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The Middle English Judas: An Interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Donald G. Schueler
Donald G. Schueler*
Affiliation:
University of New Orleans New Orleans, Louisiana
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Abstract

The Middle English Judas seems to pose more narrative problems than it solves. The sympathetic characterization of Judas; the shift in dramatic focus from Judas to Peter's denial of Christ; the implausible bargain Judas strikes with Pilate—all are perplexing elements. They can be resolved, however, once it is understood that Judas explains a biblical scene not presented in the work itself: the moment when Christ asks the apostles to share bread and wine, his body and blood. The sympathetic portrayal of Judas and the final emphasis on Peter's denial diminish the moral range between the two disciples and imply the universality of human sinfulness. But Judas' transaction, in which Christ is sold for the money to buy food for Passover, gives an even more specific and ironic meaning to the offstage lines “This is my body” since the bread and wine will cost Christ's body and blood.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 91 , Issue 5 , October 1976 , pp. 840 - 845
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

Notes

1 This text of Judas is based on Kenneth Sisam's edition in Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose (1921; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), pp. 168–69. I have, however, Americanized and corrected quotation marks and reproduced line repetitions rather than indicating them with a bis. The long-line couplets could also be modernized as ballad quatrains with alternating 4 and 3 stress lines.

2 A minority view among scholars holds that, in the strict technical sense, Judas is more exactly described as a religious carol than as a ballad, but even this view acknowledges the balladlike effect of the work.

3 The Medieval Lyric (New York: Harper, 1969), p. 69.

4 Chambers E. K., English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1945), p. 153.

5 Baum Paul Franklin, “The English Ballad of Judas Iscariot,” PMLA, 31 (1916), 184-89.

6 Or. as Francis J. Child puts it, “The ballad-singer might answer, So it was, and rest contented,” The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882; rpt. New York: Folklore, 1965), i, 243.

7 The tradition that Judas was treasurer for Christ and the apostles comes chiefly from John xii.6.

8 There is, of course, no biblical reference to Judas' sister, nor is there any surviving account of her in medieval tradition except in this ballad. An Eastern tradition does assign Judas an avaricious wife (see Baum, pp. 185 86) but the situation is not analogous.

9 Dronke suggests that “soster” is to be understood as “mistress” (p. 68). On the other hand, Sisam's assertion, after he checked the original manuscript, that the word “tunesmen” in the Child edition is actually “cunesmen” (p. 257) tends to diminish Dronke's argument. But the image we have of the woman's behavior with Judas does suggest the leman, and there is precedence in medieval literature for euphemisms of this sort.

10 The inspiration for this situation is discernible, just barely, in John xiii.29, where Jesus gives Judas the sop and predicts his treachery, telling him to do what he must quickly. Some of the disciples think that Jesus has commanded Judas to buy food for Passover or to give money to the poor, but in fact Jesus has not given him such instructions.

11 It may be worthwhile at this point to discuss further Baum's theory that Judas is a fragment and that it was meant to end with Judas' suicide. Baum cites as evidence of the suicide ending a Wendish (German) ballad which begins with Christ, at the home of a poor widow, giving Judas money to buy bread. Judas loses the thirty pieces gambling, and the Jews advise him to sell Christ to make up the loss. Christ accuses him, and in despair Judas rushes to hang himself on an aspen after failing to do so on a fir tree. Though there is a vague parallel with the Judas narrative, none of the details correspond. In the Wendish ballad there is no high rock, no sister, no theft, no bargain with Pilate. Moreover, far from predating Judas, the Wendish ballad survives only in a 19th-century version. Baum himself acknowledges that there is nothing in the parallels “that cannot be accounted for by coincidence” (p. 185). Finally, there is no indication in the English manuscript that the ballad was broken off or left unfinished. Since the 13th-century scribe had no reason to reproduce a fragment, he must have been satisfied that he was transcribing a finished work.

12 Jesus speaks about the “bread of life” in John vi.32 51, but the occasion is the miracle of the loaves and fish. In i Cor., Paul accounts for Christ's words at the Last Supper in an after-the-fact manner, but his discourse concerns only the symbolic validity of the words, not a specific motive that might have inspired them.