We read that Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss as a sign of identification to his arresters that it was indeed him, as if nobody knew him in Jerusalem.
Elsewhere, we read that Jesus triumphally entered Jerusalem and people run to welcome him holding palm-tree branches praising him and that he visited the temple and preached in public, which means that many people and of course the priests knew him very well, him and his apostles, so it doesn’t really stand to logic, why the priests needed to bribe somebody to identify to them who Jesus was in order to arrest him?
In an apocryphon Christian work, namely a Coptic-Sahidic manuscript of a homily on the Life and Passion of Christ which is ascribed to Cyril of Jerusalem, discovered in the library of the Monastery of St. Michael in the Egyptian desert near present-day al-Hamuli in the western part of the Faiyum Hamuly, dated no earlier than the 8th century CE, we read that Jesus had the ability to change his shape at discretion, corroborating not only with the Secret Book of Peter in which the latter asserts that somebody else replaced Jesus on the cross while he was standing aside laughing at the Roman soldiers, but also with the NT itself, that his apostles didn’t recognize him after his supposed resurrection when he appeared in front of them. Strange, isn’t it?
In this manuscript, we read that Pontius Pilate invited Jesus to meal and he offered to sacrifice his only son to replace Jesus on the cross. In the Coptic and Ethiopian churches, Pilate is regarded as a saint, which explains that this manuscript was accepted by them as scriptures and not as an apocryphon. In this manuscript we read that Jews said to Judas, “How shall we arrest him, for he does not have a single shape but his appearance changes. Sometimes he is ruddy, sometimes he is white, sometimes he is red, sometimes he is wheat coloured, sometimes he is pallid like ascetics, sometimes he is a youth, sometimes an old man”, justifying Judas kiss as an identification sign. How many veiled stories exist on Jesus, like the Apocryphon of Thomas on his childhood in which he is portrayed as a ruthless serial killed boy?
But it isn’t only the puzzling verses we read in the NT and in other apocryphal books, but also what other “writers” said on this subject, like Origen who in his work “Contra Celsum,” stated that “to those who saw him (Jesus) he did not appear alike to all.”
Hence, was Jesus a shapeshifter as to need somebody to identify him with a kiss to his arresters? Didn’t really the Jews know him and desperately needed a traitor? Isn’t this myth on Judas a patch-work of veiled and semi-veiled fiction stories or apocryphal myths?
Δεσμώτης
Article URL : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Life_and_the_Passion_of_Christ