6. Man from Kerioth

“Betrayer of God, Pariah of Faith, A cunt, My name is Judas

No place in time, Or heaven or hell, A cunt, My name is Judas

A catholic reject, A catholic arsehole, A catholic bastard

I am Judas, a fucking liar, I am Judas, I’m no messiah

Don’t look at me, the roof of hell has cracked below my feet

I am condemned, The roof of hell has cracked below my feet

Baneful  end, The roof of hell has cracked below my feet

Damned to she’ol, The roof of hell has cracked below my feet

The roof of hell has cracked below my feet for I am the god slayer, vile wretched beast, the drug of hatred.

Suicide tree, the roof of hell has cracked below my feet

a rope and dance, The roof of hell has cracked below my feet

Curse of Edom, The roof of hell has cracked below my feet

Curse of edom, The roof of hell has cracked below my feet”

This is a more punk imbued track about the man all Christianity has been taught to hate. The embodiment of treachery, It is lyrically offensive towards Judas from the Church’s point of view. Judas [Ioudas] is along with the Sanhedrin the villains of the Jesus story according to the Gospels. Kerioth, This  is also the birthplace of the traitor Judas – hence the surname Iscariot (a Greek translation of the Jewish “Ish Kerioth”, or “from Kerioth.”) Kerioth was a town in the south of Judea, today identified with the ruins of el-Kureitein, about 10 miles south of Hebron. The traitor Judas and his father Simon were both apparently from Kerioth, their surname “Iscariot” is from the Hebrew (pronounced) Ish Kerioth, meaning “a man of Kerioth.”

Some read Iscariot to mean “man of Kerioth,” a city in Judea. This would make Judas the only Judean in the group and an outsider. Others argue that a copyist error transposed two letters and that Judas was named “Sicariot,” a member of the party of the Sicarii. This comes from the Greek word for “assassins” and was a group of fanatical nationalists who thought that the only good Roman was a dead Roman. Judas Iscariot could have been, then, Judas the Terrorist. This is unlikely as this splinter group of Zealots is though to have appeared around 60AD.  Born to be cursed for eternity. I feel Judas was not the dark traitor the church would have us believe. His story is one of infamy and yet full of implausibility’s.

The lyrics deal with the distain heaped on Judas though Christian theology. Edom was an ancient place of Palestine and  a reference to his pariah status.  Later in Jewish history,the Roman Empire came to be identified with Edom, The Gospel of Judas, a fragile clutch of a leather-bound papyrus thought to have been inscribed in about AD300. According to this version of events, not only was Judas obeying orders when he handed Jesus to his persecutors, he was Christ’s most trusted disciple, singled out to receive mystical knowledge. According to the 26-page gospel, copied in the ancient Coptic language apparently from a Greek original more than a hundred years older, Jesus told Judas: “Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal.” So, in this lost Gospel, we have a another version of Jesus knowingly accepting his end. It is however a Gnostic work and of dubious authenticity to the events surrounding the actual events leading to the Death of Jesus.

The Betrayal There are several explanations of why Judas betrayed Jesus.^] A common explanation is that Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver (Matthew 26:14-16). One of Judas’s main weaknesses seemed to be money (John 12:4-6). Another possible reason is that Judas expected Jesus to overthrow Roman rule of Israel. In this view, Judas is a disillusioned disciple betraying Jesus not so much because he loved money, but because he loved his country and thought Jesus had failed it. The Gospels suggests that Jesus both foresaw (John 6:64, Matthew 26:25) and allowed Judas’s betrayal (John 13:27-28).

Some scholars have embraced the alternative notion that Judas was merely the negotiator in a prearranged prisoner exchange (following the money-changer riot in the Temple) that gave Jesus to the Roman authorities by mutual agreement, and that Judas’s later portrayal as “traitor” was a historical distortion.

In his book The Passover Plot the British theologian Hugh J. Schonfield argued that the crucifixion of Christ was a conscious re-enactment of Biblical prophecy and Judas acted with Jesus’ full knowledge and consent in “betraying” his master to the authorities. This is pure conjecture, but no more than many of the theories surrounding the life and times of Jesus extracted from the Gospel narratives.

Another theory is that early Bible authors, after the First Jewish-Roman War, sought to distance themselves from Rome‘s enemies. They augmented the Gospels with a story of a disciple, personified in Judas as the Jewish state, who either betrayed or handed-over Jesus to his Roman crucifiers. This can be identified with the origin of modern Anti-Semitism. I would suggest this is the most plausible answer as it is the most historically sound.

Judas’ Cause Of Death  This is the most obvious contradiction. In Matthew Judas hung himself, but in Acts he fell headlong and his bowels gushed out. Attempts to reconcile this contradiction, such as this one typically assume that both things happened: Judas hung himself, the rope broke, and Judas fell headlong with his bowels gushing out on impact. Also, there is the assumption that Matthew was concerned with the original cause of death whereas Acts was concerned with the ultimate cause of death.

First, it should be noted that Judas fell headlong. So, an explanation is needed as to why Judas’ body rotated 180 degrees upon the rope breaking. Judas could have hung himself from a tree branch that protruded over a cliff in order to all the fall sufficient distance so that his body could flip, but that seems odd as it would not have contributed to the hanging unless Judas meant for the rope to break. In fact it would have made it needlessly difficult as Judas would have had to climb out onto the protruding branch. It could be that as Judas fell he crashed into something, such as another tree branch, that caused his body to flip. This is possible, but it would make more sense for Judas to simply choose the lowest branch that he could find that was sufficiently high. A branch with a branch underneath it would have only gotten in the way.

Various assumptions can be made about the organization of Matthew and Acts in order to justify placing the hanging part of the death in Matthew and the falling part of the death in Acts. Perhaps Matthew preferred to talk things in the air whereas Acts preferred to talk about things on the ground. Such assumptions seem arbitrary and contrived unless they are vindicated by the rest of the text.

Regardless of what is assumed about the organization of Matthew and Acts Judas died only once. Either Judas died when he hung himself and then later fell, or he was still alive when he fell and died when he hit the ground. In either case either Matthew or Acts neglected to mention how Judas actually died. Appeals to the idea that the authors of Matthew and Acts each knew what the other would write and wished to not be redundant are difficult to defend in light of the amount of repeated material in the rest of the Net Testament; particularly the synoptic gospels.

Purchaser Of The Field of Blood Another contradiction has to do with the purchaser of the field of blood. In Matt 27:7-8 the priests purchased the field. In Acts 1:18-19 Judah purchased the field. Attempts to reconcile this contradiction, such as this one, often quibble over the verb by which Judas came into possession of the field In Acts 1:18.

The “Gospel of Judas” says that the other eleven disciples stoned him to death after they found out about the betrayal.

Some scholars have embraced the alternative notion that Judas was merely the negotiator in a prearranged prisoner exchange (following the money-changer riot in the Temple) that gave Jesus to the Roman authorities by mutual agreement, and that Judas’s later portrayal as “traitor” was a historical distortion.

Spong’s conclusion is that early Bible authors, after the First Jewish-Roman War, sought to distance themselves from Rome‘s enemies. They augmented the Gospels with a story of a disciple, personified in Judas as the Jewish state, who either betrayed or handed-over Jesus to his Roman crucifiers. Spong identifies this augmentation with the origin of modern Anti-Semitism.