Introduction
Judas CyriacusFootnote 1 first appears in an early fifth-century version of the Inventio sanctae crucis legend (Finding of the Holy Cross), in which his invented character is responsible for the rediscovery of the cross used in Jesus’s crucifixion. Miraculous stories of the finding of holy relics (inventio stories) had become common enough during this period to have developed their own form and genre. Judas Cyriacus has a second half to his tale as well, a martyrdom (passio) narrative that employs similarly common formulae.Footnote 2 While the dual legends of Judas Cyriacus’s finding of the cross and of his martyrdom have their beginning in the fifth century, both continued to resonate in the Christian imagination across languages, centuries, and continents in the millennium that followed. Judas Cyriacus appears not only in dozens of extant early manuscripts, including both passionales (collections of saints’ matrydom narratives used in liturgical reading) and other liturgical sources, but also in early Western vernacular traditions like Cynewulf’s Elene (ca. 750–900 CE) and later medieval sources: the Northumbrian Cursor Mundi, vernacular translations of Jacob de Voraigne’s Golden Legend, and the South English Legendary.Footnote 3 He was represented in stained glass windows and carvings across Europe; elements of his story were included in medieval passion and miracle plays; and his cult spread into the early modern era in both eastern and western churches.Footnote 4 Why did this version of the Inventio sanctae crucis eclipse other versions, and what made it so popular?
As his name is meant to signal, Judas Cyriacus is a Jew. He is a Jew with mystic knowledge about the location of the cross; he is also a Jew who converts to Christianity. His Jewishness is marked throughout both the Inventio and his Passio through specific identifying tropes and markers, including two occasions on which his character is made to speak “in Hebrew.” Aside from a few words and a handful of recognizable syllables, however, there is no genuine Hebrew content; it is just pseudo-Hebrew gibberish meant to invoke the idea of Hebrew sounds.
The image of the Jew in Christian thought has received detailed study, as have the Inventio sanctae crucis narrative, its transmission, and the relics themselves. However, reception history of the image of Judas Cyriacus has garnered relatively scant attention across scholarship on Jewish-Christian relations. The popularity and familiarity of the Judas Cyriacus story contributed to Western Christian attitudes and policies towards Jews for well over a thousand years, and it is worthy of closer examination. The aims of this essay, therefore, are threefold: to examine the Judas Cyriacus version of the Finding of the Holy Cross story and what it reveals about the ambiguity and entanglement of Christian identities and truth claims in late antiquity; to analyze the use, function, and importance of pseudo-Hebrew in the Inventio and Passio; and to discuss how both of these, together with the figure of Judas Cyriacus himself, illustrate the tensions and problems in the perceived meaning and efficacy of Christian baptism for Jews.
Overview, Textual History and Reception
Legends surrounding the discovery of the cross began to circulate during the fourth century and developed along two main traditions. One legend, preserved in Gelasius, features Constantine’s mother Helena and the bishop of Jerusalem, Macarius, as the discoverers of the relics. The version with Judas Cyriacus circulated concurrently, and ultimately proliferated “as profusely as the pieces of the True Cross themselves.”Footnote 5 The only substantive difference between the two stories is the fictional figure of Judas Cyriacus.Footnote 6 Scholars agree that his Inventio with its accompanying Passio came from the same source at the same time, and that the original language was Greek.Footnote 7 The terminus post and ante quem are placed at 415 and 440 by Jan Willem Drijvers.Footnote 8
Early reactions to the Cyriacus version were mixed. Sozomen, Ambrose, and Paulinus of Nola all promoted the Helena account.Footnote 9 But the Judas Cyriacus version ultimately concretized what had formerly been a fluid and evolving tradition. By the beginning of the sixth century, the Liber Pontificalis linked Judas Cyriacus’s baptism and the celebration of the Finding of the Cross. A few decades later, Gregory of Tours (540–594 CE) pronounced Judas Cyriacus to be the one who had helped Helena find the cross.Footnote 10 This, then, was the legend that ultimately animated the popular imagination in late antiquity and proliferated across Europe through the Middle Ages.
The Judas Cyriacus legend, in brief, is as follows:Footnote 11 Helena comes to Jerusalem on pilgrimage to search for the cross on which Jesus was crucified. She demands that all Jerusalem’s Jews (numbered as three thousand) bring her the most knowledgeable among them. A thousand “experts in the Law” are assembled, but Helena gives them a long speech about their blind ignorance and demands better experts. Five hundred appear before her, but she complains that they do not believe in Christ and dismisses them. The Jews, understandably confused at this point (what does she expect them to tell her?) are then addressed by another Jew named Judas. He knows she is searching for the cross, and he also knows about it from his family traditions: he is a descendant of Stephen, the protomartyr, and his family has secretly believed in Jesus. He does not want to be in trouble with the Jewish community, however, and therefore has not spoken up until now. This is all news to them; they send him straight to Helena. She interrogates him but he refuses to reveal what he knows. Angered, Helena throws him into a dry pit to starve until he relents. After seven days he agrees to show where the cross is hidden. He heads to Golgotha and prays in “Hebrew,” which is then “translated” (it is not actually Hebrew in any known recension, so what follows is not a translation).Footnote 12 This has immediate effect: three crosses are revealed as soon as he starts digging. He proclaims his belief in Christ, and the true cross raises a dead person to life. The devil appears, railing against Judas, who rebukes him. Judas is then baptized by the bishop. That bishop dies while Helena is still in Jerusalem, so she has Pope Eusebius ordain and install Judas as the new bishop of Jerusalem, at which point he is given the name Cyriacus (Greek for “of the Lord”). Helena and Judas Cyriacus find the nails, which she makes into a bit for Constantine’s horse bridle. As a final triumphal move, she expels the Jews from all Judea.
Judas Cyriacus’s Passio follows the usual outline for martyrdom narratives, with Christological parallels. The Emperor Julian (“the Apostate,” 331–363 CE) arrives in Jerusalem, summons Judas Cyriacus, and engages him in debate. Julian threatens him with torture if he will not renounce Christianity. Judas Cyriacus refuses. Amid a series of lengthy trials and continued apologetic rebuttals and prayers he endures the following: his right hand is cut off, he is burned and made to swallow boiling lead, beaten with rods and roasted alive, cast into a pit of snakes, thrown into a vat of boiling oil, and finally meets his demise when run through with a spear.
The Judas Cyriacus Inventio legend reinforces established tropes: Jews cannot understand their own prophets; are abandoned by God because they killed Christ; and are blind and stubborn for their refusal to convert. We also see an additional claim: that the certain defeat of Judaism (and the defeat of Satan) would be sealed by the revealing of the relic of the cross. The revised story that becomes the Judas Cyriacus legend preserves the essential shape of the earlier versions, but replaces its setting among traditional Greco-Roman worshipers with Jews, and concurrently shifts focus away from the holy cross itself. It is now transformed into a story about the cross and the Jews: “[Judas Cyriacus] is also himself altered, absorbed into Christian subjectivity, transforming and transformed by the wood of the Cross.”Footnote 13 The message of the character of Judas Cyriacus has become inextricably interwoven with the message of Christianity.
Why Differing Versions?
Aside from resulting in an arguably superior dramatic effect in the Cyriacus account, what prompted alternate versions of the story? The answer would seem to be political, spiritual, and practical in equal measure. Jerusalem in the late fourth century was a symbol of both physical and religious imperial victory for Christians, a “conquest of real and imagined space” in which Christian foundational legends were tied to physical locations, and in turn those locations were monumentalized.Footnote 14 The rise and spread of the Inventio sanctae crucis in all its versions is inextricably tied to the political environment of the fourth century, both within internecine power struggles and competing Jewish-Christian claims.
As a matter of internal political vying, Drijvers has argued that the early success of the legend is closely connected to Cyril of Jerusalem (ca. 315–387 CE) and his quest to raise the status of his bishopric.Footnote 15 The alternative legend presents Helena, the bishop Macarius, and the cross as roughly equal participants “in a narrative that conceded very little to the supernatural.”Footnote 16 Cyril sought to employ that legend, one that he himself helped shape and propagate as Jerusalem’s main cult, in order to bolster the power and prestige of his own episcopal see within the empire.Footnote 17 Without a focus on the physical relic of the cross, the central Jerusalem liturgy and pilgrimage would most likely have concentrated on the location of Christ’s tomb rather than on the crucifixion relics, a point upheld in the works of Eusebius and in the early use of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; the first hagiographic inventio narratives only appeared at the turn of the fifth century.Footnote 18 Cyril’s initial propagandizing of the cross relics and the dissemination of its legends ultimately achieved its purpose. The popularization and spread of the Judas Cyriacus version in the century to follow, however, clearly reflect anxieties around conquering both the real and imagined space mentioned above. That conquest required the authority not only of physical relics, but of specifically Jewish knowledge.
The area around Jerusalem in the fourth century was what Mary Louise Pratt has named a “contact zone,” a social space of colonial encounters in which historically separated cultures clash and struggle with each other, where relationships are established but most often involve ongoing conflict and inequality.Footnote 19 The very real social interaction between Jews and Christians in both ideological and physical holy spaces gave rise to the narrative typologies that shaped the imperial imagination.Footnote 20 Circulation of the Inventio crucis narratives, in particular, held importance for and among imperial women, as Julia Hillner’s recent work has shown.Footnote 21 Moreover, by the late fourth century, Judaism in the Roman empire had religious recognition just as Christianity had, and their clergy enjoyed similar authority and privilege in administration of their communities.Footnote 22
Despite their central presence in the Inventio, however, Jews had been banned from the city and its immediate outskirts since Hadrian’s punitive measures following the Bar Kokhba revolt in 136 CE.Footnote 23 Not only did an interdiction against Jews in Jerusalem remain in effect, but new forms of legally enforced social separation were also emerging across the empire.Footnote 24 Physical restraints notwithstanding, Christian anxiety around the continued Jewish claims over both Jerusalem and the newly-Christian holy places only increased across fourth-century discourse. Paradoxically, the forbidden Jews were now omnipresent in their absence: they “lingered in the imperial Christian imagination”Footnote 25 and were “at the heart of the Christian sacred space.”Footnote 26
The promised land, just like the Hebrew Bible, was considered by Christians to be their own inheritance from the Jews, whose time and covenants with God had passed. Efforts to legitimize this inheritance and concern for proving supersessionist claims abound throughout fourth-century Christian literary traditions. The defense of sacred sites and the propagation of their attendant legends give rise to pronounced tropes of “Jewish knowledge” in Christian tradition, in which a Jewish figure is called upon to reveal a location or a relic, divulge an ancestral story, and/or provide testimony to the truth of Christian claims regarding the site or object.Footnote 27 Moreover, this special authority was ascribed to Jews precisely during those periods that Jews did not have rule over those spaces.Footnote 28 The inclusion of a Jewish figure in authenticating legends of the inventio genre forces an imagined Jewish presence to admit Christian victory while confirming the truth of the physical claim, thereby proving the truth of Christianity itself. Judas Cyriacus, as just one such example, is credited not only with finding the cross and the nails, but is even cited as the one who transmitted the traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition in early versions of the Dormition legend (which follow soon after the composition of the original Judas Cyriacus/cross stories).Footnote 29
As unassailable proof goes, eyewitnesses are useful, but nothing validates a claim to both belief and the land that accompanies it as well as hard physical proof. It is not enough that Jews provide testimony, memory, and authentication, they must also reveal evidence. In many cases that confirmation comes in the form of Jewish bones: relics of patriarchs whose stories are rewritten to suit a Christian narrative. “Christians in Jerusalem built their religious and political authority on the bones of martyrs, and on the fantasy of the cultural colonization of an ancient Jewish patrimony to which they had made themselves heirs.”Footnote 30 Relics, and the stories that accompanied them, were at the heart of the imperialization of the holy spaces. In the Judas Cyriacus story, three sets of Jewish bones are thinly veiled behind the entire premise of the legend: the bones of Stephen the protomartyr, the bones of Joseph, and the bones of Judas Cyriacus himself. The first two are contained in Judas Cyriacus’s direct speech; the last will be examined in further detail later in this essay.
Early in the story, Judas Cyriacus’s author establishes the credibility of his character by having him reveal that he is a descendant of the Christian protomartyr, Stephen. In Acts 7, the Jewish convert Stephen delivers a long speech to a Jewish audience and is subsequently stoned to death. In the Judas Cyriacus tale, Helena’s speech to the assembled Jews is closely patterned on Stephen’s. Neither of these is incidental, as the early fifth-century importance of Stephen as both a Jewish convert and protomartyr was central to the newly discovered relics, holy sites, and the inventio genre.Footnote 31 Stephen’s inventio legend, which dates to just before Judas Cyriacus’s, invokes the figure Gamaliel, who comes to a priest in Jerusalem named Lucianus and reveals the location of Stephen’s bones.Footnote 32 Gamaliel is the Jewish authority figure in this inventio, himself a composite character taken from appearances in the book of Acts, and best known to Christians as the Pharisaic teacher of the Apostle Paul. He appears to Lucianus with a long beard (signaling his Jewishness) wearing a gown with a cross on it (at once marking his testimony as unassailable and confirming the truth of Christianity).Footnote 33 As Jacobs observes, “soon after Lucianus’s discovery, Stephen’s bones traveled outward from Jerusalem, bearers of this new fantasy of imperial Christian domination stamped with the particular emphasis of Jerusalem.. . . The circulating narratives and bones of Saint Stephen and the True Cross provided imperial Christians with a new way of integrating the otherness of the past into a triumphant present.”Footnote 34
The audience of this Inventio sanctae crucis version is not apprised of Judas Cyriacus’s relationship to Stephen by a narrator, but through the character’s own direct speech, creating another link in the chain of authoritative Jewish witnesses. Moreover, when asked to reveal the cross, Judas Cyriacus’s “translated” prayer includes an appeal to God, “who revealed the bones of our father Joseph” (AASS Maii I, Col. 0447C). The contents and significance of the “translated” prayer following his pseudo-Hebrew will be discussed more below. For now, let us discuss his mention of Joseph’s bones.
Moses’s carrying of the bones of Joseph, who was buried in Egypt, is recorded in both Exod 13:19 and Josh 24:32.Footnote 35 But how did Moses know where Joseph had been buried centuries earlier to be able to take his bones? Jewish tradition had recorded that in a midrash: Serach, a wise woman, reveals Joseph’s coffin’s location in the Nile to Moses. Moses throws an amulet with the powerful incantation “Aleh shor” (“Arise, bull”) into the Nile, pronounces a prayer about the Exodus, and Joseph’s coffin rises to the surface.Footnote 36 The identification of Joseph with bull or ox imagery originates with Gen 49:22 and Deut 33:17. The tradition of either “Aleh shor” or the tetragrammaton being inscribed on the amulet seems to come from other midrashic contexts, namely the Golden Calf in Exod 32 from Midrash Tanhuma, Ki Tisa 19: “And there are those who say that Micha. . . took the tablet upon which Moshe wrote, ‘Aleh shor,’ when he raised Joseph’s coffin” 
.Footnote 37
Significantly, the under-studied Actus Sylvestri, circulating during the fifth century alongside the Inventio narratives, also involves Helena and Constantine, a public dispute with learned Jews, and a magical incantation in which a dead bull is brought back to life, with “Arise, bull” as the miraculous punchline uttered by the Roman bishop Sylvester. In this legend, Helena is a convert to Judaism who ultimately converts to Christianity after being won over by Silvester following a public debate with learned Jews.Footnote 38 It is not beyond possibility that the Midrashic traditions are in fact responding directly to these Christian stories. The Actus Sylvestri was also included in the Liber Pontificalis, championed by Gregory of Tours as mentioned above, and widely copied across medieval sources. Finally, the connection to Joseph is already alluded to in the story’s earlier choice of punishment for Judas Cyriacus: like Joseph, he is thrown into a dry well for days until his rescue (Gen 37:24); it is also mentioned later in the Passio (AASS Maii I, Col. 0447C), when Judas Cyriacus mentions “qui liberasti Joseph de lacu” in a prayer for his own deliverance, which might be either freeing Joseph from a “pit” or “body of water,” fitting both earlier images of Joseph neatly: either the pit his brothers employ, or his watery grave.
The similar material in these stories is clear: a knowing Jew recites a powerful Hebrew incantation with a sermonizing prayer, resulting in centuries-buried relics miraculously revealing themselves. Through Judas Cyriacus’s calling to mind this extra-Biblical Jewish inventio in his spoken prayer, Christians co-opt Joseph’s bones and all the Jewish figures in the Jewish tale for their own. The midrashic story is subsumed into the Inventio sanctae crucis. The Jewish figure increases his Jewishness for the listener by referencing a popular Jewish story at the very moment that he Christianizes its contents.Footnote 39
A final explanation for the emergence of this new version lies in Judas Cyriacus’s martyrdom under the emperor Julian; the end of his fictitious life is closely tied to the decision to incorporate him into the narrative of the holy cross. Julian’s short rule (361–363 CE) threatened to wreak havoc for the nascent Christianity of the empire. As someone who had left Christianity, Julian (“the Apostate,” as the ancient church had deemed him) saw the Jews as allies in his quest to de-Christianize his rule. He removed many of the punitive measures against them and reputedly backed the building of the Third Temple, whose construction had supposedly begun when the earthquake of May 363 destroyed Jerusalem and much of the remaining Jewish life in its outskirts and the Galilee. Julian himself was killed the following month while retreating from Persian battles, frustrating the brief challenge to Christianity’s imperial designs. Following the perceived threat of Julian’s rule, however, the Christian need for superiority surged stronger than ever. As Amnon Linder notes, “Julian’s plan to rebuild the Temple and restore its traditional ritual must be appreciated in the context of his struggle with the Christian Church: the whole project was designed to defeat Constantine’s Jerusalem project by undermining its more important ideological foundation—its exclusive character with regard to the Jews.”Footnote 40 Judas Cyriacus’s defiant speeches toward Julian in his passio are directly related to the Christian struggle for cultural and religious dominance, a struggle that only the authority of a Jewish voice can validate.
To be clear, the figure of Judas Cyriacus was not constructed purely out of Christian ideas that took on a life of their own in subsequent decades and centuries. Analyses of relics and their inventio legends are often framed either as successionist or competitive dualities, when in fact the political and social circumstances were more fluid and multivalent.Footnote 41 Rather, Judas Cyriacus is a lively figure at his own narrative conception, constructed from a socio-religious and political struggle in which his voice must drown out competing claims. Footnote 42 Ultimately, all of this leads to one solution: at the culmination of the Cyriacus story, Helena bans the Jews from Jerusalem. The Holy Cross has triumphed, Christianity has defeated Judaism, and Helena can create a true Christian Holy Land.Footnote 43 The echoes of this triumphant expulsion will repeat across centuries to come.
Pseudo-Hebrew: The Phenomenon and the Problem
From its earliest known appearance in Greek, Cyriacus’s speech is described as “in Hebrew,” yet is written in Hebrew-like nonsensical syllables and words. The oldest Greek source, as it is transcribed by Johannes Straubinger, appears thus: “AΚPAAΚ PABPI MI ΛAMMEΔΔΩΧ AZZAEΛ ZΩΘΦEN ΦAΥΘIOΥ BAPOΥΚΚAΘA AΔΩNAIE EΛΩΪMNANE ΔACΦIΔΩN BAPOΥΧ AΘA CIAMΩP AMAMΩP ΪΛEM AΔΩNABIP AΔΩNAI BEΛENΩN ΚAΘA EΛΩEIM AΧEΛ ΔAΔAΥA ΔAME Ω EΛΧMAPΩ ΪPOBA ICTPA AZAZIP ABPA NΩ ΚAΘA AMEN.”Footnote 44
Below are two Carolingian Latin manuscripts’ versions of his prayer, which contain several remarkable similarities to the Greek sounds from four centuries earlier:
Diacrach. Rabri. milas. filon. anabonachbiro. helomil̄a. maddoca. Iahel. Iod. phaide. fancius. barucataadona. heẏloi. elegmana. abraxio. athetlal. atanius. tranbauIit. monachata. dauid. Dauia. rahel. belben. segel. Gemman. ihuFootnote 45
barucatha. Iamnuhel. tarcusiar. namedo. atthi. abachat. tazael. mellico. nabatiba. Zabali. zoarābethieli. adonmel. aeloh.Footnote 46
After so much direct speech in the legend, why must Judas Cyriacus suddenly be made to speak in Hebrew when seeking the cross relics? Hebrew’s status among Christians as the language of not only the Old Testament, but also of God and the angels, implies that Jews, by virtue of their intimacy and association with that language, have a special relationship and authority to the text.Footnote 47 Once again, Jewish authority is invoked, but just as before, the relationship is equivocal: it is the language of the Bible, but it is also the language of ineffable mystery and power. Mystery and miracle are easily turned to magic and sorcery. Judas Cyriacus’s “Hebrew” fits into the pattern already noted: it marks him as Jewish, and is at once both exotic and tamed (through reassuring “translation”) for the listener.Footnote 48 The “translation” is a lengthy prayer-sermon that borrows liberally from biblical passages, particularly Isaiah, Revelation, and the epistles; here are excerpts from the opening and closing:
God, God, who made heaven and earth, who gauged heaven with the palm of your hand and measured the earth with your fist; who is seated upon the chariot of the cherubim, and they themselves are flying in the courses of the air with immense light.. . . And now, Lord. . . work for us, O Lord, this miracle. . . just as you heard your servant Moses and showed him the bones of our father Joseph; so even now, if it be your will, show us the hidden treasure. . . that I too may believe in the crucified Christ, for he is the King of Israel, both now and forever.
Deus, Deus, qui feciste caelum et terram, qui palmo metisti caelum et pugno terram mensurasti; qui sedes super curram Cherubin, et ipsa sunt volantia in aeris cursibus luce immensa. . . Et nunc, Domine … fac nobis, Domine, prodigium hoc … sicut exaudisti famulum tuum Moysen, et ostendisti ei ossa patris nostri Joseph; ita et nunc, si est voluntas tua, ostende nobis occultum thesaurum … ut et ego credam crucifixo Christo, quia ipse est Rex Israel, et nunc et in secula seculorum.Footnote 49
His powerful “Hebrew” speech, just as in the midrash he quotes, reveals the relic of the cross; it is a heavenward prayer that functions as a magical incantation to summon a relic. It is addressed to God, but ultimately results in the devil’s appearance. It signals the essence of Judas Cyriacus’s Jewishness but, once spoken, results in his immediate conversion to Christianity. Pseudo-Hebrew in this narrative mediates a liminal place between heaven and hell, between reality and fiction, between prayer and sorcery, between Jew and Christian.
While ostensibly divine and miraculous within the context of the Inventio sanctae crucis, this moment would have also been theatrically recognizable to its early audience as containing elements of magical formulae.Footnote 50 Magical formulae, both spoken and inscribed, along with relics ascribed with healing power were common across the ancient world, so it is no surprise to find a combination of both here in a fifth-century Christian story.Footnote 51 What will concern us for this discussion is not so much its existence at all, but rather its existence in context: why this material in this way at this time? The Judas Cyriacus legend contains three elements evoking miraculous properties. The cross and the nails, as material relics, may be most recognizable to modern readers; the third is the content of Judas Cyriacus’s prayer.
There is a great deal of scholarly material devoted to magic in the ancient world, as well as to Christian relic traditions, and a thorough examination of those would be well beyond our scope. Let it suffice here to accept the tradition of the importance of the material items as an adaptation of predominating belief, within the political machinations outlined above; a few further observations will be noted in the examples discussed below. The preparatory evocation “lifted up his voice to God in Hebrew” and the pseudo-Hebrew words which follow it, however, as well as much of the content of the “translated” prayer, are of significance.Footnote 52
The boundary differentiating divine healing and miracles from magic and sorcery is set by institutional approval and communal norms for observance; however, across the ancient and medieval world, just because an amulet, incantation, or remedy was not sanctioned certainly did not mean it was not considered effective. Hebrew was perceived as particularly powerful among non-Jews by virtue of its exotic unintelligibility and seeming mystery: papyri and amulets from Hellenistic antiquity onwards display the use of Hebrew, Aramaic, and pseudo-versions of both.Footnote 53 Collections such as the Sefer HaRazim, for example, demonstrate the popular belief in the powers of names—names of God but also of angels—including names and invocations from biblical sources but also those far outside it.Footnote 54 Judas Cyriacus’s prayer contains one such powerful, widely-used name, “Abrasax/Abraxio.” Other recognizable names and Hebrew snippets (“Baruch ata adonai,” “Elohai,” “Adon,” and so forth) combine to give an air of verisimilitude.Footnote 55
Judas Cyriacus’s prayer is not only a dramatic list of names and sounds, however; it has a direct connection to the relic of the cross it is meant to summon, and to the nails of the crucifixion which appear later in the story. To place these items within the larger historical and geographical context, it is relevant here to examine three popular authors whose works on healing and the supernatural circulated in the Mediterranean world through the centuries of early Christianity: Pliny, Origen, and Chrysostom. Long before the inventio narratives, the Roman historian Pliny (ca. 23–79 CE) cites a variety of powerful healing amulets, including nails previously used in crucifixion or a piece of a cross: “These wrap up in wool and tie round the neck. . . a piece of a nail taken from a cross, or else a cord taken from a crucifixion” (iidem. . . fragmentum clavi a cruce involutum lana collo subnectunt aut spartum e cruce).Footnote 56
In the earlier Christian world, Origen (ca. 185–ca. 225 CE), who was familiar with midrashic material, remarked specifically on the practice of adjuring of demons or spirits as “Jewish” and as connected to Hebrew.Footnote 57 In the late fourth century, John Chrysostom (ca. 347–407 CE) gave a series of sermons, The Homilies Against the Jews, in which he made excoriating claims to discourage Christians from interacting with Jews across nearly every aspect of daily life, including lengthy sections condemning Christians who go to their Jewish neighbors for healing. The vituperative content of Homily VIII 5.6 makes it clear that Christians are clearly regularly making use of “their incantations, their amulets, their charms and spells,” which Chrysostom admits may in fact be effective but are nonetheless forbidden to Christians.Footnote 58
Among Jewish textual witnesses, there is ample evidence of nonsense phrases from the scores of surviving Aramaic “magic” or incantation bowls and various amulets and their written contents, alongside codified magical phrases.Footnote 59 The Mishnah (compiled ca. 200 CE) and the Talmud (the Mishnah with its accompanying legal discussions, the Gemara, compiled ca. 500–700) also record many such phrases and objects. For example, the Talmudic tractate b.Shabbat (67a) also contains a curious mention in both the Mishna and Gemara of the use of crucifixion nails for healing, alongside other magical medicinal objects such as a fox tooth or a locust egg (just as in Pliny). Even later in the Middle Ages, Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah allows the use of these items if their only purpose is curative and not idolatry.Footnote 60 There are also a host of folk remedies and nonsensical incantations. In one discussion over unlearned people, the rabbis liken an unwise teacher to a sorcerer who chants but does not know the meaning of the words.Footnote 61 The Gemara’s point is less crucial to our purpose here than the fact that the rabbis quote a folk saying acknowledging the common practice of incomprehensible magical incantations. A few of the practices cited in the Talmud are remarkably like aspects of Judas Cyriacus’s pseudo-Hebrew:
1) b.Yoma 84a, with nonsensical words for writing on an amulet: “Canti canti kelirus. And some say to him [to write]: Kandi kandi keloros, Yah, Yah, Lord of Hosts, amen, amen, Selah.”
2) b.Pesachim 112a, with nonsensical words traditionally considered to be demons’ names (not to conjure them but to adjure them): “Lul, shafan, anigron, anirdafin, between the stars I sit, between lean and fat I go.”
3) b.Avodah Zara 12b, featuring another demon whose name is pronounced in diminution until it disappears completely (signaling the disappearance of the demon): “Shavrirei verirei rirei yirei rei.”
4) In addition to the objects mentioned above, b.Shabbat 67a also contains a number of incantations, including some against demons, various ameliatory phrases, and these nonsensical words used as angel’s names: “Baz, Bazya, Mas, Masya, Kas, Kasya, Sharlai, and Amarlai, these are the angels who were sent from the land of Sodom and to heal painful boils. Bazach, Bazich, Bazbazich, Masmasich, Kamon, Kamich. . .”
These kinds of examples of nonsense syllables that fit into a Hebrew sound world can also be found in healing amulets and incantation bowls. One amulet against fever from Horvat Kannah in the Lower Galilee mentions Abrasax and also reads (in part), “rbyhw nhwmy’l Shamshi’el, llwzbh mr’pwt mr’wt’h’h’h sssss.”Footnote 62 Similarly, an Aramaic incantation bowl reads, “In the name of Saksan, saksin kak astoh yofet yofateiha from the burning fire, sakion.”Footnote 63
These examples from Hellenistic Greek, Christian, and Jewish sources in late antiquity all attest to the same phenomena: the power attributed to talismanic healing objects, particularly crucifixion relics, alongside the proliferation of incantations in pseudo-Hebrew across traditions.Footnote 64 Judas Cyriacus’s “Hebrew” taps into an established magical tradition, marking him as a miracle-worker. However, while someone with Hebrew knowledge (such as the Talmud’s audience) would have recognized this magical “prayer” as a blend of nonsense syllables or presumed angelic names, a Christian unfamiliar with Hebrew would be meant to hear the sounds as Hebrew.Footnote 65 Seen in this context, pseudo-Hebrew in the Inventio claims these uniquely for Christianity in a particular way, but his use of it in his passio takes those associations and customs and reasserts his intractable Jewishness even at the moment of his approaching martyrdom.
Conversion: The Impossibility of the Christian Jew
The Judas Cyriacus combined narrative is a prime example of the essential interrelatedness of the inventio, the passio, and the adversus Iudaeos disputatio genres.Footnote 66 Together with Jewish disputatio figures across the history of Christian apologetics, Judas Cyriacus’s voice is entirely fictitious. He is an imaginary Jew made to speak the words Christians wish him to say. His is a conversion story, a story about Jewish baptism, and a story about the devil, a story in which his voice controls the dramatic action, and yet a story in which his Jewishness ultimately remains suspect despite public verbal confession and miracles, and even long after his baptism.
A. Judas? Cyriacus? Typology, Naming, and the Baptismal Problem
Interestingly, in neither the Inventio nor his passio is Judas Cyriacus ever not Judas. He does not receive his new name at his baptism, but only upon his ordination as bishop. Even in the passio, at the end of his life, he introduces himself as Judas. Most liturgical-hagiographical witnesses keep these distinctions, but some vernacular versions continue to use Judas indiscriminately after his renaming at ordination. He never completely assumes a new identity the way in which an ordinary convert would be given a new name at baptism to signify “new birth.”
It is no mistake that Judas’s Jewish name is “Iudas,” which stands in for both Jews in general (Iudaeus) and for Jesus’s former disciple, Judas Iscariot.Footnote 67 Iudei/Iudah is originally a neutral toponymic, meaning of or from the land of Judah/Judea, the source of modern English’s “Jewish.” Footnote 68 Judas Iscariot, originally one of Jesus’s twelve disciples, famously betrayed Jesus to the authorities following the Last Supper, leading to his arrest and crucifixion.Footnote 69 Judas Iscariot’s role in early Christianity and his reception history requires a more nuanced and comprehensive treatment than can be afforded here. However, it should be noted that for the listener of this type of Christian narrative, he typologically represents all Jews. All Jews are thereby unbelieving, unfaithful, deceitful crucifiers. The figure of Judas Cyriacus, presented as a “second Judas,” is therefore not only meant to redeem the perfidious actions of the “first Judas,” but also serves as the type for eschatological Jews, who will eventually admit their errors and convert, as promised by Paul in Romans.
As Cyriacus, his baptismal name, he is “Lordly,” or “of the Lord.” Cyriacus (Kyriakos) is a transliteration of the adjectival form of Kyrios, a title of Christ in Phil 2:11, and the first word of the Ordinary of the Mass, Kyrie. When his Jewish name, Judas, is juxtaposed to his baptismal name, Cyriacus, an impossible polarity is forcibly welded together: he is marked as a “literal” Jew by a name meaning “Jew”; he is branded as the “second Judas” and therefore the betrayer of Christ and architype of all Jews; and he is at the same time Cyriacus, a descriptor for Jesus himself. Judas Cyriacus is thus suspended in an impossibility, sharing space with Schrödinger’s cat, both betrayer and redeemer at once. Even baptized and with an appended name, he remains indelibly, impossibly, eternally Jewish.
B. Identity after Baptism: Christian? Or Jewish?
Judas Cyriacus’s character embodies the central difficulty for Jewish converts. His story is compelling to Christianity precisely because “[t]he life of the Jewish convert corroborates the Christian structure of the history of salvation and mirrors it in nuce.”Footnote 70 The very function of the conversion narrative mirrors Christian eschatology, as Ryan Szpiech has demonstrated.Footnote 71 Christianity therefore sets up an impossibility for Jews: they must convert, but are still considered ineradicably Jewish even after they do. Even the word “Jew” creates contradictions for Christians, highlighting the historical and scriptural fragility of Christian identity.Footnote 72 Anxieties arising from this fragile identity result in newly baptized Christians being perceived as occupying a no-man’s land, because they are feared to be unstable.Footnote 73 This heightened apprehension surrounding identity and “true” conversions becomes a staple feature around conversion and conversion narratives.
From the seventh century on, Jewish conversion was particularly fraught. For example, in 630 Heraclius reinstated Hadrian and Constantine’s expulsions of Jews from Jerusalem (and a three-mile radius) and issued a decree about the same time requiring baptism for all Jews and their households across the Roman empire.Footnote 74 A few years later in 633, the Fourth Council of Toledo found it necessary to ban Jewish converts from appointment to public office to the second generation.Footnote 75 “Sincere” conversions increasingly involved the use of force, a pattern perpetuated and reinforced by popular conversion narratives such as Judas Cyriacus’s.Footnote 76
The conversion story nested within the Judas Cyriacus Inventio follows a pattern common to Christian conversion narratives: the convert secretly believes, suffers penance or punishment, then finally makes a public confession which is followed by baptism. In this legend, however, the added element of the devil’s arrival stalls the baptismal action. Judas Cyriacus’s interaction with the devil is final confirmation of Judas’s role as a “second Judas”—in fact, the devil makes the explicit connection between them, announcing it for everyone to hear. Baptism only follows after the “Hebrew” prayer, the miracles, the confession, and the devil’s appearance: the narrator remarks, “Judas, receiving the baptism of incorruption in Christ Jesus—he was shown to be faithful by the previous signs—[Helena] commended him the then-bishop, who baptized him in Christ” (Iudas accipiens incorruptionis baptismum in Christo Iesu de praecedentibus signis ostensus est fidelis commendavit eum episcopo, qui in illo tempore erat, qui baptizavit eum in Christo Iesu).Footnote 77
In other words, the narration makes a pointed effort to alert the listener that it was not enough for Judas Cyriacus to profess belief; nor was it enough for him to work a miracle; he had to also publicly be identified as a second Judas and encounter the devil directly before being accepted as suitable for baptism. Jews are regularly portrayed in early Christian literature as unconvinced by miracles. Therefore any conversion following a miraculous event, such as Judas Cyriacus’s, was viewed with suspicion. As we have seen, baptizands were already at risk of igniting fears around identity and sincerity, and these fears were only multiplied when those being baptized were Jews, who (literally) embodied disbelief for Christian onlookers. Therefore, “stories of miraculous conversion carried their own risks, pointing to the possibilities of expedient conversions that lacked the requisite depth of faith.”Footnote 78 Hence it is not baptism in this story that has the power to render Judas Cyriacus a Christian; Jews must paradoxically “prove” their Christianity while still Jewish. That the final words of his “translated” “Hebrew” prayer would proclaim Jesus as Messiah is not merely a dramatic flourish of storytelling.
C. The Problem of Jewish Physicality for Conversion
Throughout their conversion narratives, Jews must continually signal their Jewishness, which Steven F. Kruger notes refers not only to their own conversion, but to Christianity itself: “replicating the triumphal movement of Christian revelation, individual conversion also calls up the specters of Jewish identity that, declared dead, nonetheless continue to haunt Christian self-definitions, as excluded from but still necessary to them.”Footnote 79 Judas Cyriacus also fulfills Christian ideals for converts by remaining single and celibate. Moral transformation for Jewish converts meant forsaking sexual expression and kinship ties, denying their physicality to embrace the spiritual, Christian model of chastity.Footnote 80 This reifies the Platonic dichotomy interpreted by Christians: the “fleshly” is tainted, Jewish, worldly, and evil while the “spiritual” is pure, Christian, heavenly, and sacred. As many theologians have noted, this creates a tension for Christianity between corporality as essentially corrupt and yet a central necessary good of the incarnation of Christ. Kruger writes, “This incoherence. . . ultimately reflects a deep ambivalence within Christianity about the viscerally powerful and disturbing embodiments at the heart of the Christian mystery itself, an ambivalence worked out not only through Christians’ own bodily celebrations and asceticisms but also upon others’ bodies in acts of violence both symbolic and real.”Footnote 81
Graphic and generally horrific violence enacted upon the body of the martyr is a central feature of passio stories. As seen in the opening summary, Judas Cyriacus’s Passio is not only no exception, but might be said to even exceed the more extreme in the genre. Judas Cyriacus’s body is punished before his baptism, but then again both inside and out at his death. In the midst of his final tortures, however, Judas Cyriacus’s corporeal gens must again be signaled for the listener as Jewish: upon being forced to drink boiling lead, he suddenly prays again in “Hebrew,” with many of the same features as the first prayer, including a recognizable Hebrew opening followed by magical syllables and names, as shown above. He then continues to speak after swallowing the lead. The Jewish voice cannot even be stopped by torturous means. After reminding the listener of his essential Jewishness using “Hebrew,” this prompt is mitigated by a second baptism, this one in boiling oil, about which he remarks, “And making the sign of the cross on his forehead, the saint entered, saying, ‘Christ, [you] who sanctified the Jordan, and filled your predecessor John with wisdom (who bathed you in the water of life incorruptible); Behold, now I baptize again with oil. I have yet the third bathing [=baptism] of blood, the consummation of martyrdom, which I have long awaited’ ” (Et faciens Sanctus in fronte sua signaculum Crucis, intravit dicens; Qui Iordanem sanctificasti, Christe, & antecessorem tuum Joannem replesti sapientia, qui donasti lavacrum per aquam incorruptionis vitæ; ecce nunc iterum oleo baptizer: jam iterum habeam tertium lavacrum sanguinis, martyrii perfectionem, quam ante multum temporis expecto).Footnote 82
There are in fact two oils used in traditional baptismal rites: the oil of catechumens, and the oil of chrism, whose consecration prayer includes the mention of Christ at the Jordan. The first is used prior to the water rite of baptism; the latter is used after it. In the case of this story, Judas’s actions would seem to signal that the Jewishness he continues to carry with him requires a last confirming move—to be sealed with oil as a final mitigation before his third baptism, the “baptism of blood,” martyrdom. Judas’s first baptism could only come after torture, use of pseudo-Hebrew, multiple miracles, public profession, and a rebuking encounter with the devil. His second and third likewise come only after prolonged torture, miraculous speech in pseudo-Hebrew, public profession, and a rebuking encounter with the antichrist figure, Julian.
Conclusion
The narrative manipulation of the fictional figure of Judas Cyriacus provides an ideal case study for close examination of the complicated entanglement of Jewish and Christian identities in late antiquity. His pseudo-Hebrew speeches in the Inventio sanctae crucis and his Passio “baptize” the widespread intercultural use of magic, talismanic healing objects, and incantations for Christian use, while simultaneously marking Judas Cyriacus himself as Jewish even at the moments of the discovery of the cross and throughout his own Christian martyrdom. His complex character’s contradictory and paradoxical identity creates polarities at every turn: his name is meant to evoke both Judas Iscariot and Jesus Christ; he at once embodies both Christian tropes of the perfidious Jew and imperial Christian supersessionist triumph. His “Hebrew” speech is a magical incantation summoning miraculous events, “translated” into pious sermonizing prayer. He is made to prove the sincerity of his conversion over and over, even at the final moments of his martyrdom, and yet at each moment must mark these expressions as Jewish through his speech. Discovery of Christendom’s holiest relics, public proclamations, baptism, ordination, church leadership, torture, and brutal martyrdom are not enough to escape his eternal, ineradicable Jewishness. Through his magical words, the message of the Judas Cyriacus legend rang out across the centuries; what those words conjured in the end, however, was not rediscovered relics and remembering, but deliberate erasure and forgetting. These stories serve as a microcosm of Christianity’s deeply conflicted approach and ambivalence over the meaning of baptism and the possibility of true conversion for Jews.
