The Two Judases. The Betrayer and the Friend

Judas Son of James, with the Heart of a Child Only once does he break his silence, when he asks Jesus, “Lord, how can it be that you show yourself to us and not to the world?” The anticipation of a response greater than all expectations

BY GIUSEPPE FRANGI

A thin, tangled thread leads us to the memory of Judas, the apostle whom Mark and Matthew list third from the last, whom Luke calls “Judas son of James” in his Gospel and the Acts, and whom John introduces in a flash, with a question that is much more important than it seems on the surface. Before we ask who Judas was, in effect, we have to answer another question: how many Judases were there? There was Judas Iscariot, the most obvious. There was the “Judas son of James” mentioned by Luke. There was the Judas Thaddeus of Mark and Matthew. There is the “Jude brother of James” who signs the shortest book in the Bible (the Letter of Jude). Exegetes essentially agree that Luke, Mark, and Matthew are talking about the same person. The last two change his name to Thaddeus, to distinguish him from the apostle who betrayed Jesus. Thaddeus (or Lebbaeus) in reality was a nickname, which derives from the Aramaic (“lebh” means heart) and could mean, according to Abbot Ricciotti, “big-hearted man.” The mystery of whether the apostle was the author of the letter remains. Why is one called “son of James” while the other is called “brother of James”? If he is James’s brother, he should be the same one cited by Mark (6:3) and Matthew (13:55) in the description of Jesus’s family (together with his cousins James the Less, Simon Zealot, and a Joseph who does not appear among the apostles). But one scholarly exegete, Oscar Cullman, points out that the Jude of the letter seems to distinguish himself from the apostles, even if, from the chronological point of view, the text cannot be dated with certainty before the year 90 and thus it would be plausible to identify them as the same. In synthesis, according to René Laurentin, Judas the apostle and Jude the brother of Jesus would be two different people, while for Abbot Ricciotti they are the same man.

The big heart
Thus what remains to us of this obscure apostle is his characteristic “big heart.” This heart of a child leads him to break his silence only once. John tells the story (14:22): “Judas–not Judas Iscariot–said to him, ‘Lord, how can it be that you show yourself to us and not to the world?’” Here we find all the impulsiveness of a man who had misunderstood the type of hope that Jesus came to bring. Like Simon Zealot, he too, probably, had imagined an immediate historical and political redemption. His love for reality had led him to anticipate Jesus’ plan. Instead, in Judas’s question lies the wonder of a person who has understood that the hope to which he has been called is a hope that answers his expectations much more fully, a hope that even exceeds his expectations. Jesus answers him, “Anyone who loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make a home in him.”
Judas (or Jude) reappears only in a passage from Acts and in his letter. Here too he finds himself having to change direction. He says he wanted to write a letter on salvation, and instead the infiltration of bad influences among them has forced him to denounce those who were placing the integrity of the faith in danger.
His traces then become harder to find. An ancient historian, Nicephorus Callistus, says that Judas Thaddeus preached in Palestine, then went on to Syria and Mesopotamia. A tradition links him to the story of King Abgar of Edessa, who sent an emissary to Jesus to ask to be healed. The Addai who went to Edessa would be Judas Thaddeus, which could explain the tradition calling for Judas Thaddeus to be invoked in cases of the hopelessly ill; an ancient prayer is addressed to him (St. Jude’s prayer, to “You most holy Apostle, full of faith, the servant and friend of Jesus…”). A tradition of the Eastern Church says that he is buried in Edessa, while his relics are venerated in Rheims and Toulouse in France. It is interesting to note that Austria and Poland are the two Catholic countries where the apostle is most greatly venerated, as is testified also by the popularity of forms of the name Thaddeus in those two countries.