Lucifer's True History of Everything
May 30, 07 08:09 PM
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The Sixteen Disciples (cont.)
(15.) Judas Bar-Simon, the traitor, went by the handle, "Iscariot." Grumpy Thomas is the one who started that particular tradition (John 6:71). Thomas said that it was "just a metonymy." ("Iscariot," one of the oldest terms in the Aramaic language, is a word that means the asshole.) Jesus said the sobriquet was "impolite," which I think must have been the Lord's diplomatic way of saying that he totally agreed.
After Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty denarii, everyone took to calling him "the Iscariot." Even the Christian Right, who won't say the English word "fart," call him Judas Iscariot.
Now a denarius was a silver coin. And Caiaphas, the Jewish Chief Priest, had a little joke about that: he said, "Judas! What an Iscariot! He ripped me off! He charged me 480 times what Jesus was worth, ha ha ha! Get it?" – and no one ever did, but they laughed anyway…"
Caiaphas would then explain the punch line: "C'mon, fellas!" he said. "How many disciples did the Nazarene have? Sixteen!" –
(A denarius was officially valued at 16 donkeys.)
"…so one denarius should have bought all Christendom! But we pay Judas thirty denarii, and nail only one sorry ass from Nazareth! 480 times the market rate! Go ahead, do the math!"
But no one did the math. Even back in those days, if you had to explain your joke, or do the math, it wasn't funny. But Caiaphas didn't care, he was the Chief Priest. (It was like when Papa Ratzinger tells one of his famous "Klopfen, Klopfen! Wer ist dort?" jokes to the bishops who visit him in the Vatican: if you're an upwardly mobile bishop who wants someday to become a cardinal, you don't mind laughing at a few of the Holy Papa's stupid punch-lines.)
But when Caiaphas the Jewish Chief Priest met with members of the holy Sanhedrin, he never knew when to quit with his anti-Jesus jokes. "Here's another one," he said. "If you donate a shilling to the Nazarene's female disciples, how many donkeys do you get?" He then answered his own riddle: "No complete donkey! Just one nice piece of ass! ha ha ha!"
Really, the man was insufferable. If I were Jesus, I would seriously have considered using those flesh-eating worms on him that the Lord loosed upon Herod Agrippa (Acts 12:22-23).
Now here's the amazing thing: three days after Judas kissed Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Judas's body discovered exactly what the Lord meant by the ominous phrase, "Woe unto you!" A few days after the Crucifixion, Judas was walking around in a meadow he had bought with those 30 denarii, when suddenly, "he burst asunder in the middle, and all of his bowels gushed out," killing him instantly. In fact, as Luke records the story, the man's insides exploded right out his iscariot – "which is why that field is called, to this day, in the Hebrew tongue, Assoldama, or, more properly, "The Field of Blood" (Acts 1:18-19).
Caiaphas had a joke about that, too: he said that "the wicked plotz of Judas totally backfired!"
– L.
(Up next: who will sub for the Iscariot?)
Posted by Lucifer at 08:09 PM
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