Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Working with the Enemy: The Harmonizing Tradition and the New Utility of Judas Iscariot in Thirteenth-Century England

Working with the Enemy: The Harmonizing Tradition and the New Utility of Judas Iscariot in... Britt Mize Texas A&M University The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw some diversification of both popular and official representations of Judas Iscariot in the Latin West. One new possibility that arose, as I will show, was the assimilation of Jesus' betrayer to one of the chief parochial priorities of the thirteenthcentury church, the promotion of regular lay confession. The purpose of this essay is to define and illustrate the process by which Satan's man on the inside could become an ordinary Christian penitent worthy of a certain measure of human understanding: a contrite sinner who did exactly what he should have done, before failing at the last moment to claim God's mercy. Section I below describes the development and ossification of the prevailing early medieval image of Judas as statically wicked. I argue that this came about largely through the theory and practice of gospel harmony, by which the more ambiguous synoptic versions of Judas, particularly the remorseful Matthean one, became flattened into a constant enemy of the true faith through commingling with details from the Gospel of John, which is unique in its intense hostility toward him. As a fundamental hermeneutic paradigm, "informal" harmony came to seem http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures Penn State University Press

Working with the Enemy: The Harmonizing Tradition and the New Utility of Judas Iscariot in Thirteenth-Century England

Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures , Volume 36 (1) – Jun 15, 2010

Loading next page...
 
/lp/penn-state-university-press/working-with-the-enemy-the-harmonizing-tradition-and-the-new-utility-N2Xg1CKOBd

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Penn State University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Penn State University Press
ISSN
2153-9650
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Britt Mize Texas A&M University The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw some diversification of both popular and official representations of Judas Iscariot in the Latin West. One new possibility that arose, as I will show, was the assimilation of Jesus' betrayer to one of the chief parochial priorities of the thirteenthcentury church, the promotion of regular lay confession. The purpose of this essay is to define and illustrate the process by which Satan's man on the inside could become an ordinary Christian penitent worthy of a certain measure of human understanding: a contrite sinner who did exactly what he should have done, before failing at the last moment to claim God's mercy. Section I below describes the development and ossification of the prevailing early medieval image of Judas as statically wicked. I argue that this came about largely through the theory and practice of gospel harmony, by which the more ambiguous synoptic versions of Judas, particularly the remorseful Matthean one, became flattened into a constant enemy of the true faith through commingling with details from the Gospel of John, which is unique in its intense hostility toward him. As a fundamental hermeneutic paradigm, "informal" harmony came to seem

Journal

Journal of Medieval Religious CulturesPenn State University Press

Published: Jun 15, 2010

There are no references for this article.