Judas

(ca. 1250)

   The religious carol called Judas is preserved in a single manuscript from the 13th century, now at Trinity College of Cambridge University. The poem consists of 18 couplets in seven-beat lines that can be easily rewritten as the familiar alternating tetrameter/trimeter lines rhyming abcb that make up the English BALLAD stanza. This has led scholars to consider Judas the oldest extant written example (by some 200 years) of a popular English ballad. Written in a Southwestern dialect of MIDDLE ENGLISH, the text includes the parallelism and incremental repetition as well as the quick-moving narrative and absence of transitions common to folk ballads. The subject matter, based largely on the New Testament but partly on medieval traditions concerning Judas Iscariot, is somewhat atypical of the later popular ballads. In fact the details of the narrative, particularly those concerning Judas’s sister, are unique and remarkable, having no known source in any other text. In the poem Christ sends Judas with 30 pieces of silver to procure the Maundy Thursday meal for himself and his disciples. On the way Judas meets his sister, who chides him for following a false prophet. He defends his master, but accepts his sister’s invitation to sleep with his head in her lap.When he awakens his money is gone, and his sister nowhere to be found. He then meets a “rich Jew” named Pilate, who asks him if he will “sell” his master. Frantic to regain the 30 pieces of silver entrusted to him by Christ, Judas agrees. The scene shifts abruptly to the Last Supper, with Jesus announcing to the disciples that he has been bought and sold for their meat. Judas leaps up to ask whether he is the guilty one, and before an answer comes, Peter rises to vow his support of Christ though Pilate come with “ten hundred” knights. The poem ends with Christ saying Peter will forsake him three times before the cock crows.

   The poem’s amelioration of Judas’s guilt is certainly extraordinary, though the invention of the apocryphal character of Judas’s sister who becomes ultimately responsible for the betrayal of Christ is not terribly surprising given the atmosphere of misogyny so common among medieval clerics and their emphasis on Eve’s responsibility for original sin. There is some question as to whether Judas can really be considered a popular ballad, but Child did include it as number 23 in his collection.

   Bibliography

   ■ Boklund-Lagopoulou, Karin Margareta. “ ‘Judas’: The First English Ballad?” Medium Aevum 62 (1993): 20–34.

   ■ Child, Francis James, ed. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 vols. 1882–98. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1965.