 Dr. Burke, welcome back. How are you? Good. Thank you. Thanks again for having me. So Dr. Burke, Judas is a figure that seems to get a lot of press, for lack of a better term, in apocryphal literature. One of the earliest that of Papias in his Exposition 4 discusses the death of Judas. It's just completely wild. Like he swells up like a garbage pill kid, essentially in verses in one of the recensions. So I don't know if you could just discuss those two recensions and are these the earliest examples besides the ones we have in Acts and Matthew regarding the death of Judas? I'll back up just a little bit. The version that you read is included in one of my books, The New Testament, Monokinonical Scriptures, Volume 1. The whole goal of this series is to present texts that people are not as aware of. Most people know Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Mary and so on. But here was this story about the death of Judas that most people aren't aware of and I really wanted to include it in there. And you mentioned that Acts and Matthew have their own versions of the death of Judas. So already in The New Testament we have two separate versions of the story. And to have a third is quite interesting I think and it's a quite early one. Papias was writing around the middle of the second century, early second century maybe. We don't have the full text of Papias' work expositional on the sayings of the Lord, but we have quotations from it. And one of the things that Papias says is how much he values our early transmitted story. So he knows people who knew the Apostle. So he prefers those kinds of traditions over written traditions. So there's a bit of romanticism about Papias that he knows things that nobody else was aware of and the more material we can kind of pluck from our sources by Papias the better. So here we have this story and it's only again it's a quoted piece. It's found in commentary on scriptures. So someone quotes it in connection with the New Testament stories. And yeah it's a really interesting little story. It's a horrible story as you said. Judas kind of swells up and various body parts swell up as well and kind of explode. It's more original or truthful than the one we find in New Testament. I don't know if any of them are really truthful necessarily. They're they're almost caricatures, right? Any story is a you know the one thing that we know of the earliest about Judas is Paul mentions that Jesus on the night was betrayed or handed over. That's all Paul knew. And then when we get to the gospels we get this story kind of fleshed out. We don't know if that fleshing out by Matthew and the book of Acts or have any historical value at all. So I don't know. I'm not saying that Papias is any better necessarily than those. But it certainly is interesting and it follows a certain convention of that we see in other writings of the time where a person who's particularly vile their evil nature eats away at them from inside. We usually see okay so the story follows a convention that we see usually associated with tyrants so bad kings like Herod or King Agrippa or others where they meet their end usually by being kind of eaten away from the inside by worms or something like that. And the story of Judas is similar. It just shows you how a character who is so evil on the outside and does some terrible things they meet their justified end and it's from rotting from within and that's what we see in the Judas story. So very early on you have conflicting accounts of how Judas passed and it kind of culminates in these stories right and Papias and then Matthew and Luke and like you say Paul is the earliest account of Jesus being betrayed. But then we get a little bit later like centuries down the line and we have something which I found fascinating this text in your in your volume more New Testament apocrypha called the legend of the 30 pieces of silver. It's a really trippy story of the coins are very interesting in this story they almost function as like a monkey's paw or the lament configuration of you've ever seen the Hellraiser movies like it's just like this cursed object that changes hands through time and space and nothing good can come of it. It's kind of like in the heavy metal movie if you've seen that like the orb it goes it goes everywhere. Yeah it's it's interesting. So I was wondering what your further thoughts on the legend of the 30 pieces of silver are. I came across this text like I started an interest in it when I saw a reference to it in a manuscript catalog. So I was working on a particular manuscript and this this particular text was listed in there too and I hadn't seen it before and I have a blog it's called Apocryphicity and early on in the in the creation of this blog so years ago I had mentioned to it I mentioned the text and asked you know does anyone know anything about this text and a guy in Slovakia named Slavinia Cieplo you said I know a little bit about that and so the two started this working relationship on the text and we put together a critical edition of the Syriac tradition which had never been really worked on before. So I'm quite connected with this text and it's it's not very long it it's relatively short and it does tell this story of of where these silver pieces came from and how they intersect with various moments in biblical history so it's a bit of like a forest gump of these these these silver pieces so wherever there's some reference to money in biblical story if it's Joseph being purchased by I think it's Midianites his brothers sell him and so they get monies that that money that was the 30 silver pieces or Nebuchadnezzar is purchasing is plundering the temple he well he plunders those 30 silver pieces from there as well so they intersect in various ways until they finally come to to Judas well they come to the Jewish authorities first and then they pay Judas for betraying Jesus Jesus with these 30 pieces so yeah it really does intersects in various places in history. One of the the most interesting aspects of it to me is its connection to to actual coins that were collected by people in medieval times people you know like today they like to be connected with history in a very tactile way so they they they will purchase relics of some kind and these were actually gold coins so they had to be kind of a special explanation for how the silver coins became gold but you could purchase these these these Judas pennies and the text then will function as a kind of a a certificate of authority of authenticity should say for these coins because you can say well check out my coins and let me tell you the story because they they came originally from Terra who gave them to Abraham who gave them to so-and-so and so-and-so to Jews and now I have them and so you'll become part of that story right so I think that that that interplay between text and and coins is really interesting. Really an interesting aspect of the 30 pieces is over but also a lot of apocryphal text if I'm not mistaken have this kind of function in a way like your pieces of the True Cross and how the True Cross got this place for that place things like that so it's very interesting these origin stories of these important relics in the lore of the people around around it so they come full circle and this was another really interesting text the medieval life of Judas so I found this really really mind-blowing because Judas is almost portrayed like a tragic Greek anti-hero in some ways at certain aspects so I was wondering if you could further elaborate on just what that text is and your thoughts on it. Very popular text it's there's lots and lots of copies in lots and lots of languages but it's not often placed in collections of apocryphal text because it's it's relatively late it's maybe 9th century 10th century something like that most apocrypha collections tend to focus on the first three centuries that's why the more New Testament apocrypha series that I'm working with is trying to redress that by saying you know let's look at some text from from other time periods so we included this in I think the second volume of this series tells the story of the birth of Judas he's born to I think it's a wealthy man and the man receives a vision that this child will be the death of him in some way so he abandons the child but at first he marks up his ankle so he'll know to recognize him later on so there's a there's kind of an injury to the ankle and then he gets picked up by someone later on he grows up into the court of King Herod he ends up accidentally unbeknownst to him killing his father and then marrying his mother so it's a famous edifice story from as you say Greek tragedy and then it's discovered what happened and as a result though you know you know the story is not you know Judas is evil because he did these things it's he's a tragic character like you said and you feel a bit of sympathy for him to some extent and in various apocryphal texts we we see these kinds of efforts to not redeem Judas so much as try to understand him or try to find some sympathy for him right and this is one of those examples and there's a there's a another text called the Acts of Andrew and Paul and at one point in this Paul talks about going down to hell just like Jesus did and he meets Judas and Judas is all alone he's the last one there because of course he's not redeemed everyone else gets to go to heaven but Judas stays in hell but you do feel a bit of sympathy for the character because we hear of his efforts to try and get forgiveness from Jesus and one of the ways he did it was well at one point in the text Judas is like well I need to talk to Jesus I need to get forgiveness but he's on trial right now so what am I going to do I know I'll kill myself and then I'll meet him in the underworld and then I'll ask him for forgiveness so he's kind of this resourceful character in a way and a bit again a bit sympathetic he's eager for the forgiveness but of course Jesus doesn't forgive and so he remains in hell forever you know something like Nico Kazanzakis Kazanzakis yeah sorry similar names you know with the last temptation of Christ you know whether it be the book or the movie you know you have people still striving to kind of understand who he was not necessarily always sympathize with him and try to rehabilitate his character but to give him some depth you know maybe he's there are some ways we're we're uncomfortable but he is in a way relatable to you know some of our feelings so and you see that even in things like Dante you know Dante's treatment of Judas and the divine comedy trilogy you know people are just trying to understand this character and I think this kind of goes to my next question about a text that isn't necessarily apocryphal but it is a non-canonical text gospel of Judas is it fair to say that this is yet another like more lore in other in other words circulating among communities about Judas you know I'm not sure we can say how widespread that lore was compared to something like life of Judas or you know papias discussion of him but I was just wondering what do you think about Judas that's portrayed there versus what we see in these apocryphal texts you know about this gospel of Judas in history because it's mentioned by a church writer named Eusebius around 180 so it makes it fairly early mid second century and he talks about it as connected to a particular group called the Canites and you know describes a little bit so we know this text existed then because it matches the Irenaeus's description but we have this one copy of it and we only just found it so yet and so certainly not it seems widespread in antiquity and it didn't survive antiquity except for this one copy and it's an in-coptic so it's not the original language original language would have been Greek so yeah compared to like life of Judas or the silver pieces which have lots and lots of manuscripts and lots of different languages this is our only example of this one text and it's certainly unorthodox it's got some ideas in there that that mainstream Christianity would be quite uncomfortable with but as the story goes it's presented at I think it's the last supper so it's before Jesus died and Jesus is with the disciples with the apostles and Judas is there too but it portrays the apostles in a very negative way Jesus laughs at them at one point because he says they are worshiping the wrong god they think they're worshiping the real god but in this the system behind this text which is a Gnostic system there are two gods there's a god of this world who's an evil entity sometimes called Ealdibath or Sackles and then there's the true god which is where who Jesus is affiliated with he comes from that true god to come down to earth and tell people about their true origins that they should be up there in the heavens with the real god with the good god the apostles are are worshiping sacrificing so the sense that they're doing Jewish ritual practices as naturally they would to this earthly god and Jesus says you're all wrong Judas though seems to understand that that is not kosher like this is not the not the right thing so he asks Jesus for more teaching so Jesus gives him a whole bunch of cosmological information about how the universe was created and who the true god is and who who the lower god is and in the process says again some more nasty things about the apostles so what does this say about communities it seems to be a reflection of a Christian group or an expression of a Christian group that's at odds to some extent with Orthodox Christianity mainstream Christianity which is represented by the apostles and probably by the texts that are starting to become quite popular that will become the New Testament and our our writer has decided to use Judas as a foil for these and they say and they have Judas be the one who knows who Jesus is as opposed to the apostles as representatives of mainstream Christianity now when this text was discovered though the original editors of it the translators editors of it said here we have this text where Judas is presented as a hero he's the guy who knows everything right the other apostles don't and Jesus even praises him for for the role he has to play which is to betray him and thus make you know the providential history take its course but later editors said no no no that's not what the text says at all so on one particular part where it says where Jesus is talking to Judas and he says look at the apostles they're terrible you will surpass them well the original editor just said clearly he's a hero the new editor said no no no you read that wrong it what it really says is look at those those apostles they're terrible you will surpass them in your villainy because you are going to betray me so that we have these competing interpretations of the text here so it's good to know both of them get a sense of what we think this text is really saying and of course it the text when it was published made a big sensation so you have these very upset conservative television hosts saying are you saying this text says Judas was a hero and it's like no no no no we don't really think that at all and even so it's a text that says that doesn't mean that the real Judas was a hero we always be very careful that whatever we have in these texts are just the expression of the writers we don't know how they intersect with history at all but again it's a great little window into this conflict in the second century between Christian groups have different ideas about who Jesus was and about how God relates to humans and so they they they fight with one another through texts by choosing a certain apostle to be their champion and look and and having a main conflict with other apostles that they portray in as negative a light as possible so it's a lot of fun working with texts that do that kind of thing the whole hubbub about gospel of Judas and Judas was a hero and just remember recalling that and then reading Brackie's commentary on gospel of Judas now it's kind of like yeah they really fumbled but in a in a way it's very interesting because it's it's exactly what we're talking about right people are kind of seeing what they want to see and interpreting the character how they want to see it so very fascinating now I just want to shout call back to your point about last temptation of Christ and that that scene with Judas and so here we have Jesus agonizing about what what his role is and he's going to have to die and he's talking to Judas and Judas has to betray him and Jesus says to him yeah you you got the hard job you know so the betrayal is a harder job than dying in a horrible way and this is part of this nuanced view of Judas that that that's quite modern or we think it's quite modern but again we have these texts throughout history where people are still are struggling with the Judas character but what what to do with him and so it's not not as modern a pursuit as we might have thought but it people it just shows you how people really like to play with this character and I think because of thinking about themselves you know you know Judas yes he did this horrible horrible thing but we all do horrible things and and maybe if Judas is not so horrible maybe I'm not so horrible either right and if you really if you watch that movie it's almost like Judas has to really steer the ship at many times it's really interesting Jesus very very much waivers many times in that movie and Judas is the one who has to keep him going and it's just just an amazing like I love every like iteration of every character like I love Harry Dean Stan and as Paul there I love like Harvey Kai tells Judas everybody's so great that movie but did you have anything you wanted to plug before we go live to two kind of big projects that that I like to make people aware of that's my pocket from more non-canonical scriptures where the which is a collections of texts which we don't normally see in a pocket for collections these are texts that I have never been published before or haven't been looked at for quite some time so we have new manuscripts and new understandings of them and so we have two volumes that have been out and we have the third volume which is out any day now so maybe out by the time people are listening to this and information about those books are on my website which is Tony Burke dot ca so you can look there and you'll see you know the the table of contents and some preview material and if you're interested in grabbing a copy of that it'd be great and the other major work that's kind of a public outreach project is under the auspices of a group called Nascow the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature and we're a group of scholars who of course work in the field and organization has a website just nascow.com and one of the things on that website is something called the eclavus and this is a big bibliographical resource for our Christian Apocryphal texts there's a 250 entries on there now probably another 100 left to go each dedicated to a particular text and you just click on one let's say the life of Judas it'll give you a summary of the text it'll give you lists of manuscripts links to manuscript images links to online scholarship and a list of non-online scholarship a whole bunch of other resources so it's free and it's open access and it's the great introductions to these texts and like I said there's hundreds of them so this will keep you very busy if you get a chance to take a look at it. As always it's been a pleasure having you on the show Dr Burke and you have a pleasant evening thank you