The uninteresting survivor
Jane Gardam
MY NAME WAS JUDAS by C. K. Stead Harvill/ Secker, £16.99, pp. 256, ISBN 1846550122 ✆ £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 C. K. Stead was Professor of English literature in the University of Auckland and is a highly esteemed literary critic and author. He is not, to my knowledge, a theologian but was urged to write this novel about the life of Judas Iscariot by the professor of religious studies at Victoria University because, ‘These are our stories. They must be constantly retold.’ Stead has, I would guess, used his recent awards to visit the Holy Land, for the beauty of Galilee, its atmosphere and light, and the looming presence of Jerusalem are some of the best things in the book. The novel itself is oddly disappointing.
It is based on the far from new idea that Judas did not commit suicide after the crucifixion by hanging himself on the fig tree once cursed by Christ. He lived on, a wandering Jew, his memory hated by the growing numbers of Christians and eventually was considered to be the Devil himself. Stead has him as a man who survived that terrible Passover to escape to Sidon on the Mediterranean coast. He had not betrayed Christ with a kiss but grabbed his arms in Gethsemane and told him to run for it. There were no 30 pieces of silver to fling away onto earth that never afterwards bore fruit. He simply walked off into another country back to the merchant class to which he belonged, passed himself off as a Greek, married and raised a family and is still hale and hearty at 70 years old. The agonies and ecstasies of his time with Jesus do not leave him, but he sees the whole thing as a pitiful mistake:
Our friend was not the Messiah nor will there be one. This is the truth I write, It will not hurt you. Grasp it.
Stead introduces Judas as a child of six. He is a brilliant boy from a privileged background and shares a Greek tutor with the even more brilliant Jesus, son of the carpenter. Judas is befriended by Jesus’ family (secretive Mary he calls ‘weird’) and goes about with them, and to the temple in Jerusalem. The two boys play and fight together, have adventures, once secretly watch a crucifixion which horrifies them. Later Jesus disappears into the desert to live with the Essenes and returns, changed. Judas has married and lost his young wife in childbirth. A broken-hearted man, he is called by Jesus to join his disciples. He does so but has difficulties in getting on with the rough fishermen and in believing that his pal of 20 years before has turned out to be the only son of God. One sees what he means.
The story is ‘imaginary’. Stead’s pugnacious boy-Jesus is as speculative as the flaxenhaired youth in the carpenter’s shop of the old illustrated bibles. And this is of course acceptable, since in fiction there should be nothing unimaginable. It is no longer considered blasphemous to put words into the mouth of God. Half a century ago the nation sat gravely and nervously listening to Dorothy Sayers’s The Man Born to be King when ‘Jesus’s’ voice was heard on the air for the first time (like King George V’s).
Earlier, George Moore’s boringly unreadable Victorian novel The Brook Kerith, about Jesus’ physical survival of the cross, lived down the back of many British book-cases in brown paper covers. In medieval tapestries there is scarcely any portrayal of the face of God, for it was considered too bright for human eyes. Now there are jokes on television about clouds and long white beards and we all claim to have enjoyed The Life of Brian.
Why then is My Name was Judas so unsatisfactory? Probably because in making Judas the opposite to the charismatic firebrand of the gospels and the great religious paintings he becomes so ordinary. His long, agreeable life on his estate in Sidon swims along in a sort of generalised regret and this mood is too static to sustain a full first-person historical novel. And in spite of our robust attitude about Christ being so ‘human’ it is embarrassing to see him doing little dances by the roadside and trilling on a pipe. His ill temper and behaviour to his mother — who seems to drop right out of the frame — we can cope with, but Jesus being massaged by Mary Magdalene, who suggests ‘a little walk in the moonlight’? Sorry, no.
Stead does paint a rather good picture of Judas meeting up in old age with Bartholemew and his weeping when he hears of the death — one by crucifixion of Jesus’ brothers; but his insistence on the mistakenness of getting involved with such outlandish company stays solid. Judas, the plain man.
Maybe being a plain man is a sort of suicide after all?
Correction: North Yorkshire by Peter Burton, recommended by Jane Gardam last week, is published by Michael Russell.
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