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:—­