Is there anywhere in literature an account of the subsequent career of the thirty pieces?
The Capitol library, one of the most complete collections in the world, offers unlimited facilities for research. There Barwood was to be found some part of every day for months.
The writer has seen a list of the works consulted by him in his singular investigation. It numbers some hundreds, and includes commentaries of all sorts upon the Gospels, lives of the apostles, collections of apocryphal Gospels and Scriptural traditions, the works of the early fathers, chronicles of the Middle Ages, treatises upon Oriental life and customs, histories of symbolism and Christian art, a great number of works upon numismatics, and, finally, accounts of great crimes and calamities. For Barwood took a new view of history: he looked to find that the great treasons, briberies, betrayals of trust, murders from mercenary motives, and perhaps financial troubles, had been set in motion by this fatal money, made the instrument of divine vengeance.
"It has mown a swath through history," he said, "like a discharge of grape."
He believed it would appear, if the truth were known, in the bank accounts of Manuel Comnenus, of Egmont, Benedict Arnold, and the Hungarian Gorgey.
His progress was by no means rapid. Much of the literature among which he delved, musty with age, written in mediaeval Latin and in obsolete characters, gave up its secrets with reluctance. Nevertheless he found definite replies to the questions which he propounded to himself. A collection of apocryphal Gospels "printed," according to the quaint title-page, "for Richard Royston at the Angle in Amen Corner, MDCLXX," relates particulars about Judas, among the rest, which do not appear in the Scriptures. He was when young, it was said, a playmate of the boy Jesus, who delivered him from a devil by which he was even then possessed. The chief value of this book to Barwood was in a reference it contained to a fuller Gospel of Judas Iscariot, not now extant with the exception of some passages quoted in the writings of Irenaeus. But these passages were upon the very subject of which he was in search. In a treatise of Irenaeus's, therefore, of about the second century, Barwood found the first definite mention of the coins.
The main part of the story is that of the authorized version, but after the account of the relinquishment of the coins by Judas, saying that he had betrayed innocent blood, and of their use in the purchase of the potter's field, occurs a passage translated[[2]] by Barwood as follows:—
"Now the shekels were of the coinage of Simon, the high priest, which Antiochus authorized him to issue. They bore the pot of manna and the flowering rod of Aaron, the high priest. But he to whom they were given knew that they were the price of blood, and was afraid. And he stamped them with a mark in shape like a cross. And great tribulations came upon him, and tribulation came upon all that bought and sold with the money of Judas." Later on, Leontinus, a Byzantine writer of the sixth century, in a treatise devoted to showing the efficacy of certain forms and processes in imparting virtue to inanimate matter, instances as well known the malevolence inherent in the thirty pieces of silver of Judas, which carry ruin wherever they go. From this time the legend is traced down through successive periods. The Middle Ages, which so delighted in the romantic, the mysterious, the portentous, received it implicitly. Eginhard, abbot of Seligenstadt under Charlemagne, William of Malmesbury, the English chronicler of the twelfth century, Roger Bacon of the thirteenth, Malespini, the Italian chronicler of the same period, and many others of equal note mention as fully established that the coins of Judas were in circulation, and were inflicting serious injury upon those into whose possession they came. It was said to be impossible to amalgamate them with any other silver. They either would not melt or in melting remained distinct. This, however, was a disputed point. Some of the alchemists in their writings seem disposed to attribute the ill success of their efforts at transmutation to the presence of some taint of these pieces in the silver upon which they were experimenting.
Matthew Paris, who first popularized the legend of the Wandering Jew, as now received, strangely enough makes no mention of them.
The conclusions arrived at by Barwood were these:—