Remember, the Temple was built by Herod

Oct. 27, 2009
ROBERT EISENMAN

The Temple, over which we now see such weekly struggles, was built by Herod who, for all intents and purposes, was not Jewish. He had not an ounce of Jewish blood in him - if one can speak in such "racial" terms in this period - his mother, according to Josephus, being an "Arab" from Petra, probably related to the royal family there; his grandfather, a Greco-Arab priest of Apollo from the Gaza/Ashkelon "Philistine"/Palestine Coast.

On occasion, he might have simulated Jewish ways in line with his appointment as king of the Jews (which did not necessarily require being Jewish - it was a Roman title and a tax-farming fiefdom). His father Antipater was the first Roman procurator of Judea (c. 60 BCE), who parlayed a Roman governorship into a family dynasty, in the process eliminating the Maccabees and garnering a Roman citizenship for himself and his family after him.

Herod might have had a few Jewish wives among the 10 or so he allowed himself, including two high priests' daughters - one the proverbial Maccabean princess Mariamme/Miriam, whom he actually had executed, as he did his children by her, due to his jealousy of their Maccabean blood and therefore their popularity among the masses. Almost all of his other wives were Greek or Arab.

He also built a host of Greek temples - in Sebaste (Samaria) in honor of the Emperor Augustus, at Caesarea and across the Mediterranean, as well as the Antonia fortress in the Temple in honor of Mark Anthony and Phasael (Feisal) after his brother was executed by one of his Maccabean wife's uncles.

Herod used his building projects to magnify his own image and keep a disaffected population busy. The Temple itself, which he began early in his reign in the 20s BCE, was not finished until shortly before its fall in 70 CE. Herod in fact was a typical Arab potentate, combining the worst qualities of a latter-day Saddam Hussein and the harem aspects of the House of Saud.

As Josephus tell us, Herod had spies everywhere, executed all the members of the previous Maccabean or nationalistic Sanhedrin except the two Pharisees "Pollio and Sameas" - probably Hillel and Shammai - and even went on the streets in disguise to search out malcontents. These he had taken to the fortresses Hyrcania and Machaerus (as John the Baptist was, by one of his Greco-Arab sons) to be tortured and ultimately put to death. He was hated by the Jewish people and, as noted, responsible for the extirpation of the whole Maccabean family root and stalk, including his own several grafts upon them; and there followed 110 years of struggle (37 BCE-73 CE) to be rid of him, his heirs and the Romans who imposed them on the Jews and supported them.

Nor is the celebrated Western Wall anything but a part of this extravaganza he built to mollify Jews and busy unemployed priests. It was consecrated by their Roman overlords, after they destroyed the Temple, as a place Jews could go once a year (on the Ninth of Av) in humiliation to bewail their former glories - therefore its traditional name, the Wailing Wall.

So the Jews go today to worship at the remains of a stone edifice built by their arch-enemy, responsible more than anyone else for their destruction, who was himself certainly not native born and hardly Jewish at all except where convenient. (This is much like Paul, in 1 Corinthians 9:19-27. To paraphrase: "I am a Jew to the Jews, a Greek to the Greeks, a law-keeper to the law-keepers, a law-breaker to the law-breakers. I believe in winning. I will do whatever I have to do to win. That's how I fight, not beating the air." And Herod did "win," as did Paul, his probable descendant).

But here's the rub. The Pharisees and the Herodian Sadducees whom they dominated were the only party willing to live with Herod and the Romans. In fact, Pollio and Sameas in 37 BCE recommended opening Jerusalem's gates to Herod and the Roman army given him by Mark Anthony. This behavior was repeated over and over, including 130 years earlier, at the time of Judah Maccabee, when they were willing to support Alcimus, a high priest appointed by a foreign power (the Greek Seleucids in Syria) - probably "the birth moment" of the Pharisee party. It happened again when Pompey stormed the Temple 100 years after that. According to Josephus, the Pharisees cooperated with the Romans in slaughtering the Temple's pro-Maccabean defenders.

Notwithstanding, over and over again the people rejected the counsel of the Pharisees, including at the time of the uprising against Rome in 66 CE, when they cooperated in inviting the Roman army into the city. The Pharisees were not the popular party they are assumed to be, despite the pretensions of historians probably based on Gospel portraiture.

Predictably the nationalists were the popular party (as they usually are even today).

Pollio and Sameas became the heads of Herod's Sanhedrin after he had executed all its Maccabean and pro-nationalist members when he took undisputed control. Earlier, in the mid-50s BCE, they alone opposed bringing him to Sanhedrin trial when he was governor of Galilee (under his father) and had executed guerrilla leaders there.

But the Pharisees cum Rabbinic Judaism were, as noted, the only party Rome was willing to live with after the uprisings of 66-70 and 132-6 CE. Their patriarchs became the de facto Roman tax collectors in Palestine, as the Herodians had been earlier.

We all respect our rabbis, their durability, learning, and great venerability. We acknowledge their leadership in surviving 2,000 years of the Diaspora, that is, up to the Holocaust - but they were not up to the Holocaust. They could not provide real leadership then. Only the pro-Zionist parties left or right and the worker's movements did.

In the same manner, the rabbis, experts at non-territorial leadership, cannot provide - almost by definition - leadership in a territorial situation. Now, in the face of the seemingly miraculous Jewish regaining of the Temple Mount in 1967, their bans for or against walking on the Temple Mount smack of quaintness and out-of-touch or even self-serving unreality. One is not walking upon anything there except perhaps Herod's Temple (recently Herod's tomb seems to have been found under his pile of dirt Herodion, not surprisingly apparently smashed to bits by revolutionaries).

Perhaps there is an authentic First or early Second Temple Holy of Holies hidden somewhere beneath the ruins, but it would take an archeological investigation to determine this. The Western Wall with all its familiar comfort is nothing but stones set down by the destroyer of the Jewish people and its royal family and a probable abomination, i.e. kissing stones set down by Herod.

The problem is we must start from scratch based on being a territorial people once again.

We need a new approach to religion if, for instance, we are to combat the J Streets, Goldstones or George Soroses of this world, not to mention appealing to the imagination of questioning disaffected youth; and the first step should have been to start rebuilding the Temple.

This does not mean one should revive the priesthood or the sacrificial cult. You need living symbols to move the people. If nothing else, Herod showed us this and the durability of the wall he built is its final proof.

Unfortunately, Rabbinic Judaism can no longer provide us these. Two millennia, yes, and up to the Holocaust. But no further. It cannot provide us with the blueprint for becoming territorial once again. Moshe Dayan was wrong in ordering the Israeli flag taken down, in effect, surrendering sovereignty and giving the Muslim Wakf control over the Temple Mount. No self-respecting people after two victorious wars would have behaved in this way. But he had no guideposts to rely upon, only egocentrism and his own pragmatism - plus he loved the grande geste.

But now, almost three generations after the Holocaust and with its memory beginning to fade, we have nothing positive to appeal to our young generations in Israel and abroad. It is poetry and the spirit that provide this. They are the positives, not humiliating renunciations. The reconstruction of a Temple - any Temple - should have begun 40 years ago and we would be well on our way toward achieving these things. This does not mean we should emulate the old design. Its content, shape and operation should be open to investigation, even architectural competitions, and creativity; but the symbol would be there.

It took the Herodian Temple almost 90 years to be completed. Ours and even its early stage - archeological investigation - hasn't even begun. People need a positive historical Judaism to go forward and this does not mean a Roman/Herodian-sponsored Phariseeism. People need positive symbols to rally around. The time is late. There is plenty of room on the Mount for everyone.

In no other manner can we gain the respect of the world and regain our own self-respect, and the world come to understand us - and we come to understand ourselves.

The writer is the author of James the Brother of Jesus and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians and co-editor of The Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls and The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered. He is Professor of Middle East Religions and Archaeology and the Director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian Origins at California State University Long Beach.

Huffington Post: Robert Eisenman: Redemonizing Judas: Gospel Fiction or Gospel Truth?

"Judas Reconsidered -- Betrayal: Should We Hate Judas Iscariot"?

These are the shout lines given the most recent article in the New Yorker magazine (8/3/09) on the Gospel of Judas by Joan Acocella (credentials unknown, though her specialty has mostly been dance), which burst upon the scene in 2006 via a National Geographic TV special and companion book. It had apparently been gathering dust since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices in the late 40's (alongside the spectacular Dead Sea Scrolls), but that it existed had been known since Irenaeus of Lyons pronounced a ban upon it in the late 2nd c. CE -- the probable reason for its disappearance thereafter only to re-emerge in our own time in the sands of the Upper Egypt where, presumably, it had been cached to save it from the effects of just such an interdiction.

While Ms. Acocella's New Yorker piece is tolerable as a quick summary of the twists and turns of the debate for the non-specialist and the books that ensued, it is basically one of the more temporizing, least edifying, and most equivocal of any preceding it, ultimately drifting off into a discussion of Caravaggio (1603), Ludovico Carraci (1590), and Giotto (1305) -- as if these could matter -- and ending with a critical discussion of a recent book by one Susan Gubar (Judas: A Biography, 2009), perhaps the reason for the whole exercise.

Ms. Acocella displays no sense of history or any critical acumen -- and this from a magazine as prestigious as the New Yorker -- being so simplistic as to make even the amateur blush. So naturally she can come to no conclusion about a "Gospel" which early on gave every promise of being interpreted as removing some of the stigma adhering to a character taken as representing the Jewish people. Rather she backtracks to the position, best epitomized a year and a half earlier in a New York Times feature article by Prof. April DeConick of Rice University. For her part, Acocella ends by concluding: "The answer is not to fix the Bible (i. e., don't try to get at the true history concerned, however pernicious its effect), but to fix ourselves."

To come to grips with her ahistorical approach, take the very first sentence: "At the Last Supper, Jesus knew that it would be the last, and that he would be dead by the next day." (She sounds as if she were actually there.) She continues in this vein in the next paragraph: "This is the beginning of Jesus' end, and of Judas's. Jesus is arrested within hours. Judas, stricken with remorse, returns to the priests and tries to give them back their money" (she had already pictured him in the previous paragraph "perhaps before the Last Supper -- "Last Supper," no quotes, no "purported," just absolute truth -- meeting with the priests of the Temple to make arrangements for the arrest and collect his reward, the famous thirty pieces of silver").

This is a perfect example of the dictum I have tried to illumine in all my books, "Poetry is truer than History;" that is, it doesn't matter what really happened only what people think or the literary works upon which they depend say happened. No wonder Plato, who lived closer to these times than many, wanted to bar the poets (whom he felt created the "myths" by which people lived and which he considered to be a world of almost total darkness) from his "Republic."

She goes on without the slightest hesitation as if there were not an iota of doubt about any of these things: "They haughtily refuse it. Judas throws the coins on the floor (hardly, this is a misstated quotation from Zechariah we shall also elucidate further below). He then goes out and hangs himself. He dies before Jesus does." What immediacy -- she states these things as "facts," yet doesn't even seem to know that Luke in Acts has a very different picture of Judas' end, that he "fell headlong into the Akeldama" or "Field of Blood," "his guts bursting open," though for what reason it is impossible to say. This is literature, after all. Nor does she wonder whether there ever was a "Judas Iscariot" or imagine that he might be the literary representation of some retrospective theological invective which, finding a Gospel of completely opposite literary orientation, might suggest.

One should perhaps be grateful, however, to Ms. Acocella because, even in such an exalted forum as the New Yorker, she demonstrates the lack of sophistication and general cloud of unknowing about these things even among those who should know better - scholars, writers, artists, film-makers, Jew or Gentile (in fact, Jews being less knowing, are often more inclined to accept these pretenses than some Gentiles even though they affect them more -- sometimes even mortally). For her part, in the end, giving credit to this Gospel scenario of Judas as the Devil incarnate and ignoring the real significance of a contrary Gospel in his name, Acocella returns to the picture of Judas being the harbinger of both classical and modern anti-Semitism.

That being said, the real climax in this interpretative revision and turn-around was first expressed publicly in print on December 1st, 2007, the beginning of Hanukkah season that year and, of course, a prelude to the Christmas, when the New York Times, obviously purposefully, featured a centrally-positioned article on its editorial page, entitled -- perhaps facetiously, perhaps not -- "Gospel Truth" (my counter to this, "Gospel Truth or Gospel Fiction," ignored by the Times, was published in The Huffington Post about three weeks later -- 12/18/07).

In it, Prof. DeConick alluded (quite flatteringly, one might say) to the monopoly I and some colleagues broke concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls and compared the situation regarding the editing of "The Gospel of Judas" to it. Directly referring to the difficulty of "overturning" entrenched translations and "interpretations...even after they are proved wrong," she also went on to cite the Society of Biblical Literature's "1991 resolution holding that, if the condition of the written manuscript requires that access be restricted, a facsimile reproduction should be the first order of business." This, persons familiar with the sequence of events relating to the freeing of the Scrolls will know, Prof. James Robinson (a party to the present debate over the Gospel of Judas) and myself did in the same year (A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, B.A.S., Washington D. C.,1991).

The problem was that Prof. DeConick did not stop there. What she did (abetted by the appearance of this piece, so prominently positioned at such a time and in such a venue) was was to check the heroicization of Judas that had ensued after the National Geographic Society TV program featuring it, seemingly exonerating him, and return to portraying him in the traditional way as the Demon (Daimon) incarnate (in Gnostic terms, "the Thirteenth Apostle").

My own encounter with this situation actually occurred two weeks earlier in San Diego, California at a National Meeting of The Society of Biblical Literature (the premier organization in this field). My visit coincided with the exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls during the same period there, when Ms. DeConick appeared on a panel on the Gospel with some eight other scholars, including James Robinson above (The Secrets of Judas), Elaine Pagels of Princeton (The Gnostic Gospels), Karen King of Harvard (Reading Judas and the Shaping of Christianity), and Marv Meyer of Chapman University (who was allowed a very short response to Prof. DeConick in New York Times Letters a week later, 12/8/07, but nothing of any real substance regarding the points at issue here).

And here is the key point for everyone: the upshot of this necessarily-brief discussion was how few "orthodox Gospels" (meaning, Matthew, Mark, Luke, etc.) had come to light from the Second Century (the single example cited being a possible fragment of the Gospel of John from papyrus trash heaps in Egypt) but, on the other hand, how many heterodox. Did this mean that more people were reading "sectarian Gospels" at that time, not "orthodox" ones? The answer of the more conservative scholars on the Panel (Chair Michael Williams of the University of Washington, DeConick, Robinson, et. al) was, "Not really but that, in any case, the Gospel of Judas was less historical than they" -- a conclusion echoed by Ms. Acocella above.

At that point, as there seemed to be no further questions, I gathered my courage, stood up, and asked, "What makes you think any are historical and not just retrospective and polemical literary endeavors of a kind familiar to the Hellenistic/Greco-Roman world at that time? Why consider one gospel superior to the another and not simply expressions of retrospective theological repartee of the Platonic kind expressed in a literary manner as in Greek tragedy? The Gospel of Judas was clearly a polemical, philosophical text but, probably, so too were most of these others. Why not consider all of them a kind of quasi-Neoplatonic, Mystery Religion-oriented literature that was still developing in the Second Century and beyond, as the Gospel of Judas clearly demonstrates?"

A sort of hushed silence fell on the three hundred or so persons present in the audience, because there was a lot of interest in this Gospel at that time, as I continued: "Why think any of them historical or even representative of anything that really happened in Palestine in the First Century? Why not consider all Greco-Hellenistic romantic fiction or novelizing with an ax-to-grind, incorporating the Pax Romana of the earlier Great Roman Emperor Augustus, as other literature from this period had and, of course, the anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish legal attachments which were the outcome of the suppression of the Jewish War from 66-73 CE?"

"The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were masters of such man/god fiction and the creation of such characters as Osiris, Dionysus, Asclepius, Hercules, Orpheus, and the like as the works of Hesiod, Euripides, Virgil, Ovid, Petronius, Seneca, Apuleius, et. al. demonstrate. Why not consider all of this literature simply part of this man-God/ personification literature, in this instance incorporating the new Jewish concept of "Salvation" -- "Yeshu'a"?"

At this point Chair Williams finally cut in, gave an answer on behalf of what he claimed to be (and I believe him) "the whole panel" -- that, "Tradition affirmed they were." This he seems to have considered sufficient for me -- one of the few non-Christians in the room who might have enough knowledge to say something meaningful or precise enough to matter.

But the reason I write about these things now is that Jews, in particular, must not just leave them to well-meaning Christians to sort out. In view of the suffering of the last century -- in fact, the last nineteen centuries -- they too should take an interest in and become knowledgeable about these issues. Especially now, in view of the informational turn-around and retreat in the New Yorker, a magazine traditionally aimed at people of sophistication and urbane intellectuality; it is all the more relevant to raise the issue of this "Judas" and not allow it to go by the boards again and, now that we have more tools, incumbent upon one to do so.

Regardless of predictable outcries from "the left" or "the right" or the impact on anyone's "Faith" -- as if this could matter in the face of all the unfortunate and cruel effects that have come from taking the picture of the "Judas" in Scripture seriously as "history" -- especially in the post-Holocaust Era, one must go beyond the inanities and superficialities to the core issue raised by the Gospel and not allow it to be just blandly dismissed -- that is, all are works of literature. None are really historical works in the true sense of the word, which the appearance of Gospels such as this and an earlier one, the Gospel of Thomas, drive home with a vengeance.

Having grasped this, one must move beyond all this artfulness ("the poetry" as it were) and confront the issue of whether there ever was a "Judas Iscariot" per se (to say nothing of all the insidious materials circulating under his name), except in the imagination of these Gospel artificers. Nor is this to say anything about the historicity of "Jesus" himself (another difficult question, though the "Judas" puzzle likely points the way towards a solution to this one as well) or another, largely literary or fictional character, very much -- in view of women's issues -- in vogue these days, "Jesus"'s alleged consort and the supposed mother of his only child, "Mary Magdalene," in whom Ms. Acocella along with Mss. Pagels and King above are very much interested.

But while this latter kind of storytelling did little specifically-identifiable harm, except to confuse literature with history or call into question one's truth sense; the case of "Judas Iscariot" is quite another thing both in kind and effect. It has had a more horrific and, in fact, totally unjustifiable historical effect and, even if it happened the way the Gospels and the Book of Acts describe it, which is doubtful, effects of this kind were and are wholly unjustified and reprehensible.

In fact, there are only a few references to "Judas Iscariot" in orthodox Scripture -- all of which probably tendentious. In John 12:5, he is made to complain about Mary's "anointing Jesus' feet with precious spikenard ointment" (another of these ubiquitous "Mary"s in the Gospels -- this time "Mary the sister of Lazarus" and not "Mary Magdalene" or "Mary the mother of Jesus" or even "Mary the mother of James and John" or "of John Mark") in terms of why was not this "sold for 300 dinars and given to the poor" -- a variation on the "30 pieces of silver" he supposedly took for "betraying" Jesus later in Matthew 27:3-7, and which Ms. Acocella makes so much of.

For their part, Matthew and Mark have the other "Disciples" or "some" do the "complaining," not specifically "Judas Iscariot" (the episode is ignored in Luke in favor of other mythologizations -- see my New Testament Code); but I say "made" because this is certainly not an historical episode, but rather one which one would encounter in the annals of Greek tragedy with various "gods" demanding the obeisance due them.

Moreover, anyone remotely familiar with the vocabulary of this field would immediately recognize the allusion to "the Poor" as but a thinly-veiled attack on "the Ebionites" -- that group of the followers of "Jesus" or his brother "James," according to Eusebius in the Fourth Century, who were probably the aboriginal "Christians" in Palestine who did not follow the doctrine of "the Supernatural Christ," considering "Jesus" as simply a "man"/"a prophet," engendered by natural generation and exceeding other men in the practice of righteousness only.

In fact, Luke's version of Judas Iscariot's death in Acts 1:16-19, as noted, and Matthew's version do not agree at all -- a normal state of affairs where Gospel reportage is concerned. In Matthew, Judas goes out and "hangs himself" (thus) after throwing the "30 pieces of silver" -- "the price of blood" as Matthew terms it -- into the Temple (whatever this means -- more imaginatively, Ms. Acocella has him "throwing the coins on the floor" before the "haughty" priests!) This is supposed to fulfill a passage from "the Prophet Jeremiah" but, in fact, the passage being quoted is a broadly-doctored version of "the Prophet Zechariah" (11:12-13) which does not really have the connotation Matthew is trying to give it anyhow.

To continue -- in Acts, Judas "falls headlong" into "a Field of Blood" ("Akeldama"), reason unexplained. This is the description used in an "Ebionite" document called the Pseudoclementine Recognitions to picture the "headlong fall" James takes down the Temple steps when the "enemy" Paul physically attacks him leaving him for dead; and, as also noted, "he burst open and his bowels gushed out" (thus). Most conflate these two accounts but, as just suggested, they are really only a parody of the death of James as reported in early Church literature (so is the stoning of Stephen in Acts) and the other three Gospels do not mention how "Judas" died at all.

The point, however, is that the entire character of "Judas Iscariot" is generated out of whole cloth and it is meant to be. Moreover, it is done in a totally malevolent way. This, the Gospel of Judas was obviously trying to ameliorate; but now, if we are to take the words of Prof. DeConick in the New York Times' "Gospel Truth" column seriously, and Ms. Acocolla in the New Yorker, about "not fixing history but fixing ourselves" -- after the first blush of excitement over its discovery, the scholarly pendulum has swung back the other way and we are, once again, in the business of "demonizing" Judas, not "heroicizing" him. Moreover, according to both, we should in effect downgrade the Gospel and consider the "orthodox" Gospels, in some manner, superior to it and more historical.

The creators of this character and the traditions related to him knew what it was they were seeking to do and in this they have succeeded in a manner far beyond anything they might have imagined and that would have astonished even their hate-besotted brains. Contrary to what Ms. Acocella imagines, Judas Iscariot was meant to be both hateful and hated -- a diabolical character despised by all mankind and a byword for treachery ("Betrayal" according to the New Yorker) and the opposite of the all-perfection of the perfect Gnosticizing Mystery conceptuality embodied in the person of the "Salvation" figure "Jesus" ("Yeshu'a," of course, meaning "Salvation").

But in creating this character, the authors of these traditions and these Gospels (often, it is difficult to decide which came first, "the Gospels" themselves or the traditions either inspired by or giving inspiration to them) had a dual purpose in mind and, in this, their creation has done its job admirably well. His very name "Judas" in that time and place (forget the fact that it is a byword for "Jew" even to this day) was meant both to parody and heap abuse on two favorite characters of the Jews of the age: "Judas Maccabee," the hero of "Hanukkah" festivities even today, and "Judas the Galilean," the founder (described by the First Century Jewish historian and turncoat, Josephus -- someone who really was a "Traitor") of what one might call either "the Zealot" or "the Galilean Movement" even "the Sicarii."

Moreover, the name "Jew" in all languages actually comes from this Biblical name "Judas" or "Judah" ("Yehudah"), a fact not missed by the people at that time and not misunderstood even today. So, therefore, the pejorative on "Judas" and the symbolic value of all that it signified in the First Century, not only as a by-word for "treachery," but a slur on the whole Jewish people, was not missed either by those who created this particular 'blood libel' or by all other future peoples even down to the present -- and how very successful over the last two thousand years.

But there is another dimension to this particular 'blood libel' which has also not failed to leave its mark, historically speaking, on the peoples of the world. This is "Judas"' cognomen "Iscariot." No one has ever found the linguistic prototype or origin of this curious denominative, but it is not unremarkable that in the Gospel of John he is also called "Judas the son" or "brother of Simon Iscariot" and, at one point, even "the Iscariot" (cf. John 6:71, 14:22, etc.).

Of course, the closest cognate to any of these rephrasings is the well-known term Josephus uses to designate (also pejoratively) the extreme "Zealots" or Revolutionaries of the time, "the Sicarii" -- the 'iota' and the 'sigma' of the Greek having simply been reversed, a common mistake in the transliteration of Semitic orthography into unrelated languages like English and well-known in Arabic -- the 'iota' likewise too generating out of the 'ios' of the singular in Greek,"Sicarios." There is no other tenable approximation that this term could realistically allude to. Plus the attachment to it of the definite article "the," whether mistakenly or by design, just strengthens that conclusion.

Furthermore, Judas' association in these episodes with the concept both of "the poor" as well as that of a suicide of some kind in Matthew -- suicide being one of the tenets of the group Josephus identifies as carrying out just such a mass procedure at the climax of the famous last stand on Masada -- to say nothing of the echo of the cognomen of the founder of this party, the equally famous "Judas the Galilean" (also a "Judas the Zealot" as "Judas Maccabee" certainly would have been), just strengthens this conclusion.

Equally germane is the fact that another "Apostle" of "Jesus" is supposed to have been called -- at least according to Luke's Apostle lists -- "Simon Zelotes"/"Simon the Zealot" which, of course, also translates out in the jargon of the Gospel of John as "Simon Iscariot" or "Simon the Iscariot." Moreover, he was more than likely a 'brother' of the curious Disciple in the same lists called "Judas of James," that is, "Judas the brother of James" (the way the designation is alluded to in the New Testament Letter of Jude/Judas). In a variant manuscript of an early Syriac document known as The Apostolic Constitutions, this individual is also designated "Judas the Zealot" -- thereby completing the circle of all these inter-related terminologies which seem to have been coursing through so many of the early documents in this period.

Of course, all these matters are as difficult for the non-specialist as they have been for the specialist, but once they are weighed together, there is hardly any escaping the fact that "Judas Iscariot "/"the Iscariot"/"the brother" or "son of Simon the Iscariot" in the Gospels and the Book of Acts is a pejorative for many of these other characters, meant to defame and polemically demonize a number of individuals seen as opposing not only the Imperium Romanum but also the new 'Pauline' or more Greco-Roman esotericizing and pacifist doctrine of the "Supernatural Christ." The presentation of this "Judas," polemicizing as it was, was probably never meant to take on the historical and theological dimensions it has, traveling through the last two thousand years and leading up to the present, but with a stubborn toughness it has endured.

Nevertheless, its success as a demonizing pejorative has been monumental, a whole people having suffered the consequences of, not only of seeing its own beloved heroes turned into demonaics, but of being hunted down mercilessly - to some extent the frightening result of its efficacy. If anything were a proof of the aphorism "Poetry is truer than history" with which we started, then this is. It is worth repeating that I believe its original artificers would have been astonished by its incredible success.

Even beyond this, not only is there no historical substance to the presentation or its after-effects, but if "Jesus" were alive today -- whoever he was, human or supernatural, historical or literary, real or unreal -- he would be shocked at such vindictiveness and diabolically-inspired hatred and he, perhaps more even than all others, would have expected his partisans to divest themselves of this historical shibboleth, particularly in view of the harm it has done over the millennia, especially to his own people.

This is what the initial appearance of the Gospel of Judas gave promise of achieving, but now the rehabilitation of the character known to the world as "Judas" -- so greatly in order in the light of the incredible atrocities committed over the last century, some as a consequence of this particular libel -- seems to be reversing itself, particularly among theologically-minded persons, as scholars like DeConick and journalists like Acocella rethink and represent these things; and the process engendered by this historical polemic and its reversal now seems to be ending, the downplaying of its historicity relative to alleged "orthodox Gospels" and the "demonization" of Judas (deserved or undeserved) being evidence of this. It is yet another deleterious case of literature, cartoon, or lampoon being taken as history.

Still, it is time people really started to come to terms with the almost completely literary and ahistorical character of a large number of figures of the kind of this "Judas" in whatever the "Gospel" and in whatever manner he is portrayed -- positively or negatively -- and, in the process, admit the historical malevolence of the original caricature and move forward onto the higher plain of the amelioration of rehabilitation. This is what Christians of good will have always said they were interested in doing and this is what Jews must learn to do for themselves, if they are ever to escape from its pernicious effects and the re-emergence of the traditional picture.

No one else is going to do it for them and ignorance is no excuse. They must first of all stop repeating the platitudes that these things reflect historical truth. One allows this to continue at one's own peril and this the Gospel of Judas illumines with a vengeance, which is why the rush to reinterpret and discredit it. It is ignorance that allows this and Jews must be the first to take off the blinders regarding this particular embodiment of it. As the coming of yet another High Holy Day atonement period approaches, no healthier, happier, or higher hope could be wished for or expressed.

Robert Eisenman is a professor of Middle East Religions and Archaeology at California State University Long Beach. He is the author of James the Brother of Jesus and The New Testament Code.