JudasI have been thinking a lot about treachery and betrayal in the recent past. André Philippe, mentioned in a previous post, lost his whole family and an important part of his youth because of a hideous act of betrayal that resulted in many deaths. In his case, the traitor was a double agent who had infilitrated a resistance network. What leads people – frequently respected or popular members of their communities (as this particular lady was) – to behave in such a way, especially when they are indebted (sometimes very heavily) to those they betray? I naturally turned to the example of the most notorious traitor in the New Testament – Judas Iscariot – and immediately discovered that there was much more to his story than I had until now imagined. For a start, the biblical accounts (Mark, Matthew, John) are ambiguous and contradictory about the act of betrayal itself, and this has led to a huge raft of philosophical and theological debates, ranging from, for example, Bertrand Russell’s The Problem of Natural Evil through to Jorge Luis Borge’s short story, Three Versions of Judas. Was Judas’s act of betrayal an act of free will or predetermined? If predetermined, how could Judas be a traitor? And did it anyway make any difference to Jesus’s fate, given that, according to his own scheme of things, he had to die in any case in order that man might be redeemed? Did Judas even exist at all, given his absence from, for example, the Epistles of St Paul? Beyond that fundamental question, there are academic and theological question marks hanging over Judas’s death (did he hang himself or did he fall?) and the possible significance of that. It was thus that I came across an exquisite book, The Many Deaths of Judas Iscariot  A Meditation on Suicide, by A.M.H. Saari. A theologian, Aaron Saari was drawn to the theme after his elder brother, a long-term sufferer of mental illness, committed suicide, an action traditional Christian teaching asserts is a mortal sin. The grieving Saari consoled himself with meditation through theological research and on the basis of his findings came to the firm conclusion that Judas Iscariot was a literary invention of the Markan community. Saari argues that the language used effectively indicated a split between Pauline Christians, who saw no reason for the establishment of an organized Church, and the followers of Peter, who did. Judas, in other words, was a character invented to undermine the authority of the ‘college’ of the twelve apostles. It’s a lovely book, combining theological research and literary critique with touching reminiscences about his brother. The last sentence sums the book’s theme succinctly: ‘When we are bogged down by questions of historicity, we deny the evangelists the opportunity to impart their story.’