Justin Cartwright on redheads, anti-Semitism and the betrayal of Christ

Peter Stanford is a writer on religious and ethical matters. He was for four years editor of the Catholic Herald. Writing Judas: The Troubling History of the Renegade Apostle must have been a difficult task because there are no facts. Judas may quite possibly never have existed at all, and if he did, the Judas kiss may not have happened. Also, he may not have hanged himself. This is a fascinating story of febrile myth-making over two millennia, with very little historical fact.

Stanford starts his pursuit of Judas with a visit to gloomy Hakeldama in Jerusalem, the place where Judas is traditionally said to have hanged himself — if he did hang himself. The famous kiss is, as Stanford points out, improbable because those who were looking for Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane would have known perfectly well who he was in a group of 12; after all, he had recently created havoc among the moneylenders of the temple. The story of the Judas kiss was the start of the notion of betrayal and Stanford suggests that he was a necessary scapegoat. Judas was reviled by the evangelists: Mark labelled him the betrayer, in John’s Gospel he is described as the ‘son of perdition’ and according to Luke the devil entered him.

Stanford moves on from the speculative and the unsubstantiated to an account of how Christianity treated the story of Judas over the next 2,000 years. St Jerome (347–420), translator of the Vulgate, proclaimed that ‘in Judas the Jews may be accursed’. Ominously, the words ‘Judas’ and ‘Jew’ were conflated.

In search of Judas and his ever-changing image, Stanford visits many early churches and monasteries to uncover the fascination aroused by Judas. In the stunning sculpture of the last supper in Volterra, Judas is portrayed as half beast, crawling beneath the table.