I recently commented on an academic colleague’s article contrasting Christian and Jewish perspectives concerning the disgraced apostle Judas Iscariot, perhaps unfairly criticizing her observations based on the Jewish Toledot Yeshu as shallow[1].  The article described Christian attitudes with respect to Judas as reflecting the most extreme example of evil and betrayal possible, an attitude indeed shared by many, but not one universally shared among more modern Christians, especially in light of twentieth century efforts to rehabilitate Judas and ameliorate the perception of the Jewish role in the arrest, torture and execution of Yešu[2], given the climactic horrors of antisemitism during the Second World War seeking to treat both in a more neutral manner. 

The Jewish attitude towards Judas, as reflected in the Toledot Yeshu (as well as in both the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmud), predictably regard him as a hero, albeit as a hero without ethical boundaries, and as the savior of Judaism in the face of encroachment by Yešu-inspired heretics (not yet misnamed “Christians” by Saul of Tarsus[3]).  My point in criticizing (too strong a word really) the authors’ description of related Christian perceptions concerning Judas was that, to an increasing number of Christians, rather than an arch-villain, Judas Iscariot is a tragically complex figure who faced irresolvable conflicts of interest between his aspirations seeking a messianic Jewish liberator and the otherworldly idealism attributed to the victim of his betrayal, a conflict complicated by the reality that, at any rate, he was irrevocably bound to the fate decreed for him by the always strange Abrahamic deity which both he and Yešu believed they served. 

For some reason, the forgoing led me to reflect on the accretive nature of Abrahamic religions and then, to reflect on the reality that most if not all religions seem accretive.  A strange leap but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Consider:

The roots of all Abrahamic religions lie in the city of Uruk in ancient Sumer.  They all start with a certain Sumerian, ironically given subsequent beliefs, the son of an idol maker.  That Sumerian’s original name was phonetically Abiramu but has reached us as Abraham.  Based on the foregoing it seems clear that most of the stories in the Hebrew Book of Genesis, e.g., the Garden, the Flood, etc., have Sumerian roots, but as Abiramu and his sister-wife Sarai and their descendants fled though Egypt into Canaan, and Judaism slowly evolved as a religion, cultural borrowing was heavy and included Akhenaton’s monotheism, the Midian religion wholesale, and from Canaan, its divinity, YHWH, one of the seventy sons of the chief Canaanite god, El.  Somewhere along the line however, for reasons unknown, Judaism shed its female deities, the numerous wives of YHWH including Anat-Yahu, Aholah and Aholibah , Asherah, Anatha of the Lions and Ashima of the Doves, not to mention the Shekinah, a process largely rejected for centuries by the common people until Hebrew women were reduced to objects bereft of rights and a religious, civic and social patriarchy, purportedly divinely ordained, was established, history having been reformulated and recorded, as necessary.  Of course, all of the foregoing also forms the predicate for both Christianity and Islam, although Christianity added a number of Hellenic religious and philosophical concepts via Saul of Tarsus (Islam has always been much closer to Orthodox Judaism, ironic given today’s genocidal antipathies).  Wow!!!  What a journey in every sense.

Syncretism is a term used to describe the dialectic process through which accretion leads to religious evolution and it was certainly evident among the religions of the country the ancient Hebrews referred to as “Mizraim” (which we call Egypt) where gods from diverse regions were added to a growing common pantheon where they eventually tended to meld.  The same seems true with respect to divinities and their respective cults in the Indian subcontinent and to the divinities prominent in ancient Greece and Rome.  It may well be true of religions in the Americas as well. 

As a young academic many, many decades ago, I taught a course on comparative religions which I elected to divide into three major segments, the first dealt with primitive spiritual concepts such as animism and totems, the second with mythologies which my students denominated “other peoples’ religions” and finally, to the enormous diaspora of spiritual and religious concepts that have become prevalent during the past three millennia.  Through it all I sensed a fount of religious instincts sprouting from somewhere in central Asia, perhaps somewhere in what is today modern day Mongolia, the place from which, periodically, waves upon waves of refugees turned invaders seemed to erupt, waves that included the Huns, the Mongols and those to whom we refer as Indo-European, Hindus, Achaeans, Aryans, etc.  I visualized the foregoing as a crescendo of peoples and beliefs, perhaps sharing a common origin, then diffracting and subsequently reassembling in differing configurations.  However, all too soon, as tends to occur, the young academic I once was found his academic pursuits deflected into first history, then political science, then law, and my quest for “a unified theory of socio-spiritual evolution” returned to the ether from which it had apparently once sprung, … until recently.  Until when, after semi-retiring to pursue personal interests and research, I returned to old roots exploring the “legends” of Gilgamesh and the origins of YWHW and of the myriad faces of Yešu, which, somehow or other, after reading the article by Ora Limor and Israel Jacob Yuval (“Judas Iscariot: Revealer of the Hidden Truth”), led me back to this introspective reflection concerning the diametrically opposed perspectives concerning both Judas Iscariot and Yešu that have subtlety but profoundly impacted our history during the past two millennia, and that has led me to reflect on how much our socio-religious perspectives are changing as time goes by, as our values change and as our memories evolve. And of how long-held traditional religious beliefs are being considered by some among our new generations as mere myths, a sort of inversion of how the students in my class on comparative religion once considered mythology, while others seem willing to accept and espouse new hypotheses concerning intergalactic aliens as the sources of our civilizations and even, of the possibility that our remote biological ancestors from the Mesozoic Era, the dinosaurs, in fact survived and merely went underground, literally, where they await in their own civilizations for a chance to return to the surface once, in our arrogance, we arrange for our own extinction.

Chaos to me is not a negative but rather, the primal state where once upon a time everything at all was a possibility and contradictions comfortably cohabited as compliments.  Strangely, modern theories of physics involving both minimalist quantic phenomena and omniversal string theories seem filled with echoes of that primordial chaos, the chaos that seems to have existed before the Big Bang or the divine seven days of creation, take your pick. 

Today, as I write, confusion appears to reign, happily enthroned and smiling, as we impatiently seek to untangle the confused webs we’ve woven and somewhere perhaps, echoes from Elphaba Thropp’s refrain at the conclusion of the 1930’s movie, the Wizard of Oz, as she slowly melted, laid low by water, “… what a world, what a world” happily resonate, and perhaps, somewhere outside the bounds of time and space, Yešu and Judas dispassionately debate.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] Limor, Ora and Israel Jacob Yuval (2011): “Judas Iscariot: Revealer of the Hidden Truth” in Peter Schäfer, Michael Meerson, and Yaacov Deutsch, eds., Toledot Yeshu (The Life Story of Jesus) Revisited: A Princeton Conference; pp. 197-220; Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen available at https://www.academia.edu/43624042/Ora_Limor_and_Israel_Jacob_Yuval_Judas_Iscariot_Revealer_of_the_Hidden_Truth_in_Peter_Sch%C3%A4fer_Michael_Meerson_and_Yaacov_Deutsch_eds_Toledot_Yeshu_The_Life_Story_of_Jesus_Revisited_A_Princeton_Conference_T%C3%BCbingen_Mohr_Siebeck_2011_197_220.

[2] “Yešu” is the correct Aramaic phonetic pronunciation of the Hellenized name of the principle protagonist of the diverse Christian faiths usually referred to as “Jesus”.

[3] According to some versions of the Toledot Yeshu, Saul of Tarsus whose Roman name was Paulus and who is referred to by Christians as St. Paul, was really a Jewish infiltrator into the evolving Yešu heresy whose role it was to sunder the movement from Judaism in order to decelerate and minimize conversion.