Was Judas the most wicked man ever?

Two millennia after he became a byword for betrayal, the apostle is experiencing a makeover, says Andrew Lycett

Most people know of the Bob Dylan concert in Manchester in May 1966 when an angry fan jumped up and screamed “Judas” in protest at the erstwhile folk singer’s “treason” in abandoning his acoustic for an electric guitar. It was one of rock music’s defining moments. An infuriated Dylan launched into his next song with an instruction to his amped-up band to play louder than ever. Cue mega-decibel mayhem and the end of civilisation as we know it. But equally interesting was that, almost 50 years later, Dylan, in an interview with Rolling Stone, was still smarting at the insult of being called “the most hated name in human history”. Any association with the apostle who betrayed Jesus Christ has the power to hurt, even in our liberal, secular world, where hell holds few horrors. Judas was the Moriarty of the biblical story, or, as Pope Leo the Great described him in the fifth century, “the wickedest man that ever lived”. But, as Peter Stanford sensed during his Catholic childhood, Judas, with his weaknesses, was in some ways the most human apostle. In this well-paced study, Stanford becomes an upmarket tour guide as he explores texts and art from Jerusalem to Assisi (not forgetting a British connection in Norfolk) to explain how attitudes to Judas have changed over two millennia. Judas’s story is presented in the gospels as a three-part tragedy, starting with his involvement in the Last Supper. With his “Judas kiss”, he then identifies Jesus to a detachment of soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane. In the final act, he yields to despair and takes his own life in the Hakeldama or Field of Blood. Stanford’s initial efforts to understand the historical underpinnings of the story are not helped by his negative reception when he visits the remote Greek Orthodox monastery of St Onouphrius, the generally accepted site for the Hakeldama, in the Valley of Hinnom, outside Jerusalem’s Old City. As often happens, his perseverance pays off, and he chances on an icon with a representation of Judas overlaid by one of St Onouphrius. It is a colourful opening gambit, but no certainties. And these are hardly gained when Stanford examines written evidence for Judas. This shows the evangelists uncertain about even the number of Judases among the apostles. When John, the latest chronicler, refers to a Judas who “was not Judas Iscariot”, the process of ostracising the apostle was gathering pace, with John wanting to distinguish a good Judas from a bad one. Stanford is particularly good at explaining how interpretations evolved during Christianity’s early years as the new religion sought to differentiate itself from other sects. There is a gradual Judaicising of Judas (among the apostles, his name was the only one to identify his town of origin, Qeriot, in the Jewish heartland of Judea rather than the Galilee of the others). Matthew introduces the detail