Book 2, lines 797-811

[Previous: lines 765-766]

Judas has betrayed Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Now read on!

Ille dolum prœsensit, et hœc presso edidit ore:
“Hœc verô meruit, comitum fidissime, noster
oscula amor? Tanton scelere ulla ad prœmia tendis?
Haud equidem hœc tecum pepigi commercia quondam.”  [800]
Vix ea fatus erat, cum circumfusa iuveutus
cœca mit, densaque omnes indagine cingunt.
Non aliter quam coniectum cùm in retia rara
cervum aut fulmineis metuendum dentibus aprum,
pastorum circum sœvit manus, ilicet hastas                       [805]
comminus agglomerant certatim: ad sidera voces
undique eunt: reboant montes clamore propinqui.
Sic iuvenem obsessum longe fulgentibus armis
saeva cohors premere, atque omnes incumbere inermi.
Hi prensare manu, hi stupea vincula collo                          [810]
iniicere, et nunc hùc nunc illùc ducere captum.

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He had foreseen this betrayal, and so spoke:
“Is this deserved, most faithful friend, this kiss
for my love? How will this crime reward you?
This was not the bargain we struck beforehand.”               [800]
As soon as he said this a gang of young men
rushed through the darkness to surround and seize him.
It was just like when, trapped in a thin net
a tusked boar or a lightning-antlered stag
rages at being captured by shepherds, who                  [805]
compete to thrust their spears: the skies resound with
their excited shouts, reechoing off the hills.
In this way this pack in their glittering armour
all pressed to get hold of this unarmed youth.
Some seized him, others threw a rope around his               [810]
neck, yanking him this way and that, and away.

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This is a short linking passage, following on from Judas’s betraying kiss and leading into Peter cutting off Malchus’s ear (and Christ healing that same), which is what comes next.

Not to nitpick, but Vida contradicts himself in this epic simile, rather, doesn’t he? Christ is the stag, or the boar, cornered in the hunt in trapped in a net. The boar has his sharp tusks and the stag can strike out at you with his lightning-bolt-shaped horns—that’s why you’ve incapacitated them with your net before going in for the kill. Dangerous! But after setting up the simile non aliter quam … sic ‘just as … so’ Vida goes out of his way to stress that Jesus is unarmed. I suppose he wants his hero to be both things at once—just as C S Lewis wants his Christ to be both a sublime and terrifying lion and a harmless lamb. Nor does such a reading lack Biblical precedence.

Otherwise the most interesting bit here, I think, is line 800: Haud equidem hœc tecum pepigi commercia quondam; ‘This was not the bargain we struck beforehand.’ This is the last thing Jesus says to Judas. It begs the question: what bargain? It's not something Jesus says in the gospel account, and there's nothing there, or in earlier in Vida's poem, to suggest that Jesus and Judas struck any kind of deal. And yet here we are.

The twentieth-century German theologian Günther Schwarz wrote a reappraisal of Judas's role in the passion drama. In the words of Casimir Bern:

Briefly, Schwarz's thesis is that the NT has tendentiously portrayed Judas as a ‘traitor,’ whereas in reality he was merely the one who ‘handed over’ Jesus in obedient compliance with both the will of God and of Jesus himself ... The surname of Judas Iscariot is derived from a source meaning ‘the man from the city’ (i.e., Jerusalem). Judas was the only non-Galilean among the Twelve; he was a person who knew his way around the city, and was thereby the perfect choice on the part of Jesus to carrry out the mission of ‘handing over’ the master in accordance with the latter's own intentions. The Passion of Jesus, with its attendant details, ‘had to’ happen, in accordance with the Scriptures; Judas is only one cog in this wheel of inevitability. Especially important for S.'s argument is the contention that Judas' approach to the high priests in Mark 14:10-11 (and parallels) was made, not before, but after, the supper—and this in obedience to Jesus' command to carry out this very mission.

But it would be pretty surprising (wouldn't it?) to find a 16th-century, theologically conventional Catholic churchman anticipating revisionist 20th-century Protestant theology? And, of course, elsewhere in the poem Vida is perfectly conventional in his representation of Judas: possessed by devils, driven by greed and cowardice, a traitor. Still, that leaves the question of what is being hinted at in this line.

I could, if it weren't an indulgence, spool off here into abstruser speculation. The word I translate as “deal” is commercium: From con- (“together, with”) + merces (“pay”): “trade, traffic, commerce, exchange”, and by extension “intercourse, communication, correspondence, fellowship”. It is the con- part of this that is interesting here, as if Jesus is acknowledging some secret fellowship, some partnership linking the two of them. It reminds me of Ernst Bertram's reading of Nietzsche as a philosophical Judas:

The object of this inspired love and derision, however, both in Zarathustra and throughout the rest of Nietzsche, is always one and the same: man himself, double-souled, wretched and divine man. The fate of Judas is inseparable from Judas’s betrayal. To be destroyed through oneself—that is the final seal on the traitor’s hidden identity with Christ. We know the word with which Zarathustra tortures himself in his final solitude, with which, in both senses, he betrays himself and his seemingly bright, cheerful, generous divinity, the evil word of Judas: self-executioner.

O Zarathustra
Cruelest Nimrod!
Only recently still the hunter of God,
The trap of all virtues,
The arrow of evil!
Now—
Hunted down by yourself,
Your own prey . . .
Strangled in your own snares,
Self-Knower!
Self-Executioner!

Nietzsche’s intellectual fate, as he prepared it for himself, is just as deeply evangelical as was Judas’s betrayal in the legend: in the midst of an entirely hopeless, entirely skeptical, entirely godless late humanity, it made a new Dionysian Gospel, the new and ancient Gospel of man, possible again. [Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology University of Illinois Press (2009), 131-32]

Vida of course would find this fanciful, and indeed offensive and heretical (or at least, Nietzsche would be disappointed if he didn't); but that's not a reason to dismiss it out of hand as a way into the epic reimagining of the passion story.

The image at the top of this post is Heinrich Hoffman's ‘The Capture of Christ’, (1858). It's in the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany.

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