THREE VERSIONS OF JUDAS

In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith, when Basilides
it published that the cosmos was a reckless or evil improvisation of deficient angels,
Nils Runeberg would have led, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the gatherings.
gnostics. Dante would have perhaps destined him a tomb of fire; his name would increase the
catalogs of lesser heresiarchs, between Saturninus and Carpocrates; some fragment of their
preachings, adorned with injuries, would endure in the apocryphal Book against all heresies
he would have perished when the fire of a monastic library devoured the last copy of the
Syntagma. In contrast, God provided him with the 20th century and the university city of Lund. There, in
In 1904, he published the first edition of Kristus och Judas; there, in 1909, his major book Den
The Secret Savior. (The last one has a German version, performed in 1912 by Emil Schering; it
the secret savior

Before rehearsing an exam of the precipitated works, it is urgent to repeat that Nils Runeberg,
member of the National Evangelical Union, was deeply religious. In a cenacle in Paris
or even from Buenos Aires, a writer could very well rediscover Runeberg's theses; those theses,
proposals in a cenacle will be light exercises of negligence or blasphemy.
For Runeberg, they were the key that decrypts a central mystery of theology; they were material
of meditation and analysis, of historical and philological controversy, of pride, of joy and
terror. They justified and dismantled his life. Those who read this article must also
consider that it only records Runeberg's conclusions, not his dialectics and his proofs.
Someone will note that the conclusion undoubtedly preceded the 'evidence'. Who resigns to
to seek proof of something he does not believe or whose preaching does not matter to him?

The first edition of Kristus och Judas carries this categorical epigraph, the meaning of which, years
Later, it would monstrously dilate Nils Runeberg himself: Not one thing, all things that
the tradition attributes to Judas Iscariot is false (De Quincey, 1857). Preceded by some
German, De Quincey speculated that Judas delivered Jesus Christ to force him to declare his
divinity and to ignite a vast rebellion against the yoke of Rome; Runeberg suggests a
vindication of a metaphysical nature. Skillfully, it begins by highlighting the superfluity of the act of
Judas. Observe (like Robertson) that to identify a teacher who preached daily
in the synagogue and performed miracles before a gathering of thousands of men, it is not required the
betrayal of an apostle. However, that happened. To suppose an error in Scripture is
intolerable; no less intolerable is to admit a casual fact in the most precious event
from the history of the world. Therefore, Judas's betrayal was not accidental; it was a predetermined event that
It has its mysterious place in the economy of redemption. Runeberg continues: The Word, when
it was made flesh, it went from ubiquity to space, from eternity to history, from bliss without
limits to mutation and to death; to correspond to such a sacrifice, it was necessary that a
man, on behalf of all men, would make a fitting sacrifice. Judas Iscariot
It was that man. Judas, unique among the apostles, intuited the secret divinity and the terrible
purpose of Jesus. The Word had condescended to be mortal; Judas, disciple of the Word, could
to lower oneself to being a snitch (the worst crime that infamy can endure) and to be a guest of the fire that does not
turn off. The lower order is a mirror of the higher order; the forms of the earth correspond to
the shapes of the sky; the blemishes on the skin are a map of the incorruptible constellations;
Judas somehow reflects Jesus. Hence the thirty pieces of silver and the kiss; hence the death.
voluntary, to deserve even more the Reprobation. Thus Nils Runeberg elucidated the enigma of
Judas.

The theologians of all confessions refuted him. Lars Peterson Engström accused him of
to ignore or to prefer the hypostatic union; Axel Borelius, to renew the heresy of the docetists,
who denied the humanity of Jesus; the steely bishop of Lund, to contradict the third
verse of chapter twenty-two of the Gospel of Saint Luke.

These varied anathemas influenced Runeberg, who partially rewrote the condemned.
book and modified its doctrine. He left his adversaries the theological ground and proposed
oblique reasons of a moral order. He admitted that Jesus, "who had considerable resources.
"resources that Omnipotence can offer," did not need a man to redeem everyone.
the men. He then rebutted those who claim that we know nothing about the inexplicable traitor;
we know, he said, that he was one of the apostles, one of the chosen ones to announce the kingdom of the
heavens, to heal the sick, to cleanse lepers, to raise the dead and to cast out
demons (Matthew 10: 7-8; Luke 9: 1). A man whom the Redeemer has distinguished in this way deserves
the best interpretation of their actions from us. Attributing their crime to greed (as they have
Some have suggested, citing John 12:6, that it is to resign oneself to the clumsiest motive. Nils Runeberg proposes
the opposite mobile: a hyperbolic and even unlimited asceticism. The ascetic, for the greater glory of
God debases and mortifies the flesh; Judas did the same with the spirit. He renounced honor, to
Well, to peace, to the kingdom of heaven, like others, less heroically, to pleasure. He premeditated with
terrible lucidity their guilt. Adultery often involves tenderness and self-sacrifice; in the
homicide, the courage; in the desecrations and the blasphemy, a certain satanic glow. Judas chose
those faults unvisited by any virtue: the abuse of trust (John 12:6) and the
denunciation. He acted with immense humility, believing himself unworthy of being good. Paul has written: THE
let the one who boasts boast in the Lord (I Corinthians 1:31); Judas sought hell, because happiness
The Lord was enough for him. He thought that happiness, like good, is a divine attribute and should not be
usurping the men.

Many have discovered, post factum, that in the justifiable beginnings of Runeberg there is
Its extravagant end and the secret saviors are merely a perversion or exasperation of
Christ and Judas. At the end of 1907, Runeberg finished and reviewed the manuscript text; almost two
Years passed without it being delivered to the printing press. In October 1909, the book appeared with
a prologue (ranging from lukewarm to enigmatic) by the Danish Hebraist Eric Erfjord and with this
Perfidious epigraph: In the world was, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
(John 1:10). The general argument is not complex, although the conclusion is monstrous. God,
argues Nils Runeberg, he lowered himself to be a man for the redemption of the human race; it is fitting
to declare that the sacrifice he performed was perfect, not invalidated or diminished by omissions.
Limiting what he suffered to the agony of an afternoon on the cross is blasphemous. To assert that it was
Man and that he was incapable of sin contains contradiction; the attributes of impeccability and
dehumanization is not compatible. Kemnitz admits that the Redeemer could feel fatigue, cold,
disturbance, hunger and thirst; it must also be admitted that he could sin and be lost. The famous text
He shall grow up as a root out of a dry ground; he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
and the last of men; a man of sorrows, experiencing grief (Isaiah 53: 2-3),
it is for many a foretelling of the crucified, at the hour of his death; for some
(for example, Hans Lassen Martensen), a refutation of the beauty that common consensus
attributes to Christ; for Runeberg, the punctual prophecy not of a moment but of the whole atrocious
future, in time and in eternity, of the Word made flesh. God completely became man
to the infamy, man to reproach and the abyss. To save us, he could choose
any of the destinations that weave the perplexing web of history; it could have been Alexander or
Pythagoras Ruriko Jesus; chose an infinite destiny: it was Judas.

In vain, the bookstores of Stockholm and Lund proposed that revelation. The unbelievers it
they considered, a priori, a bland and laborious theological game; the theologians dismissed it.
Runeberg sensed in that ecumenical indifference an almost miraculous confirmation. God
He ordered that indifference; God did not want His terrible secret to spread on earth.
Runeberg understood that the time had not yet come. He felt that they were converging on him.
ancient divine curses; he recalled Elijah and Moses, who covered their faces on the mountain
to not see God; to Isaiah, who was terrified when his eyes saw Him whose glory fills the
land; to Saul, whose eyes were blinded on the road to Damascus; to the rabbi Simeon ben
Azaí, who saw Paradise and died; to the famous sorcerer Juan de Viterbo, who went mad when
he could see the Trinity; the Midrashim, which abhor the wicked who utter the Shem
Hamephorash, the Secret Name of God. Was he not, perhaps, guilty of that dark crime?
Wouldn't that be the blasphemy against the Spirit, which will not be forgiven (Matthew 12:31)? Valerio
Sorano died for having revealed the hidden name of Rome; what infinite punishment would that be?
yours, for having discovered and divulged the horrible name of God?

Inebriated with insomnia and dizzying dialectics, Nils Runeberg wandered through the streets of Malmö,
begging to the voices that took him out of the grace of sharing with the Redeemer in Hell.

He died from the rupture of an aneurysm on March 1, 1912. The heresiologists perhaps
they will remember; he added to the concept of Son, which seemed exhausted, the complexities of evil and of
misfortune.

1944.

Jorge Luis Borges