Judas Iscariot

• 1. Introduction

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  Judas Iscariot was one of Jesus Christ's original Twelve Apostles, and his name has become, in many languages, a synonym for betrayer. Thirty pieces of silver. A kiss on the cheek. A single word, "master," spoken in a garden at night. These are the raw materials of one of the most analyzed acts in Western history. How did a man chosen by Jesus to preach and heal become the instrument of his arrest? Why does every gospel tell the story differently? And what happened to Judas afterward, in a tangle of accounts so contradictory that they troubled C. S. Lewis enough to reject the doctrine of biblical inerrancy?

• 2. A Name and Its Shadows

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  Judas was an extremely common name for Jewish men in first-century Judea, popular largely because of the revered hero Judas Maccabeus. The New Testament itself names multiple figures called Judas, and none except Iscariot is portrayed negatively. The prophet Judas Barsabbas, the apostle Judas son of James, and Jesus's own brother Jude all carry the name without stigma.

  The epithet "Iscariot" is where scholars part ways most sharply. The most widely accepted explanation reads it as a Greek rendering of the Hebrew phrase meaning "the man from Kerioth," supported by the Gospel of John's identification of Judas as "the son of Simon Iscariot." A popular alternative links it to the Latin word for "dagger man," connecting Judas to the Sicarii, a group of Jewish rebels who concealed long knives under their cloaks to assassinate people in crowds. That theory runs into a problem, though: the Sicarii appear to have not existed during the 30s AD when Judas was alive, and nothing in the gospels ties him to them.

  Other proposals trace the word to Aramaic roots meaning "to deliver," or to a Greek-Aramaic compound meaning "chokiness" or "constriction," possibly referencing the manner of his death. Joan E. Taylor has argued the epithet may have been given to Judas by Jesus himself, since Jesus gave descriptive names to other disciples, most famously calling Simon "Cephas," meaning rock. Peter Stanford has suggested that the Gospel of Luke's decision to rename one apostle from "Thaddeus" to "Judas son of James" was a deliberate attempt to create a "good Judas" in contrast to the betrayer.

• 3. Apostle Before Betrayer

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  All four canonical gospels list Judas among the Twelve, and the Synoptic Gospels are explicit that Jesus sent "the twelve" out with power over unclean spirits and a ministry of preaching and healing. Judas participated in that apostolic work alongside the others. He was not a marginal figure kept at arm's length.

  The Gospel of John adds a dimension absent from the other three: Judas carried the disciples' communal money box. The evangelist writes in John 12:5-6 that while Judas spoke of giving money to the poor, "not that he cared for the poor, but he was a thief, and had the money box; and he used to take what was put in it." This portrait of quiet, ongoing dishonesty contrasts with the other gospels, which show no sign of prior misconduct.

  New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman points to a saying of Jesus in Matthew as unusually strong evidence of authenticity. Jesus tells the apostles that in the coming new world they will sit on twelve thrones judging the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Ehrman argues no early Christian would have invented that promise after the betrayal, since no one believed Judas deserved a throne in God's kingdom. John P. Meier distills the historical case to two bedrock facts: Jesus chose Judas as one of the Twelve, and Judas handed Jesus over to the Jerusalem authorities, precipitating the execution.

• 4. Motives, Contested

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  The Gospel of Mark, the earliest account, offers money as the reward for the betrayal but does not name it as Judas's motivation. Matthew shows Judas actively asking what he will be paid. Luke and John introduce a different explanation entirely: Satan entered Judas, making the betrayal less an act of personal greed than of supernatural compulsion.

  Some scholars have proposed a political reading. Judas, on this view, was a disillusioned nationalist who expected Jesus to overthrow Roman rule of Judea. When Jesus failed to do so, Judas handed him over not out of love of money but out of disappointment with a leader who seemed to be failing his people. Another suggestion holds that Judas and perhaps others in the group thought Jesus was dangerously stirring unrest ahead of the Passover festival, and that a temporary arrest would let the commotion die down before anyone was seriously harmed.

  Ehrman's own position is that what Judas actually disclosed to the authorities was not Jesus's location but his secret teaching that he was the Messiah. This, Ehrman argues, explains why the authorities had not arrested Jesus earlier despite his visible public activity.

  In April 2006, the National Geographic magazine published a feature on a Coptic papyrus manuscript titled the Gospel of Judas, dated to around 200 AD, which suggested Jesus himself instructed Judas to betray him. In December 2007, scholar April DeConick challenged the translation, arguing that National Geographic had rendered the Coptic word "daimon" as "spirit" when in Gnostic literature it consistently means "demon." The National Geographic Society replied that its translation choices were addressed in footnotes in both the popular and critical editions.

• 5. A Death Told Three Ways

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  Matthew states that Judas, on learning Jesus would be crucified, was overcome with remorse, tried to return the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests, was refused because the coins were blood money, threw them down, and hanged himself. The priests then used the money to buy a potter's field, which became known as Akeldama, the Field of Blood.

  Acts of the Apostles gives an entirely different account. There, Judas buys the field himself with the money, then dies when he "fell headlong, burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out." No remorse is mentioned.

  Papias of Hierapolis, writing around 100 AD in his Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord, records a third tradition: God's wrath afflicted Judas with a grotesque physical deterioration. His body became so bloated he could not pass between buildings. His face swelled until a doctor could not locate his eyes. He died by pouring out his own innards on his own land, and the site stank so badly that people still held their noses when passing it a century later, in Papias's own time.

  The Gospel of Nicodemus, probably written in the fourth century AD, takes yet another angle. Judas went home and told his wife he intended to hang himself because Jesus would rise from the dead and punish him. His wife laughed, saying Jesus could no more rise than the chicken roasting over her fire could come back to life. The chicken immediately crowed. Judas ran and hanged himself.

  The contradiction between Matthew and Acts troubled theologians for centuries. Even Jerome and John Calvin acknowledged that Matthew's attribution of the death prophecy to Jeremiah was clearly an error, since the passage he quotes corresponds to Zechariah, not Jeremiah. Raymond Brown suggests Matthew was drawing on a mixed citation, weaving language from both books together. Modern scholars, noting that ancient historians like Tacitus, Suetonius, and Plutarch similarly varied in their accounts of Otho's death, tend to treat the discrepancy as a normal feature of ancient historical writing rather than a problem requiring harmonization.

• 6. Damnation and Its Dissenters

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  Dante placed Judas in the innermost region of the ninth circle of Hell in the Divine Comedy, devoured by Lucifer alongside Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus. That zone is called Judecca, after Judas. It is reserved for traitors of masters and benefactors, and for Dante it was the lowest point of creation.

  The Protestant reformers argued over whether Judas could have changed course. Erasmus believed he remained free to alter his intention up to the end. Martin Luther insisted Judas's will was immutable. John Calvin, writing in Institutes of the Christian Religion, held that Judas was predestined to damnation while simultaneously insisting this did not transfer the guilt of the betrayal to God. Karl Daub went furthest in his book Judas Ischariot, calling Judas "an incarnation of the devil" for whom "mercy and blessedness are alike impossible."

  The Catholic Church at Vatican II took no specific position on Judas's damnation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, at section 597, states the personal sin of Judas is known only to God, though that statement appears in the context of arguing against collective Jewish responsibility for Jesus's death. The Council of Trent's catechism went further, writing that Judas possessed "motive unworthy" when he entered the apostolate and was sentenced to "eternal perdition." The Tridentine Latin Mass's Collect for Holy Thursday draws the contrast directly, noting that God gave Judas the punishment of his guilt while giving the good thief the reward of his confession.

  Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his 1969 book Theologie der Drei Tage, argued that Jesus was not betrayed but surrendered himself, pointing to the Greek word paradidonai as meaning unequivocally "handing over of self." The Catholic priest Richard Neuhaus, drawing on Balthasar, suggested Hell might be empty. French monsignor Leon Cristiani countered that this position recycled the error of Origenism, which a synod condemned in 548 AD, later confirmed by Pope Vigilius.

• 7. Art, Antisemitism, and the Archive

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  Caravaggio painted The Taking of Christ in 1602, one of the most recognized depictions of the identifying kiss. Dante's Judecca had already fixed the name geographically in the European imagination. By the Middle Ages, Judas had been woven into Christian antisemitism, portrayed as a personification of the Jewish people or the Pharisees, his betrayal used to justify persecution.

  Spanish culture developed the term pelo de Judas, "Judas hair," for red hair, documented in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Espanola. The association between Judas and red hair, common also in Renaissance painting, mapped onto broader negative characterizations of Jewish people with red hair. William Shakespeare used the same association. Some church stained-glass windows, including one in the Church of St John the Baptist in Yeovil, show Judas with a black halo, signaling his former apostolic status while marking his fall.

  In the Eastern Orthodox calendar, Holy Wednesday commemorates the betrayal every year. The fasting from meat, dairy, and olive oil observed each Wednesday throughout the year traces back to this event. The prayers of preparation for receiving the Eucharist include the line: "I will not reveal your mysteries to your enemies, neither like Judas will I betray you with a kiss."

  Literary engagements kept accumulating. Jorge Luis Borges published "Tres versiones de Judas" in his 1944 anthology Ficciones, exploring three alternative accounts of what Judas actually was. Bertrand Russell addressed Judas in The Problem of Natural Evil. The 1970 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber placed Judas at the center of the Passion, depicting him as dissatisfied with Jesus's leadership. Edward Elgar's oratorio The Apostles portrayed Judas as trying to force Jesus to declare his divinity and establish an earthly kingdom, a motive rooted in frustration rather than avarice. The oldest surviving English ballad named "Judas," dating from the thirteenth century, goes a different direction still, placing the blame for the betrayal on Judas's own sister.