Christian Church
JudasThe Christian Church appears in the novel less as an institution with a depicted hierarchy than as the enduring outcome of competing interpretations of Jesus and Judas. Shmuel’s research asks how Jesus came to be regarded as divine and how Judas, whose role helped bring about the crucifixion, became the archetypal traitor. Gershom Wald widens that inquiry into a political and historical argument: Christian teaching about the death of Jesus has helped perpetuate the accusation that Jews collectively betrayed or killed him.
Historical Accounts and Competing Interpretations
The novel approaches the Church through accounts that dispute what can be established about Jesus and the beginnings of Christian belief. Flavius Josephus is presented as the first Jewish source to mention Jesus, but the account attributed to him in Jewish Antiquities describes Jesus in explicitly Christian terms, including as the Messiah who appeared alive after his crucifixion. The historian Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss considers that passage a later Christian interpolation, while a version attributed to Agapius reports that Josephus described the beliefs of Jesus’s followers without endorsing either the Messiah claim or the resurrection as fact. The contrast makes the transmission of testimony part of the novel’s concern: the Church’s account of its beginnings is not treated as identical to what an earlier Jewish witness necessarily wrote.
The novel also surveys Jewish references to Jesus that were hostile, ambiguous, or later suppressed. Some passages in rabbinic literature have been interpreted as allusions to him, though the identification remains conjectural; other Talmudic passages explicitly cast him as a wayward pupil, a wonder-worker, or a libertine. According to the narrative, these passages disappeared from nearly all printed versions of the Babylonian Talmud because Jews feared how Christian neighbors might respond to them. The fifth- or sixth-century poet Yannai, by contrast, composed an openly anti-Christian liturgical poem. Such material records polemic under unequal conditions: some Jewish writing attacked Christian claims, while the removal of other passages reflects fear of Christian power.
A medieval Arabic work later translated into Hebrew as The Book of Nestor the Priest challenged the Gospels, rejected the Trinity, and denied Jesus’s divinity. Its arguments were not consistent in tone: it could portray Jesus as a pious Jew who had never meant to found a new religion, while also resorting to degrading claims about his birth and mocking his death. Other Jewish writers offered more measured accounts. Yehuda ha-Levi presented the Christian account of Jesus and the Trinity in The Kuzari without ridicule, while Rabbi Gershom ha-Cohen condemned degrading insults against Jesus even as his own work questioned the New Testament. Maimonides called Jesus a false prophet but regarded Christianity as a stage in humanity’s movement from paganism toward belief in the God of Israel. The novel’s historical survey thus distinguishes criticism of Christian doctrine from mockery of Jesus, and neither position is made to stand for all Jewish thought.
Shmuel’s Research and the Silence About Judas
Shmuel’s investigation turns from Jewish accounts of Jesus to the conspicuous absence of Judas from Jewish writing. In a notebook entry, he observes that Jewish polemicists who disputed the crucifixion, resurrection, or divinity of Jesus generally avoided discussing Judas. This silence persists, in his account, even among writers who offered sharply negative descriptions of Jesus. Shmuel suggests that the avoidance may reflect shame or fear of invoking a figure burdened by generations of Christian contempt; his research makes that silence itself an important historical fact.
The silence also sharpens a narrative contradiction. Judas is conventionally remembered as the disciple who betrayed his teacher for thirty pieces of silver, yet Shmuel asks why he would then have taken his own life in grief after Jesus died. He argues that without Judas there would have been no crucifixion in the form the Christian story recounts, and perhaps no Christian Church: Jesus might otherwise have been forgotten among the many preachers and miracle-workers of Galilee. In the novel, this is Shmuel’s interpretation rather than an independently established historical conclusion. It recasts the Church’s foundational story around a person whom its dominant memory condemns.
The account of Judas’s death completes that reinterpretation. In Shmuel’s reconstruction, Judas sees the collapse of his life’s purpose when Jesus dies and recognizes that he has helped cause the death of the man he loved and admired. Judas then hangs himself. Shmuel calls him the first, last, and only Christian: the description makes Judas, rather than a later religious institution, the earliest figure to embody faith in Jesus and the catastrophic cost of that faith. The Church’s origin is consequently connected to a disciple remembered as traitor but reimagined as devoted and bereaved.
Shmuel also discusses Nathan Bistritzky’s 1921 play Jesus of Nazareth, in which Judas returns after learning that the priestly leaders have decided Jesus is doomed. Jesus refuses to flee and asks Judas to hand him over, presenting the betrayal as a mission he has chosen. Judas initially resists, then returns, kneels before Jesus, and accepts the task. In this version, the apparent traitor is a faithful disciple carrying out his teacher’s request. The play is not evidence that this is what happened historically; it gives dramatic form to the possibility Shmuel is exploring, and exposes how sharply the meaning of Judas depends on the version of the story a community receives.
The Church, Collective Blame, and Antisemitism
Wald argues that Judas’s reputation cannot be separated from the wider Christian association of Jews with betrayal. Recalling a journey as a young student, he describes two nuns who learned that he was Jewish and reacted with sorrowful reproach over what, in their understanding, the Jews had done to Jesus. Wald’s anecdote shows how a story about an ancient death can be addressed to a living Jewish stranger as inherited collective guilt. The accusation does not depend on the individual’s actions; Jewish identity alone makes him its target.
In Wald’s counterfactual, Judas might have become a saint if Pilate had ordered him crucified beside Jesus. Images of Judas could then have adorned churches, Christian children could have borne his name, and popes might have adopted it. Yet Wald insists that this reversal would not have ended hatred of Jews: Christians would still have remembered the crowd’s demand that Jesus be killed and its call for his blood to fall on itself and its descendants. His point is that Judas’s role matters to the tradition, but cannot by itself explain or remove antisemitism. The Church’s inherited story assigns the blame more broadly, and changing one figure’s place in it would not necessarily undo that pattern.
Wald distinguishes this long Christian history from the conflict between Jews and Muslim Arabs, which he predicts will eventually fade, while the antagonism between Jews and Christians will endure for generations if children continue to be taught that Jews are responsible for killing God. This is Wald’s bleak judgment, voiced within the novel, not a neutral forecast. It gives the Church a double significance in the characters’ discussion: it is the institution that carries forward a religious account of Jesus, and the setting for a lasting history of interpretation in which Jews have been assigned inherited blame.
Faith, Power, and the Novel’s Argument
The novel sets the Church within a broader critique of religions and movements that promise salvation. Wald contends that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam preach kindness, charity, and mercy, yet their adherents can turn to persecution when they possess power. He extends the criticism to modern movements that claim to rescue humanity, arguing that projects of redemption can become entangled with violence. His rejection of worldly redemption is presented as his own severe conclusion, shaped by a historical comparison between religious persecution and revolutionary bloodshed.
This political argument gives the novel’s treatment of the Church its tension: Christian accounts may preserve a claim of universal faith, yet their historical reception can become a means of naming Jews as enemies and assigning guilt across generations. Shmuel’s reconstruction of Judas challenges that inheritance from within its foundational story, while Wald doubts that revising the story alone can end the hostility attached to it. Together, their discussions portray the Church not as a simple villain or an unchanging body, but as a tradition whose accounts of Jesus and Judas have consequences extending far beyond the events they describe.
