«El primer cristiano, el último cristiano, el único cristiano»

“The first Christian, the last Christian, the only Christian” is Shmuel Ash’s reappraisal of Judas Iscariot: the disciple conventionally remembered as the embodiment of betrayal becomes, in Shmuel’s interpretation, the one follower who stays with Jesus, believes in him until the end, and cannot survive his death. The phrase condenses the novel’s reversal of a long-standing religious stereotype, exposing the gulf between Judas’s place in Shmuel’s imagined story and his vilified place in Christian memory.

The Phrase and Its Reversal

Shmuel writes the phrase in his notebook after imagining the crucifixion and Judas’s response to it. In this reconstruction, Jesus dies still hoping that God will help him, while Judas sees the collapse of the meaning and purpose of his own life: he understands that he has caused the death of the man he loved and admired, leaves, and hangs himself. Shmuel names him the first, last, and only Christian not because the phrase is an established historical designation, but because his account makes Judas’s fidelity and grief the measure of faith.

The three superlatives sharpen the paradox. “First” and “last” frame Judas as both the beginning and the end of a tradition; “only” makes him its singular, unshared instance. Shmuel’s formulation turns the usual story inside out: the figure branded as the betrayer becomes the disciple who, in this retelling, remains when the others flee and dies with Jesus rather than living on after him.

Judas Among the Disciples

In the notes Shmuel develops elsewhere, all of Jesus’s apostles are Jewish, but Judas alone remains fixed in popular Christian consciousness as the Jew who represents the Jewish people as a whole. When the Temple guards and representatives of the priestly caste come to arrest Jesus, the other apostles are frightened and scatter; Judas stays. Shmuel allows uncertainty about the details, imagining that Judas may have kissed Jesus to give him strength or gone with the captors to the place where Jesus was taken.

Peter, too, reaches the scene, but denies Jesus three times before dawn. Judas, in Shmuel’s contrast, does not deny him. He believes until the last moment that Jesus is divine and will come down from the cross before Jerusalem and the world. The phrase thus rests on a pointed distinction: the disciple conventionally condemned for betrayal is represented as the one who neither abandons nor denies Jesus, and whose heartbreak at Jesus’s death is unparalleled among the followers.

A History of Silence and Condemnation

Shmuel sets his reinterpretation against what he sees as a persistent Jewish silence about Judas. Jewish writers who disputed Christian claims about Jesus might describe him as a Jewish figure, a wonder-worker, or a deceiver, yet, Shmuel observes, they generally avoided Judas. He suggests that they were ashamed of him, repudiated him, or feared summoning the memory of a figure subjected to generations of hatred. The silence matters to the phrase: it leaves Judas not only vilified in Christian tradition but largely unclaimed in the Jewish writings Shmuel surveys.

The broader history of Jewish writing about Jesus in Shmuel’s research is itself divided. Accounts attributed to Josephus survive in sharply different forms: one version in Jewish Antiquities presents claims about Jesus’s messiahship and resurrection that some modern scholars, including Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss, consider later Christian additions; another account preserved by Agapius describes Josephus as reporting his followers’ beliefs without affirming them as fact. Rabbinic references could be disparaging, and some Talmudic passages describing Jesus as a wayward pupil, sorcerer, or libertine were removed from nearly all printed versions because Jews feared Christian reprisals. These histories do not establish Shmuel’s interpretation of Judas, but they show the contentious and perilous setting in which Jewish accounts of Jesus were preserved, altered, or left unspoken.

Jewish Readings of Jesus

Shmuel’s notes also assemble Jewish readings that resist a simple opposition between Jewish rejection and Christian affirmation. A medieval Arabic polemic later known in Hebrew as The Book of Nestor the Priest challenged the Gospels, the Trinity, and Jesus’s divinity, portraying Jesus in one strand as a pious Jew who never intended to found a new religion. In the twelfth century, Yehuda ha-Levi presented a Christian account of Jesus in The Kuzari without distortion or mockery, while Maimonides called Jesus a false prophet yet regarded Christianity as a step in humanity’s movement from paganism toward belief in the God of Israel.

Rabbi Yehuda Arie of Modena offers another distinction central to Shmuel’s project: he regarded Jesus as a Pharisaic Jew who differed from his teachers on marginal legal questions, did not abandon his faith, and never claimed to be divine. These accounts concern Jesus rather than Judas, and they do not prove Shmuel’s reconstruction. Their variety does, however, establish the intellectual space in which he tries to separate Jesus’s Jewish life from later Christian claims and to reconsider the disciple whom both religious traditions leave burdened with the meaning of betrayal.

Meaning and Narrative Function

The phrase is inseparable from Shmuel’s act of writing. Alone in his attic, he adds to his notebook a correction to the modern historian Tzvi Graetz, who had argued that Jesus accomplished more through his death than in his life: Shmuel insists that Judas, too, did more through his death. The formulation is therefore not only a label for Judas but the conclusion of Shmuel’s attempt to recover significance from a figure whose death has been overshadowed by his reputation.

Its force comes from the collision between fidelity and inherited blame. Judas is, in Shmuel’s account, the follower who stays, believes, and is overcome by loss; in the popular Christian image he is the most contemptible Jew and the embodiment of treachery. Calling him the only Christian turns that accusation into an indictment of the story that preserved it. The phrase does not resolve the historical uncertainties surrounding Jesus or Judas. Instead, it makes the act of interpretation itself visible: Shmuel recasts the condemned betrayer as the disciple whose devotion, precisely because it ends in despair, exposes the costs of a tradition built around his betrayal.