Our Judas Iscariot, the Judas of history, is the archetypal figure of the traitor. The grasping, envious, lying man who betrays the entire project. But there are other Iscariots.
In the early 1940s, the Argentine short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges portrayed Judas as a victim of cosmic roulette. Borges, who conceived of the universe as an elaborate game of chance, suggested that Jesus and Judas were interchangeable. For there to be a saviour, one needed a traitor. Salvation needed the death of two men, not one.
By chance, Jesus and Judas were allocated the roles they did, in the event, play.
Borges shocks our assumptions in one sense. In another, he follows them: He takes the allocation of identity - the definition of a man - to be unproblematic. What is different is the cruel indifference with which one's identity is assumed.
However, at around the same time that Borges was writing his famous story, a Maltese writer, Erin Serracino-Inglott, was writing a play on Judas, which was only published after his death (Il-Kerjoti, PIN, 1994). What Borges takes to be the pat answer to a troubling question - how much do we owe Judas? - is for Serracino-Inglott the starting point.
The play begins with a hooded figure, identity unknown to us, speaking to an old man. The speeches suggest to us, in successive turn, that we might be looking at the Polifemus, the one-eyed monster that Ulysses had confronted, or Simon Peter, or perhaps Paul. At the end of Act I, we know it is Judas.
But we also know that this is a Judas who defies easy recognition. Does Judas resemble Peter or Paul because he is doomed to be a caricature, a parody? Or did he have the calling to be like them, only he refused?
During the play, the apostles treat him as a lying thief, much of the time.
But there are continuous shafts of light, usually thanks to Mary Magdalene, that prompt us to rethink our provisional conclusions. Jesus, never on stage, dominates Judas by what I can only call his absent presence.
Judas keeps repeating that he only wants to know what Jesus's identity really is, the secret of life and death. Perhaps it is no coincidence that "I only want to know" is also the refrain of another, much more famous portrayal of Judas, written up about a quarter of a century after Il-Kerjoti was written.
The lyrics written by Tim Rice for Jesus Christ Superstar have a much more overtly political Judas, zealous for the liberation of Palestine from the Roman yoke. In the rock opera, Judas is a street-wise Everyman, far more than the hippie-like apostles. In the film, he was portrayed by an Afro-American - a casting decision that created controversy at the time but which was justified because Judas was being portrayed as a universal figure, more clued up than the other characters around him, other than Mary Magdalene.
What eats this Judas is whether Jesus knew what he was doing or whether he just accidentally stirred up people as he did. A thoroughly 1960s Judas, he asks whether, with better PR, a better image consultant, Jesus could have done better.
On film, it was easier for a black Judas to show the shallowness of the question: Identity for Afro-Americans - after the civil rights movement, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr - was no game of mirrors. Authenticity was a question with no easy answers.
For Borges, it was, which is why his Judas appears so pat: He is defined as both saviour and traitor, the two answers that Serracino-Inglott's Judas would love to adopt. He spends much of the play begging to be exiled, to be asked to leave and be damned, just as he spends much time lording it over the others. He tells Mary Magdalene that he would love to become a wanderer again, travelling the world, being slapped wherever he went and slapping in turn.
But he knows that that would be a false solution... unless exile were pronounced by Christ himself. And since Christ refuses, he remains restless. He wants to be treated like a god or a thing. He cannot bear being human, having to become what he is in the fullness of time.
In the end, he chooses to be a thing. He betrays and, then, in grief, begs the apostles to treat him like an object of scorn. He wants to become our Judas.
He hangs himself offstage. Onstage, the apostles pause in horror at the sight and retreat, thinking they are looking at a damned man.
It is only Mary Magdalene, on her knees, hands bound in prayer - almost in anticipation of her discovery of the empty tomb two days later - who smiles and is not sure.
She does not see an object of scorn but a man who died of a strange strain of Jesus fever: Could he only ever be a parody of a true apostle, or had he, the compulsive thief of truth, been gifted with a true apostolic vocation that he refused?
It is a far cry from our Judas. A far, strangulated cry.
ranierfsadni@europe.com