Palm Sunday 2003 Handed Over. Sermon by The Very Reverend Roger Dawson Dean of St. Mary's Anglican Cathedral, Caracas

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Sunday, April 13, 2003 By: The Very Reverend Roger Dawson

The English translations of the gospels make a dreadful mistake, in my opinion, with the Greek word paradidomi. This mistake is the result of church teaching over many centuries and might be considered the root cause of much anti-Semitism and the deaths of thousands and possibly millions of people. In misusing this word, we might be guilty of sustaining the charge that Jesus was betrayed ... which is what the church teaches.

However, if we read the account in the gospels in a careful manner, and forget what the church has taught we find a very different story. The word paradidomi is used no less than fifty-nine times in relation to the death of Jesus, and each and every time this word is translated as "hand over." The word is also used another thirty-two times about the relationship between Jesus and a man who has been given the name Judas. Although the word paradidomi is used in the same context as in the other fifty-nine times the translation for the Judas uses is "betray."

Why did the translators use betray and not hand over?

The answer is because the translators have been led to believe that Judas betrayed Jesus, not from the evidence of the gospels but because of church teaching. The gospels have been made to fit church teaching by the English translators of the gospels.

It is a distortion, and a dangerous distortion at that. There are perfectly good words in Greek for betray, but none of them are used in relation to Judas. The word used is paradidomi and it means "hand over" ... and in a search through hundreds of contemporary manuscripts in which paradidomi has been used, no application of it can be found in which it means to betray.

Judas did not betray Jesus, and the church is wrong in teaching that he did, because there is no evidence to support such a claim.

Why then did such a claim arise?

The answer is that, as the Jesus-faith church developed and grew, it became increasingly difficult for the various groups who worshipped the God YHWH to hold together. Their views were too far apart for them to share a single theological view and the new Jesus-faith was bringing in many gentiles ... which was resented by those who wanted to keep the Judah faith exclusive to families who had originated in the land of Judah.

• Similarly, though Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists will both claim to be Christian they do not seek each other out in order to worship together.

Although the emerging Jews and Jesus-faith Christians both had their origins in Eretz Israel, they were becoming increasingly alienated because of their beliefs. The result was that the Christians left the synagogue and founded their own church buildings, and they blamed the people from whom they had parted for what happened to their leader. In other words they were resentful of the other Jewish group and they didn't mind taking it out on them by shifting the blame of Jesus death from the Romans ... with whom they were developing a new relationship ... to the new Jews who were evicting Christians from their synagogues.

What they did not realize was that it would have a profound effect upon history.

The stories of Judas' suicide are concocted and faintly ridiculous. To start with, the various accounts do not agree and they have Judas' guts spilling out on the floor in one version, and him hanging himself in another. Maybe I will talk about this another time, but in the meantime, I would encourage you to read the story of the handing over of Joseph to the traders who took Joseph to Egypt and also the "value of a man" story in Zechariah 11: 12-13.

Who was Judas? The answer is we don't know. He could have been any one of a number of people or even an imaginary person created for the occasion. His name: Judas is Yehudah in its original form and means a person from Judah. It was a popular name at the time of Jesus and for some considerable while afterwards.

What we now understand, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, is that anyone leaving the Essene community was totally rejected and considered to be dead by them. They opened the door, pushed him out and forgot him.

If there was a disciple or close follower of Jesus who left the group, they would, more than likely, have treated him in a similar way as the Essenes treated their deserters. Or was it that there wasn't a single deserter, but that Judah as a nation was represented by Judas as being the ones to leave the faith of Jesus, and so, for the Christians, they were as good as dead for they had handed him over to his fate when they might have saved him if they had believed him and his message of good news?

Also, if paradidomi does or can mean "betray" we are presented with another problem.

It would mean that the death of Jesus would not have been a sacrifice but something beyond Jesus' control ... as others would have betrayed him.

If Judas betrayed him, then the crucifixion was a hideous accident and not a deliberate act on behalf of Jesus, and it places Christian theology on very shaky grounds.

It is an issue that the Christian Church has not properly dealt with, and every time we blame Judas, we blame a people for a crime they could not have committed.

So anxious was the early Christian Church to turn attention away from the Romans over the death of Jesus, that it offered their main rivals, the Jewish people, as a sacrifice in the person of Judas.

Christology became defined in Jesus as the Messiah who, they said, the whole world wanted and waited for, and who would have lived had it not been for a nation who killed him.

So the guilt came to rest on them and Judas who was their agent and one of their number, who left him and betrayed him. Yet this story goes against every part of Jesus' message of love and caring and forgiving one's neighbor and enemies.

Confining the blame to that generation of people in Judah is no good either, because any one who does a study of that period of history, soon discovers that the people were not waiting for or expecting an anointed one, a messiah, to come and save them and even less to redeem them and be their savior.

If they had been. they would have responded better to Jesus and his forerunner John the Baptist. No, the saving and redeeming was a Christian hope that became so important to them that they made the assumption it must have been everyone else's hope as well.

Why should I tell you about Judas?

For a number of reasons ... we should not blame others for our own predicament, nor should we presume that what are our goals and hopes, must be the aims and aspirations of others, no matter how closely we are or were once related.

Finally, we should not retell our history in such a way as to distort the truth so that we look better and others look worse. Christians, in their anxiety to make themselves appear badly treated, have brought about the deaths of countless Jews.

It is time we owned up to the deception.

We are not as lovely perhaps, as we thought we were ... we are a people in need of redemption.

St. Mary's Cathedral "News from the pews" -- Parish Notes The Very Reverend Roger Dawson, Dean of St. Mary's Cathedral (Caracas) -- telephone: +58 / (212) 991.4727, telefax: +58 / (212) 993.8170