unless you are one of those who are bent on looking for threats to the faith everywhere). But the story of how honest, fair examination of the evidence is still suppressed will damage your faith. It will damage your faith in our human ability to use reason to solve problems and our ability to combat the emotions and prejudices which subvert the search for truth. This part of the story is quite painful. If it’s faith you’re wanting in an academia that serves us well, this is not the book for you. I will make no bones about it. Your belief that there is such a thing as academic freedom in biblical scholarship will plummet right through the floor.

A witch trial of ancient Jewish leaders and Judas has been enshrined as an academic institution. Their guilt in the death of Jesus has been established by the most ruthless illogic. Scholars have gotten away with it for a couple of centuries. It’s enough to make anyone despair. And it’s enough to make anyone demand of me that if I’m going to make such a strong charge, I had better fully justify it with plenty of evidence. In preparation for this, I offer here a very specific definition of a witch trial. It is a procedure which a) invents or exaggerates incriminating evidence, and b) erases or suppresses exonerating evidence. Watch closely and see if I do not meet both parts of this definition with more than enough examples.

But no matter how well I prove what I have to say, there will be a horrified reaction. In fact, the stronger my proof, the greater will be the horror. This is terrible news. Why do it? Why destroy our faith in this field of academic scholarship? My justification for telling it is two-fold. The first is that it is impossible to begin any fair telling of Jesus’ story without telling the truth about how so many scholars have prevented us from making any beginning. The second is a belief that the truth must come out and will benefit us in the long-run. I don’t see that there will be an immediate pay-off of happiness. Many of us will suffer over this for years to come, perhaps for generations, before the truth even begins to make us a little bit happy.

Everything depends on what you are looking for in a beginning. If it’s happiness you want, I’m not sure when it’s coming. It’s a pity about history. Its study does not seem to have practical consequences. Consequences are exactly what we expect when we make mistakes with anything else. Refrigerators, bombs, bridges, your favorite credit card—they are not going to work right if a flaw, a falsehood, creeps in. But with history, you can tell all the lies about it you have a mind to, and there are no immediate repercussions. So nobody is in an all fired rush to clear it up. Who lives in pain because of a historical lie? Almost no one. And those who do don’t matter to anyone. Scholars can lie their heads off about a particular history, no one is reprimanded, some get literary prizes, and seeking the truth is condemned as weirder than weird. What kind of world is that, I’d like to know. Yes, of course, it’s this world, but some of us want something better. If truth is beauty, maybe there is happiness in a beautiful reconstruction of the evidence. When lies pain us with their ugliness, maybe historical truth will begin to have an appeal.

So where to begin? Let’s put aside the fact that I’ve already begun. I’ve said what needed to be said. You have to know there has been a well-conceived cover-up before we can uncover. Now we can get down to the real digging. It feels like it took me a hundred years to lay out all the evidence with as great an objectivity as possible. It was more like a dozen. It feels longer because there were so many cultural prejudices about Jesus and ancient Judaism to get past. The effort was exhausting. When I finally saw all the evidence we were trained not to see, it was as if I had been down in the pits so long, a couple of lifetimes had passed me by.

Judas is the best starting-point. In his case, the facts line up with incredible clarity, in both parts of this story—that is, both the facts of the real data about Judas in the Gospels and the facts of what scholars have done to misrepresent this data. It is not merely improbable that Judas betrayed Jesus. It is absolutely impossible. This cannot even be a fictional story of betrayal. Scholars cannot muster a remotely rational argument that Judas was a traitor. So part of this is about the beauty of crystalline, rational thinking and what it can accomplish in historical study and part of this is about exposing the ugliness in our collective human capacity to banish reason in favor of emotionally prejudiced arguments.

The basic approach of scholars is to argue that the Gospels contain all these negative statements about Judas, presenting him as a very bad character. As Bart Ehrman says, Judas is mentioned some twenty times in these books, and in every instance the gospel writers have something hostile to say about him, usually simply pointing out that he was Jesus’ betrayer. They all assume this was a very evil deed (in Kasser et al, 93). We will see who is doing the assuming. Later on in his book The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, he reiterates this view: Judas is portrayed in a consistently negative light in all of the Christian authors that we have examined (138). Quite false. The overwhelming majority of details in Judas’ story are ambiguous to the nth degree. They do not clearly paint him in negative terms let alone make him out to be a traitor. Tradition, including scholarly tradition, reads the negativity into the texts and then claims to have found it there. The Gospel writers give us plenty of room to disagree with these categorical statements of scholars.

Einstein once said that the job of science is to look for what is, not for what we think should be the case. Or, as I have said elsewhere, all great art and great science have this in common: To learn to see, especially to see those parts of reality that the majority overlooks and neglects. New Testament scholars think Judas should be a traitor so they make the evidence conform to what should be. Genuine scholarship is to see what is. What is the real data?

To give scholars their due, there are three things the Gospels say about Judas which indeed are very bad: traitor, thief, devil (i.e., the devil entered him). These are the three worst things the Gospels have to say about Judas and they fail miserably to make a case against him. One of them even points towards his innocence. The misuse of this evidence by scholars is one of the most witch-trial-like things about this system of abuse.

This is where the three worst charges are made in the Gospels:

1. Luke 6:16—The only place in all of the Gospels where Judas is called traitor, prodotes in Greek. Luke is listing the names of the disciples and he ends with Judas Iscariot who became a traitor. None of the other Gospels use this term and none of the Gospels, not even Luke, uses the verb for betray, prodidomi. They all use a neutral verb, paradidomi, about which I will have much more to say later on, to describe Judas’ action.

2. John 12:16—John claims (and he is the only one to report this) that Judas carried the money box for the group and he used to take what was put into it. John implies this money was intended for the poor.

3. Luke 22:3 and John 6:70-71; 13:2,27—Luke tells us Satan entered Judas just before he went to the chief priests and captains. John 13:2 has the devil putting it into Judas’ heart and then entering him at 13:27. Earlier, John had Jesus calling one of them a devil and John says he meant Judas (6:70-71).

There are three major reasons why this worst possible evidence fails to prove a thing.

The first thing you might notice about all three allegations is that they come from the last two Gospel authors, Luke and John, and not from the earliest Gospels. Mark never calls Judas a traitor, thief, or devil. Neither does Matthew. Indeed, Mark is the chief source of all the ambiguity about Judas, as we will see further on. That the unequivocally bad evidence (or so it seems) comes so late is not a good sign for anyone who wants to prove Judas betrayed Jesus. It looks very much like the ugliest things said about him were a later development. If Mark had any or all of these pieces, that might have had a little more weight. The lateness of these remarks is just the first clue that casts doubt on their legitimacy.

The second reason this evidence fails: These charges are not made by anyone speaking within the Gospels. They are comments thrown in by the Gospel authors Luke and John. No character in any Gospel calls Judas traitor, thief, or devil. The closest we come is at John 6:70 where Jesus calls somebody a devil, but it is the author John who makes it a reference to Judas. I would not say that every statement put into the mouth of Jesus by John is suspect. But when we are dealing with an outrageous remark like one of you is a devil (as Jesus says at John 6:70), our antennae ought to go up. You have to wonder why none of the other Gospel writers remembered that Jesus said this. It would have come in quite handy. Even John does not quite have the nerve to tell us Jesus identified Judas as the one. It is John’s added comment at 6:71 that picks out Judas as the target. Whatever you think of this evidence, it remains true that no fellow disciple of Judas excoriates him in any way.

This last point is particularly impressive. You might think that after the allegedly dirty deed was done, someone might have confronted Judas and hurled a curse or two at him. Someone might have denounced him, and you would think that at least one Gospel author might have deemed this worthy of being memorialized. But no! It’s missing from all the Gospels! If anyone who knew Judas ever said a bad word about him, all four Gospels failed to record it. That is rather significant. If we did have a piece of evidence that Peter or another disciple cursed Judas out at some point, that would be an interesting clue. It would be a point against Judas, even if it was reported in a late Gospel. But we don’t have that. Comments from the last two Gospel writers are pretty weak evidence.

The third reason this evidence fails: They are all irrelevant to proving his guilt as a traitor (yes, even the mention of traitor at Luke 6:16), and one of them is not only irrelevant, it is an indication of his innocence.

The charge of thief has nothing to do with Judas betraying Jesus. What are we supposed to imagine? That Judas betrayed Jesus to divert attention from his stealing from the poor? It does not make a lot of sense. It sounds more like an attempt to make Judas look bad, and therefore, to make it more believable that he could be a traitor too. It’s also funny that only the last Gospel writer remembers this. None of the others know anything about it or they didn’t think it was worth remembering. All in all, not a solid piece of evidence and it does not help prove if there was any validity to the claim that he turned against Jesus.

What about being called a traitor at Luke 6:16? Surely that is relevant to the case against Judas? Surely not. It is merely an accusation or the record of one. An accusation can never be used to prove the truth of the accusation. That is a standard logical and moral principle in any field of study, but not in historical Jesus studies. And it ought to be. How do we know the accusation of traitor was not the result of slander? An allegation at most proves this charge came to be made and probably that many people believed it (though we don’t know whether they repeated this statement out of sincere belief or out of malice, i.e., knowingly repeating it as slander). It does not prove its own validity.

The whole question is whether Judas was really a traitor or an innocent man falsely accused of such. Luke 6:16 cannot be used to answer this. It is equally consistent with both hypotheses. If there is any truth to the idea that Judas betrayed, it will depend on evidence—a pattern of evidence—beyond or outside the accusation. There is no field that I know of that would ever use an accusation or allegation as evidence for proving the truth of itself. Only New Testament scholars do this. The single charge of traitor in Luke has to be put aside.

Finally, there is the devil-made-him-do-it. Like any accusation, demonization is worthless as evidence. It proves how hated and reviled Judas became. It does not prove that the vilification was deserved. It rather proves the opposite, doesn’t it?

In pinning the devil on Judas, they were doing so because they had nothing else to pin on him. It is a statement that his act was a mystery to them. They had no idea why he did it or any other comprehensible information about it, so they said it must have been the devil who put him up to it. It is thus a confession that they had no evidence against him. Rather than give us anything, any real facts, that would demonstrate exactly what was happening here, all Luke and John can do is bring the devil into it. That’s the best they could do?

This admission that they had no significant evidence is very much a point in favor of Judas. It is one small sign that helps to exonerate Judas. This should not surprise us. It’s probably not the first time in history and it certainly would not be the last time that an innocent person was demonized. Who else but the innocent get demonized? We should have been suspicious of this from the start instead of chalking it up as evidence against Judas.

Mark and Matthew make it clearer why Luke and John (or the oral storytellers they relied on) worked the devil into it. Mark especially tells such a bland story of Judas, never attaching any epithets to him or relating anything unambiguously evil about him (I will revisit this point in much more detail), that people in the 1st century who listened to his Gospel read out loud must have been asking questions. What is going on here? Why is Judas leaving the table and returning with the authorities? Why doesn’t anyone call him a bastard, a devil, a scoundrel? There are no answers in Mark and none in Matthew either (except for a very slight hint about greed). Why did Judas do it? One day, someone must have said, Well, it was the devil, yes, the devil got into him. And everyone said, Okay, we’ll buy that. Two thousand years later, too many scholars still buy it—not for its literal truth, but for its alleged value as proof of some sort of guilt—instead of seeing it for what it really is: An admission that nobody knew what got into Judas.

Once we understand this, it is the beginning of the end of the road for Judas’ career as a traitor. The three most negative statements about Judas do not hold up to scrutiny. The case has already fallen apart. But wait! There’s more! The ambiguity of Mark gives us even more reason to think that betrayal might not be the best interpretation of the clues in all the Gospels.

* * *

There is general agreement that Mark was the first Gospel written. His account of Judas happens to be the blandest, the most neutral. There are hints, very vague, into which one could read a betrayal. But the ambiguity means we can also read a story of an innocent Judas, perhaps a Judas helping Jesus, into the very same text. There is more than one explanation that will satisfy the clues we have. Proving which approach ultimately does a better job with the evidence as a whole takes a lot thought. Assuming betrayal is the right answer is leaping to a conclusion.

The most striking thing about Mark is that his Gospel is missing every single definite element of a story of betrayal. Scholars see the innuendo that Judas did something bad in some of the details (which is possible to do, since they are so frustratingly inexact). But this does not change the plain fact that nowhere does Mark clearly state any of the main features you would expect to find if Judas had really been a traitor. He does not use the Greek word for betray, prodidomi, but a neutral word instead, paradidomi (discussed below). He gives Judas no motive. Unlike Matthew 26:14, he does not present Judas going to the priests to ask for money. Mark 14:10-11 has the priests offering the money as their own idea. Mark also has no conflict between Judas and Jesus or other disciples. Totally absent. If there were problems between Judas and anyone in the group, you won’t find a hint about it in Mark.

Perhaps most oddly, the one thing you would really want to see in any story of betrayal—i.e., somebody flinging a hailstorm of curses at Judas after this evil deed was done—is totally absent as well. It’s missing from all the Gospels! There is no conflict with Judas even after he supposedly betrays Jesus! What? Nobody felt compelled to curse him out? Or if anyone did, none of the Gospels thought it was worth remembering and recording? It bears repeating: If anybody who knew Judas said a bad word about him, all four Gospels failed to say anything about it. I don’t see how anyone can claim that we clearly have a story of betrayal. Clearly we do not. How is it rational to go from Mark is missing all the main features of a story of betrayal to the conclusion therefore, Mark is telling the story of a traitor? I have posed this question over and over to others on blogs and websites and have yet to receive an answer. Whence all the sneering and jeering at Judas over the centuries? For what sound reason? On what is it based? It seems like he betrayed Jesus? It sort of feels like he did? That’s what we’ve been told?

This is all so bizarre. If this is a story of treason, it is the strangest such story ever penned. Yet I have to emphasize even now, that all this appears so odd only because we assume there was a betrayal. Make another assumption—adopt another theory—and the strangeness might disappear. The pattern of clues we have could make perfect sense under another theory.

To return to that neutral word which Mark and all the Gospels use, paradidomi has no connotation of betrayal according to William Klassen and many others. Some would translate it as deliver, hand over, or give over. In English, these expressions can connote betrayal. To better capture the neutrality of paradidomi, I would suggest using convey. There is some disagreement about this, but it is my impression that a majority of scholars agree that the word does not mean betray. Raymond Brown, a very conservative scholar, insisted on it. Referring back to his earlier discussion of this (Brown 1.211-13), he recaps, "I insisted that the verb paradidonai, applied to Judas, means ‘to give over,’ not ‘to betray’" (Brown 2.1399). It was William Klassen’s 1996 book Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus? that really put this point on the map (see especially 47-57). Both Klassen and Brown generously give credit to Wiard Popkes for doing much of this work.

Some scholars have been hold-outs. But even they will not dispute that most of the time in Greek literature, paradidomi certainly does not mean betray. As far as I know, it is translated as betray only for Judas and for no one else. I have never seen anyone give an example of paradidomi meaning betray for anyone but Judas. The Gospels use it elsewhere in relation to Jesus and another person (other than Judas), and no one ever suggests we try betray. Pilate conveyed Jesus to the soldiers who crucify him (Mark 15:15) and Jewish leaders conveyed him to Pilate (Mark 15:1). In both cases, an inflection of paradidomi is used. No one renders it so that Pilate and Jewish leaders are betraying Jesus. The sense of the word always seems to be that someone or something is conveyed/transmitted/transferred from one place or person to another. That’s all that it is. Klassen was so right when he wrote, "Any lexicon that suggests otherwise [i.e., that paradidomi means betray] is guilty of theologizing rather than assisting us to find the meaning of Greek words through usage" (Judas, 48; cf. 50, One can only say that theology here determines lexicography, not the other way around).

Despite this, there are still scholars who will assert that betray is another possible meaning. What they cannot deny is that if so, it is a secondary meaning and only rarely means this. I am going to make an assumption against the self-interest of my own case. I will assume that they are right. Since it is not the usual meaning of the word, as everyone agrees, what would justify translating paradidomi as betray in Judas’ case? Does Mark relate any motive for this betrayal? No, he does not (most scholars acknowledge this). Does he describe a terrible fight Judas had with Jesus or with anyone else? No, he does not. Does he show anyone berating Judas for anything anytime anywhere? No! Does anyone in Mark at least accuse him after this awful act has been committed? No! So what could possibly justify translating paradidomi as betray? Some a priori knowledge scholars have that this must have been a betrayal? Lovely, isn’t it? ’Twould be so nice to be a scholar with the miraculous a priori knowledge and no need of evidence to back it up. The less they see, the more they know. Just lovely.

There is no reason why the predominant meaning of paradidomi should not hold for Judas as for everywhere else it is used in Greek literature and even in the New Testament. He conveyed or transmitted Jesus—with no hint of betrayal. Scholars who disagree and cannot offer any evidence are merely asserting. Assertion is not proof. By the way, even on the outside chance that Klassen and Brown are wrong that paradidomi never means betray, it would at the very least be true that it is an ambiguous word. A neutral translation is very much a possibility and should be mentioned as another way to interpret the evidence.

But hardly anyone does. Paradidomi is obviously giving many scholars a lot of trouble because they prefer to ignore it altogether. Elaine Pagels never mentions it in her essay on Judas in Reading Judas, co-authored with Karen King (see 15-31 where Pagels considers Judas in the canonical Gospels). Ehrman mentions paradidomi once in The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot (16) in connection with Paul’s use of it at 1 Corinthians 11:23 (where Paul refers to the night that Jesus was conveyed or transmitted) and notes that translating it as betray may be inaccurate, but when he goes on to discuss the Gospels, he never tells his readers that they use the same word Paul does. How is it possible in the 21st century to examine the Gospels and omit this vital evidence?

As for 1 Corinthians 11:23, it is not at all certain that Paul was referring to Judas’ action, as many scholars assume. He mentions no name here. Paul might very well have been alluding to the night Jesus was transferred into the hands of pagan power. It fits with Mark’s use of paradidomi at 15:1 where Jewish leaders convey him to Pilate—convey, not betray. Paul may have been thinking of the same thing.

I have mentioned several times that all the evidence concerning Judas in Mark is highly ambiguous and I will now discuss more of this. Not one piece points unequivocally to his having done something bad. Bending these pieces in a negative direction is all anyone can do to invent a case against Judas. To pretend these clues are purely negative and can have only one meaning is a misrepresentation. It is a sophisticated way of sneering and jeering at Judas, and it violates every principle of sound scholarship.

In The Ghost in the Gospels, I went over all this evidence in excruciating detail. I won’t do that here. But I will go over some of it to illustrate just how thoroughly ambiguous Mark really is. Like Luke and John, Mark has a worst comment about Judas. Probably everyone’s favorite choice for this is Mark 14:21 where Jesus says to those assembled at the table, Woe to that man by whom the son of man is conveyed. It would have been better for that man if he had not been born. It is not as unqualifiedly negative as scholars would like you to believe.

Scholars see the entire statement as a curse. Because they want to see it that way. Some of them will retranslate that woe as Damn! (See Marcus Borg, Contemporary, 169; also the translation called the Scholar’s Version in The Complete Gospels, edited by Robert Miller.) The Greek word is ouai, a transliteration of the Hebrew hoy. But hoy is not a curse, and even if it could sometimes be interpreted that way, it often is precisely not a curse—something those who wish to bias the case against Judas do not tell you. Again and again, scholars fail to tell us the complete story of the evidence. The prophet Isaiah uses hoy a lot (e.g., 5:11, 18, 20-22). The Revised Standard Version renders it as woe, but the New RSV translates it as Ah, which better conveys the softer, compassionate quality of it. Klassen points out, We must guard against any equation of the woe with a curse. A woe in ancient Judaism was an expression of love … Any reading of this saying [as] other than a cry of compassion from the master on behalf of one of his disciples is a serious misreading of the text (Judas, 83). One possible rendition of hoy into modern English would be Have compassion for.

The biased scholars start the saying off on the wrong foot and then take another misstep with the wish not to be born. They would have you believe that this can only mean that Judas did something bad (or that somebody wished to present Judas in a bad light and used these words to give that impression). Not so. In Hebrew (and may I remind everyone that these events originally took place in Hebrew or Jewish culture), these words indicate that something bad was done or happened to this person, not that he did something wrong.

Both Job and Jeremiah curse the day they were born because of the sufferings inflicted on them. At Job 3:1-26, it is quite a