As history's archetypal traitor, the fate of Judas was always going to be a source of interest to early Christians. The man who betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver has been an enigma to commentators ever since.Footnote 1 According to the canonical evangelists, Judas died shortly after betraying Jesus to the chief priests. In Matthew, Judas hanged himself, while in the first chapter of Acts his middle is split open and his bowels spill out.Footnote 2 By the second century, Christians had begun to expand upon and develop the Lukan and Matthean traditions about the death of Judas. In a fragment of Papias preserved only in the fourth-century Christian writer Apollinaris of Laodicea, we learn that Judas’ flesh was so bloated ‘that he was unable to pass through a place where a wagon passes easily’.Footnote 3 And, after some period of agonising existence, ‘he finally died in his own place’.
Papias’ description of the death of Judas goes to great lengths to highlight the exaggerated grotesqueness of his bodily form. His head alone was so bloated that it could not fit through a thoroughfare intended for wagons, and his eyelids were so swollen ‘that he could not see the light’ (τὸ φῶς μὴ βλέπειν). His eyes were not only obscured from view by his eyelids but were so sunken beneath the surface of his face that they could not be seen even with the aid of doctor's tools. His penis, too, was disfigured by the swelling and when he urinated ‘pus and worms’ (ἰχῶράς τε καὶ σκώληκας) passed from every part of his body. After his eventual death the place of his passing was perpetually marred by the stench of his body. According to Papias’ source, ‘To this day no one can pass that place unless they hold their nose, so great was the discharge from his body and so far did it spread over the ground.’Footnote 4 The already graphic scene in Acts 1.18, in which Judas’ bowels burst out of his body, gains greater definition.
The purpose of this article is to examine this depiction of Judas and his death in light of broader ancient medical, biographical and physiognomical literature and to explore the ways in which the presentation of his physical condition and the manner of his death are intimately connected to the perception of his moral failings. It will further propose that his portrayal be understood in light of a broader ancient conversation about the corrupting and irreversible effects of acquisitiveness, or greed.
1. Worms
Judas’ death seems to be the result of what we moderns might call a parasitical infection. The pus and presence of worms as symptoms of Judas’ condition are familiar in a somewhat different way to ancient audiences as well. Death by worms was something of a professional hazard for evil kings and emperors.Footnote 5 It is reminiscent of Elijah's prophesy of King Jehoram's death, and Pausanias describes the death of Cassander in a similar, less detailed account: ‘He was filled with dropsy and from the dropsy came worms while he was yet alive.’Footnote 6 Antiochus IV of Syria, too, met an unpleasant end when his body ‘swarmed with worms … his flesh rotted away’ and people refused to carry his litter because of the repulsive stench that emanated from his form (2 Macc 9.9). And, according to Josephus, Herod the Great died from a combination of swollen midsection, gangrenated nether regions, ulcerated bowls and worms.Footnote 7
Judas, of course, is no ruler, but, as Jesse Robertson has noted, Papias follows an emerging literary trope about the retributive and punitive deaths of bad rulers.Footnote 8 Over the following centuries the literary genre would reach maturity in Lactantius’ On the Death of Persecuting Emperors, which regularly involved painful, worm-swarming ailments (e.g. of Galerius in 33.6–8). The same trope is turned on heretics, for example in Ps.-Martyrius’ Funerary Speech for John Chrysostom and in the reception of the death of Arius.Footnote 9
Death by worms is not always the consequence of poor leadership. When Plutarch describes the death of Sulla (whose bowels had become ulcerated, rotten and transfigured into worms), it is presented as the direct result of his own licentiousness. Had he not spent so much time with theatrical types and harpists, he would not have aggravated a minor condition.Footnote 10 Plutarch is also aware of other, less celebrated, individuals who suffered from the same ailment: Acastus the son of Pelias, Alcman the lyric poet, a slave who led a rebellion in Sicily, a lawyer, and even a jurist.Footnote 11
Certainly in the ancient imagination being eaten alive by worms was a particularly horrific form of death.Footnote 12 A first-century ce curse tablet discovered near modern Frankfurt in Germany wishes that ‘worms, cancer and maggots’ penetrate the ‘hands, head, feet … limbs and marrow’ of a thief who stole a cloak.Footnote 13 Worms were also associated with death, decay and punishment in ancient Jewish and Christian literature. The connection between gehenna, unquenchable fire and worms is established in Isa 66.24 and proved influential in the following centuries. Jesus appears to endorse Isaiah's punitive worms in Mark 9.47–8.Footnote 14 Several tours of hell describe the unceasing consumption of the body by worms as a feature of the tortures of hell (Acts Thom. 56, Apoc. Pet. 9, Apoc. Paul 39, 42).Footnote 15 The excretion of worms appears as a tool of punishment in the descriptions of hell found early Christian apocalypses. In the Apocalypse of Paul, for example, the deacon who ate up the offerings and committed fornication wades through fire as ‘worms came out of his mouth and from his nostrils and he was groaning and weeping and crying’ (Apoc. Paul 36).
In her work on the apocalypses, Meghan Henning has noted that parasite infections are frequently identified as a womanly condition in medical literature. In the Hippocratic corpus, On Diseases goes so far as to identify the uterus is the only place in which tapeworms and roundworms could be formed. Henning's suggestion that punishment by worm consumption feminises the punished in hell may play some role here. Even though Papias (and his sources) were composed while the logic of hell was still being developed, the death of Judas can be understood as anticipating the post-mortem retribution that would face the enemies of God. And, rhetorically speaking, the tortures of hell and the death of Judas serve the same pedagogical focus: they educate their audiences about the perils of sin.Footnote 16
2. Dropsy
The description of Judas’ death is not merely a description of the last moments of his life but also of his medical condition and physical appearance. The references to his inability to pass through a passageway and the inability of a doctor to find his eyes raises the narrative possibility that Judas had tried to enter the city and seek medical assistance. We might infer from the description, therefore, that he lived with this condition for a period of time. Indeed we are told that he travelled in a kind of counterpoint to the apostolic mission. He did not, therefore, spontaneously swell up moments before his death.Footnote 17
Moreover, the description of Judas’ body is intended to conjure up images of his life as well as his death. Recent scholarly analysis of the death of Judas has rightly noted the rhetorical and generic function of the description of Judas’ body.Footnote 18 Christopher Zeichmann argues that the passage is a form of literary ekphrasis that follows the conventions of description outlined in Aphthonius and other rhetoricians.Footnote 19 Using the related frameworks of monster theory and disability studies, Anna-Rebecca Solevåg has highlighted the monstrous and disabling character of the description of Judas.Footnote 20
In medical literature, broadly speaking, swollen bodies were a symptom of dropsy (known today as oedema) or ὕδρωψ.Footnote 21 As a condition, dropsy was characterised as an inability to process fluid coupled with an unchecked thirst.Footnote 22 Though it was not difficult to cure in the beginning, the patient's inability to modify their thirst made dropsy difficult to contain and treat.Footnote 23
Ancient accounts of oedema refer to different forms of the condition that affected different parts of the body. The common element, though, is swelling, which could afflict the legs, the whole body, the genitals or face.Footnote 24 The second-century physician Galen refers to a specific form of dropsy that affects the whole body due to a swelling of αἰδοῖα, the same term used of Judas’ genitals.Footnote 25 The diagnosis of dropsy is not explicitly made here, but some of the language used to describe the swollenness of Judas’ body also appears in Aretaeus of Cappadocia's description of the disease. Additionally, Aretaeus identifies swollen genitals, the excretion of pus, discharges from the body and repulsive smells as symptoms of the condition (Sign. diut. 2.1). The prognosis for the sufferer was difficult: the condition was notoriously difficult to treat, being consistently painful and regularly fatal. Aretaeus writes, ‘Dropsy is indeed an affection unseemly to behold and difficult to endure; for very few escape from it, and they more by fortune and the gods, than by art; for all the greater ills the gods only can remedy’ (Sign. diut. 1.13). One Hippocratic text recommends draining the excess liquid via an incision, but notes the dangers involved in such a procedure: ‘Whenever cases of empyema or dropsy are treated by the knife of cautery, if the pus or water flow away all at once, a fatal result is certain’ (Aph. 6.27).Footnote 26
3. The Sins of Judas
Recent scholarship is in agreement that the description of Judas’ body coupled with the narrative of his death are intended to illustrate his disreputable character.Footnote 27 Papias himself supports their conclusions, describing Judas as wandering the world as a ‘great example of impiety (μέγα … ἀσεβείας ὑπόδειγμα)’.Footnote 28 The more precise question for us, therefore, is what kind of impiety Judas exemplifies for Papias.
In physiognomic handbooks, obesity is associated with a cluster of vices related to excess consumption, primarily gluttony, fornication, excessive drink, greed and a lack of intelligence.Footnote 29 A swollen head indicates not pride, but stupidity: ‘lack of knowledge and understanding, and indifference’.Footnote 30 Swollen eyes, in particular, had a particular position of prominence as they served as the ‘gateway to the heart’ and the source of ‘the truest information’ about that of the subject.Footnote 31 Thick lower eyelids, Polemon writes, are a sign of a philanderer, while heavy upper eyelids suggest a slothful layabout. Heavy lids, furthermore, are a sign that the subject is contemplating evil and should be judged for ‘treachery and faithlessness’.Footnote 32
Judas’ form, however, and the likelihood that ancient readers would have understood him to suffer from dropsy, directs us to think of Judas as greedy. Dropsy is specifically noted as a disease of the wealthy in a wide variety of ancient texts. Lucian includes dropsy, along with gout, consumption and pneumonia, in a list of the maladies of the rich.Footnote 33 Stobaeus notes that ‘Diogenes compared money-lovers to dropsies; as dropsies, though filled with fluid, crave drink, so money-lovers, though loaded with money, crave more of it, yet both to their demise. For their desires increase the more they acquire the objects of their cravings.’Footnote 34 In the case of Polybius, the incurable greed of a man named Scopas is explicitly compared to the condition of dropsy on the basis that neither Scopas nor a dropsy-sufferer can be sated.Footnote 35 As Chad Harstock describes it, ‘The victim drinks because he or she is thirsty, but the body retains the fluid rather than processes it; thus the victim remains thirsty and continues to drink until something bad happens, like the bursting of organs. Dropsy, then, is an appropriate metaphor for wealth and greed, as the victim thirsts for more and more wealth, only to find that the insatiable thirst for wealth is eventually his or her undoing.’Footnote 36
Perhaps pushing further, into the philosophical underpinnings of ancient medical diagnoses, can be of some assistance here, particularly when it comes to the association of Judas’ body with greed. After all, the association of girth with a voracious appetite for food and drink seems instinctive to modern readers who understand weight gain as the consequence of overconsumption, but its association with monetary greed is more obscure. The question here is not, ‘From where does Papias get the idea that greed and gluttony are bad?’ – any cursory reading of ancient literature will reveal a dislike of greed, gluttony and debauchery – but rather, ‘How and why are they linked and what does this link tell us about the fate of Judas?’
An initial distinction can be made between the moral character of wealth and greed. Judas has not made himself wealthy by acquiring thirty pieces of silver but at least one tradition, probably unknown to Papias, describes Judas as a thief who skimmed money from the common purse (John 12.6). While they will often be used as a gloss for one another, wealth and greed are not identical: the former can be morally neutral while the latter is always negative. In prophetic texts as well as the writings of followers of Jesus, the wealthy are often condemned for their failure to assist and care for the poor.Footnote 37 For Roman writers directing their compositions to the elite, wealth was a potentially dangerous state of affairs. In spending their money on luxurious goods – architecture, dress and elaborate banquets – the wealthy might come to suffer from the more damaging vice of greed, or acquisitiveness. We might think here of the case of the rich young man who intended to become a follower of Jesus but was unable to give up his possessions (Matt 19.16–30). It is not his wealth that is his problem, but rather the manner in which it has corrupted him. It is not accidental that both Judas and, metaphorically speaking, the rich young man are unable to pass through the gates of the city.
Acquisitiveness, broadly speaking, and its related vices of gluttony, drunkenness, fornication and greed, is negative not only because of the manner in which it might be said to deprive or exploit others, but more directly because of the corrosive effects it has on the individual himself. In his essay On the Love of Wealth, Plutarch remarks, ‘From what other ills then does wealth deliver us, if it does not even deliver us from the craving for it? Nay, drink allays the desire of drink, and food is a remedy for hunger … but neither silver nor gold allays the craving for money, nor does the greed of gain ever cease from acquiring new gains.’Footnote 38 He directly relates financial greed to gluttony when he concludes shortly thereafter that ‘as those who drink when no longer thirsty, or eat when no longer hungry, vomit up with the excess the rest as well that was taken to satisfy hunger or thirst, so those who seek the useless and superfluous do not even retain the necessary. Such then is the condition of one sort of lover of wealth.’Footnote 39
Not every moralist agreed with Plutarch that even hunger and thirst can be satiated by indulgence. In one of his less well known psychological writings, Galen insists that even without a diagnosis of dropsy an insatiable appetite for food can corrupt the whole person and leave them both physically and morally compromised so that they are beyond the reach of any kind of assistance.Footnote 40 The motif of the glutton, therefore, overlaps with that of the dropsy-sufferer. Horace describes the glutton as a ‘man who is swollen and pale from excess [who] will find no comfort in oysters or sea fish or grouse’.Footnote 41
Roman law, too, worried about how greed, gluttony and the indulgence of the appetites could corrupt the body politic. From the Republican period onward legislators sought to fight the corrupting influence of luxury through the passage of sumptuary laws that would limit indulgence.Footnote 42 Indulgence and greed had the potential to corrupt individuals, cities and entire empires.
If we consider the body of Judas in this broader cultural context, the moral diagnosis is one of greed. While Judas could have been condemned for a lack of constancy, impatience, betrayal or simply treason, Papias focuses on Judas’ financial gain, and indicts him for greed. His physical condition, whether he suffers from dropsy or a more mundane case of intemperate self-indulgence, is the outward manifestation of an internal corruption. In the same way that such conditions turned monarchs into pariahs, Judas’ condition isolated him from society; he must remain in a single location and is unable to move about freely. His death is a sign that he was properly punished by God for his offences in a manner that was both consistent with the most gruesome deaths imaginable, and is also anticipatory of post-mortem punishments. In this way the description of the death of Judas both satisfies the need for divine retribution, and serves as a pedagogical example for other Christians about the dangers of greed.
