I was taking another look at MacDonald's
Two Shipwrecked Gospels on Google books and I noticed that he discusses the resemblance between 2 Sam. 15-17 and Judas' betrayal.
https://books.google.com/books?id=SbpVq ... el&f=false
How did I miss that? I guess some things stick and some things don't. And I wasn't very interested in Judas when I first looked at the book.
And now I'm wondering about what Papias says about Judas, which MacDonald also discusses. He writes on page 31:
Papias explicitly attributed his version [of Judas' death] to oral informants, most likely auditors of the elders John and Aristion. One must choose between two assessments of the genesis of this vivid tale: (1) it was originally independent of the Gospel of Matthew, or (2) it was a polemical response to it prior to Papias.
And on page 34:
If Matthew created the suicide of Judas, odds are good for taking Papias's version of Judas' death as a polemical response to it.
And I found an old thread by Ben called "Apollinaris of Laodicea, Papias, and the death of Judas" that looks helpful.
viewtopic.php?t=1786
Ben wrote:
Two trajectories are thus possible:
1. Papias wrote the shorter version, with both the figurative chariot and the literal one, and Apollinarius elaborated on this story in sickening detail; at some point, these extra details were treated as if Papias himself had written them, got integrated into the story, and shoved out the death by chariot.
2. Papias wrote the longer version, with only a figurative chariot, and somebody at some point thought that, since a chariot was mentioned, a chariot must have done the deed (along the lines of what Bernard proposed above: to explain how someone can have their bowels spill out just from being fat); once the chariot was introduced, that was naturally interpreted as the end of the story, and the rest of the details became a separate commentary by Apollinarius.
I personally think that the second option makes more sense. For one thing, as I have mentioned, the figurative chariot turning into a literal chariot in the shorter version seems pretty strained, and unlikely to have been devised by a single author. For another, I think the whole point of the grotesquerie is that Judas died of his own sin and shame; his own body turned on him and disintegrated into a pile of pus and maggots. To turn his fatness into the mere cause of his getting run over by a chariot takes away some of the punch of the anecdote.
(Why did Papias want Judas to die such a horrible death? Because he played the traitor to Jesus, of course, but there is probably more. I owe the following to Dennis R. MacDonald in Two Shipwrecked Gospels: Papias may have wanted to contradict the Matthean account in which Judas repented before his death. Matthew had to hold out repentance for Judas because of a saying that he and only he had included at 19.28 to the effect that the twelve disciples with Jesus would rule Israel on twelve thrones. How can this happen if Judas is no longer one of the twelve? Well, Judas has to repent. Not everyone would be happy with this solution, though, and both Papias and Acts repudiate it by denying Judas both his repentance and his suicide.)
Hm. I'm already suspecting that Judas may have seen the resurrected Jesus (whether he had repented or not) in (an original version of) Mark, since it says in 14:27, “You will all fall away,” Jesus told them," and then in 14:28, "But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee,” which I take to be the same "you's" and which might have something to do with why there is a Short Ending of Mark.
However things may be, Papias is very interesting, since MacDonald persuades me that he stands somewhere between Mark and Mathew on one hand and Luke/Acts and John on the other. And is there an earlier gospel commentator than Papias? In any event, Ben's thread is giving me the impression that the citation of Papias by Apollinaris is complicated and I need to give it some more thought.
You know in spite of all you gained, you still have to stand out in the pouring rain.