Jesus's suffering and crucifixion

Jesus’s suffering and crucifixion, as reconstructed in Shmuel Ash’s abandoned study, turn the familiar story of betrayal inside out. Judas Iscariot does arrange Jesus’s execution, but not to destroy him: convinced that Jesus will descend alive from the cross and reveal himself as divine, Judas makes the crucifixion the final test through which he expects the world to be redeemed. Jesus instead dies, and Judas, who recognizes that he has caused the death of the man he loves, cannot go on living. The account makes the crucifixion both the collapse of Judas’s faith and the tragic culmination of it.

The journey to Jerusalem

Judas’s plan rests on an extraordinary conviction: Jesus’s miracles in Galilee have proved that he can overcome death. In Shmuel’s telling, Judas urges Jesus to leave Galilee for Jerusalem, where power is concentrated and where the largest possible audience can witness a decisive sign. The crucifixion is to take place before the city and the world, at Passover, amid the crowds gathered for the festival. Jesus will descend from the cross alive; the assembled people will acknowledge him, and the kingdom of heaven will begin. Judas understands the journey not as a path to defeat but as the necessary public staging of redemption.

Jesus does not share Judas’s certainty. Even after going to Jerusalem with his followers, he is beset by doubt and by a fear of death Shmuel presents as wholly human. The possibility that he may not be the chosen figure, or that the voices directing him may be misleading him, remains unresolved. At the last supper he asks God, if it is possible, to take the cup from him. Judas answers these fears with renewed assurance: the one who has performed miracles can surely leave the cross alive, and the ordeal itself is the final test before the redemption of humanity.

Arranging the crucifixion

Judas’s role, in this version, is active and deliberate. He organizes the execution, using his connections among the Pharisees and priests to persuade them to bring Jesus to trial. Shmuel’s account emphasizes that the task is not straightforward: the Romans have little particular interest in Jesus, and the priestly circle does not regard him as uniquely dangerous among the many preachers and wonder-workers of the time. Judas has to work through those obstacles to arrange for Jesus to be crucified alongside two criminals shortly before Passover.

This reconstruction also disputes the conventional meaning of the thirty pieces of silver. Shmuel regards the payment as an invention of later enemies of Israel, or possibly a detail Judas himself added to complete the story. In his reasoning, Judas is a wealthy landowner, Jesus is publicly known and makes no attempt to hide, and the sum would be an implausible price for arranging the arrest of someone who is neither concealed nor difficult to identify. The familiar emblem of treachery is thus recast as a doubtful explanation for an act driven, in Shmuel’s interpretation, by devotion and expectation.

Faith at the cross

When Jesus is crucified, Judas’s faith does not immediately fail. He expects the promised reversal: Jesus will free himself, descend from the cross, and address the people with the command to love one another. Shmuel’s telling places that expectation against the reality of Jesus’s suffering and death. The crowd calls on Jesus to save himself, while Judas, too, begs him to come down. In Shmuel’s later notebook reflection, Judas’s appeal is urgent partly because the day is passing and the people are beginning to disperse; the sign on which his entire hope depends has not appeared.

Jesus’s final words, as Shmuel interprets them, preserve the uncertainty that has shadowed his journey. Jesus calls out the words of the Psalms asking why God has forsaken him. Shmuel reads this not as the utterance of a figure serenely above death, but as the cry of a dying human being who had believed, or half-believed, that God would help him survive the cross. Jesus dies without descending from it. The central reversal is therefore not simply that the expected miracle does not occur: the death that Judas intended as the prelude to public revelation becomes the irreversible loss of the person whose revelation he trusted.

Judas’s death and Shmuel’s reinterpretation

After witnessing Jesus’s death, Judas understands that the plan he devised has killed the man he loved and admired. He leaves and hangs himself. Shmuel names him the first, the last, and the only Christian: the first because, in this account, Judas was the earliest person to believe with absolute certainty in Jesus’s divinity; the last and only because that defining faith ends in despair when Jesus dies. The episode makes Judas both the organizer of the crucifixion and its most devastated witness, binding responsibility and fidelity together rather than treating them as opposites.

Shmuel develops this reading against a longer history of Jewish writing about Jesus and Judas. He notes that Jewish sources variously preserved or rejected claims about Jesus: the passage in Josephus that calls him the Messiah and reports his resurrection was regarded by some scholars as a Christian interpolation, while the account attributed to Agapius presents Josephus as describing the followers’ beliefs rather than endorsing them. Talmudic passages that attacked Jesus were later removed from nearly all printed versions, Shmuel explains, because Jews feared Christian retaliation. Medieval works, including The Book of Nestor the Priest, offered polemics against Christian claims, while other Jewish writers objected to degrading accounts or presented Jesus without mockery. The range of these responses frames Shmuel’s reconstruction as an intervention in an uneven record of argument and silence, not as a claim that Jewish tradition spoke with one voice.

That silence is especially pronounced around Judas. Shmuel observes that Jewish writers who challenged Christian accounts of Jesus often said almost nothing about Judas, even when they described Jesus as a Jewish teacher who died a Jew. In Christian paintings of the Last Supper, Judas had instead become a grotesque figure, fixed as the betrayer. Shmuel questions the fit between that image and the story of a man who, after supposedly selling his teacher for a small sum, kills himself in grief when the teacher dies. His retelling supplies the defense he finds missing: Judas’s act leads to the crucifixion, but its motive is faith in Jesus’s promised triumph, and its consequence is the destruction of Judas himself.

The episode’s political and moral resonance

The crucifixion story also belongs to the novel’s wider argument about redemption pursued through power and violence. Shmuel’s notes set religious promises alongside political ones, while Gershom Wald argues that Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and revolutionary movements alike can preach goodness and then spill blood when they hold power. In this context, Judas’s confidence that a public death will usher in the kingdom of heaven echoes the peril of expecting a single act of force or sacrifice to redeem the world. The crucifixion does not resolve the conflict between belief and violence; it exposes the human cost of making one the instrument of the other.

The account’s force comes from the distance between the outcome Judas anticipates and the death he causes. He intends the cross to disclose divine power; it instead leaves Jesus dead and Judas unable to live with the result. Shmuel’s reinterpretation does not erase Judas’s responsibility for arranging the execution. It makes that responsibility inseparable from love, conviction, and catastrophic misjudgment, transforming the supposed betrayer into the central believer in a redemption that never arrives.