Judas is "the first and only Christian"

The claim that Judas Iscariot was the first, last, and only Christian is Shmuel Ash’s counter-reading of the most infamous betrayal in Christian tradition. In his notebook, Judas is not a traitor who sells out a teacher he never loved, but the solitary disciple whose faith in Jesus’s divinity leads him to arrange the crucifixion—and whose world ends when the promised miracle does not occur. The paradox is the point: Judas helps bring about the death of the man he loves, yet Shmuel’s account presents that act as an attempt to make the whole world recognize Jesus.

The inherited image and Shmuel’s challenge

Shmuel develops this interpretation while writing a study of Jesus as seen by Jews. His argument emerges against a long history of Jewish writing about Jesus that could be polemical, cautious, or silent. Josephus’s account survives in two markedly different versions: one portrays Jesus in language that some modern scholars consider a Christian interpolation, while Agapius reports a more objective description of what Jesus’s followers believed. Rabbinic references are likewise uncertain or hostile; passages in the Babylonian Talmud that denounced Jesus were removed from nearly all printed versions because Jews feared the consequences of Christian readers encountering them. Medieval polemic could ridicule Jesus, but other Jewish voices resisted crude insults or presented his life without mockery. This varied record does not establish Shmuel’s reconstruction as historical fact; it supplies the contested tradition against which his imaginative reading takes shape.

The most consequential silence, in Shmuel’s view, concerns Judas. Jewish writers who challenged Christian accounts of Jesus often avoided Judas altogether, even when they described Jesus as Jewish and disputed claims about his life and death. Shmuel suspects that shame or fear of the immense hatred attached to Judas may explain this omission. In Christian art, he recalls, Judas is often rendered as a grotesque figure set apart from the beautiful company around the table. The visual stereotype makes him an emblem before his motives can be considered: a despised Jew, and, in the wider Christian imagination, the embodiment of the connection between Jewishness and betrayal.

Shmuel turns that inherited emblem inside out. Jesus and all the apostles were Jews, he observes, but Judas alone is lodged in popular Christian consciousness as the representative Jew. The other disciples scatter when Jesus is arrested; Judas remains. Peter reaches the scene too, but denies Jesus three times before morning, whereas Judas does not deny him. Shmuel’s irony rests on this contrast: the man remembered as the betrayer is also the one who does not abandon Jesus, believes in him to the end, and dies after him.

From spy to disciple

In Shmuel’s account, Judas starts as an affluent, educated Judean, unlike the poor Galilean fishermen and peasants who make up the rest of the apostles. Jerusalem’s priestly authorities select him to join Jesus’s following, report on the unusual preacher, and determine whether he poses a serious danger. Judas disguises himself in rags, goes to Galilee, and joins the group. His learning, sobriety, and apparent fidelity win the affection of the other disciples and of Jesus. He becomes a trusted confidant and the group’s treasurer, the one apostle who is neither a Galilean nor a poor fisherman.

The assignment changes its agent. Shmuel imagines Jesus’s warmth, humility, humor, moral stature, and teaching transforming the clear-headed, skeptical man from Kerioth into a devoted follower. Whether this conversion happens suddenly or over time, Shmuel writes, matters less than its result: Judas becomes a Christian in his deepest conviction. He is the first person, in this reconstruction, to believe with certainty that Jesus is divine and that universal recognition of him will bring redemption to earth.

That conviction gives Judas’s faith a practical and dangerous direction. He believes Jesus must leave Galilee for Jerusalem, where power is concentrated and the revelation can take place before the people and the wider world. The miracles associated with Jesus—walking on water, healing the sick, and raising the dead—make Judas expect that Jesus can survive crucifixion and emerge from it alive. A public death followed by a miraculous descent from the cross, he reasons, will compel the assembled multitude to recognize Jesus and begin the kingdom of heaven. In Shmuel’s version, the crucifixion is therefore not a payment Judas accepts for betraying Jesus, but the stage he believes is necessary for the revelation.

The crucifixion as a failed revelation

Jesus’s fear and doubt unsettle the plan. In Jerusalem, he experiences the prospect of death as any human being might and asks for the cup to pass from him. Judas, convinced that the one who has performed miracles can descend from the cross, strengthens his resolve. The Roman authorities have little initial interest in Jesus, and the priests do not regard the Galilean preacher as uniquely dangerous. Judas must use his connections among the Pharisees and priests to arrange the trial and execution between two minor criminals shortly before Passover.

Shmuel rejects the conventional emphasis on the thirty pieces of silver as a sufficient explanation for Judas’s action. In his reconstruction, the payment story is a later invention of Israel’s enemies—or perhaps a detail Judas himself added to complete the story. Judas is a wealthy landowner, Shmuel argues, and the sum would have been too small to explain his involvement; besides, Jesus was known and made no attempt to conceal who he was. The decisive motive is Judas’s belief that the arrest and execution will force the revelation into public view.

At the cross, that belief does not immediately fail. Judas watches and expects the crucified Jesus to rise, leave the cross, and address the people with the command to love one another. Jesus, meanwhile, doubts whether he is truly the man Judas believes him to be. Shmuel’s account thus places two forms of uncertainty beside one another: Jesus’s human fear and Judas’s absolute expectation. The promised descent never comes. Jesus dies, and the event Judas intended as the revelation of divine power becomes the death of the person he loves.

The meaning of Judas’s death

Judas’s response completes the reversal. Having understood that the purpose of his life has collapsed and that his actions helped cause the death of the man he loved and admired, he leaves and takes his own life. Shmuel calls him the first, last, and only Christian: first because he is the first to believe fully in Jesus’s divinity, last because he does not survive Jesus, and only because no other disciple, in Shmuel’s telling, remains faithful to that belief through the crucifixion. The title does not excuse Judas’s role in arranging Jesus’s death; it changes the meaning assigned to that role by making devotion, rather than greed or hatred, its cause.

The contrast between the accusation and the imagined motive drives Shmuel’s challenge to the received story. A man supposedly paid to betray his teacher dies from grief immediately afterward; Shmuel asks why readers do not treat that outcome as evidence that the familiar explanation is inadequate. He finds no defense of Judas in the texts he knows, even though, in his interpretation, without Judas there would have been no crucifixion, Christianity, or Church, and Jesus might have disappeared from memory like other provincial preachers. The figure condemned as the archetypal traitor is thus made indispensable to the faith whose founder he helps expose to death.

Interpretation, not historical verdict

The story of the loyal Judas is presented as Shmuel’s written reconstruction, not as a settled historical finding. Its sources and materials belong to disputes over how Jewish authors have represented Jesus, how Christian tradition has represented Judas, and what those representations conceal or emphasize. Shmuel’s imaginative account reinterprets details associated with the Gospel narrative—the arrest, Judas’s continued presence, the silver, the crucifixion, and Judas’s death—by linking them into a single motive: the expectation that Jesus will reveal his divinity publicly.

The idea also resonates with the book’s broader conflict over redemption and power. Shmuel’s version makes a redemptive ambition the source of catastrophe: Judas seeks a world-changing revelation and instead helps bring about a death that cannot be undone. The result is neither a simple vindication nor a conventional condemnation. Judas remains responsible for organizing the crucifixion, but his action is recast as a tragic act of faith. The name long made synonymous with betrayal becomes, in Shmuel’s reading, the name of the disciple who stayed, believed, and could not live after that belief failed.