Working with the Enemy: The Harmonizing Tradition and the New Utility of Judas Iscariot in Thirteenth-Century England

Copyright © 2010 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw some diversifi cation of both popular and offi cial representations of Judas Iscariot in the Latin West. One new possibility that arose, as I will show, was the assimilation of Jesus’ betrayer to one of the chief parochial priorities of the thirteenthcentury church, the promotion of regular lay confession. The purpose of this essay is to defi ne and illustrate the process by which Satan’s man on the inside could become an ordinary Christian penitent worthy of a certain measure of human understanding: a contrite sinner who did exactly what he should have done, before failing at the last moment to claim God’s mercy. Section I below describes the development and ossifi cation of the prevailing early medieval image of Judas as statically wicked. I argue that this came about largely through the theory and practice of gospel harmony, by which the more ambiguous synoptic versions of Judas, particularly the remorseful Matthean one, became fl attened into a constant enemy of the true faith through commingling with details from the Gospel of John, which is unique in its intense hostility toward him. As a fundamental hermeneutic paradigm, “informal” harmony came to seem so natural, and was so strongly reinforced by its formalizations in orthodox traditions of interpretation, that very powerful counteracting infl uences would be required to make possible any reevaluation of Judas’s signifi cance for the contemporary Christian faith. Section II introduces the emergence in the twelfth century, and increasing prominence in the thirteenth, of intellectual and institutional tendencies that formed a new environment for scriptural working with the enemy: the harmonizing tradition and the new utility of judas iscariot in thirteenth-century england