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The story of Judas may have been the first thing I noticed about Christianity that didn’t quite add up.
I was raised by a Christian mother—a member of the Church of Christ Scientist and more a cultural Christian than an actual believer, who later became a staunch atheist—and an agnostic father with Buddhist and Taoist leanings. My mother, wanting me to be exposed to what she perceived at the time to be the positive ethical values of Christianity, brought me to a local Christian Science church on Sundays for Bible school. Over the years, I bought into my mother’s cultural Christianity, as well as a vague and highly generalized belief in God, but never embraced the Christian Science religion itself (for those listeners curious about the Christian Science denomination, I’ve got an episode about it, “The Tragedy of Christian Science”).
My friends and I would sometimes talk about religion. My best friend at the time shared my general religious outlook: a very vague kind of theism mixed with cultural Christianity. We didn’t talk specifics because our knowledge of the details of Christianity was limited. Our beliefs were shaped more by our moral intuitions than our morality was shaped by our religious beliefs: we believed that God and Jesus represented good, and that if we did good ourselves, we’d go to Heaven, whereas Hell was reserved for bad people. This folk understanding of Christianity is, of course, not doctrinal: salvation is reserved for those who accept the substitutionary atonement of Christ, regardless of the moral value of their earthly deeds. Christian murderers are saved; atheists working for Doctors Without Borders are not. My friends and I understood the general premise that “Christ died for our sins” and neither assented to nor disputed it. But I remember a conversation in which we discussed the story of Judas, the Apostle who betrayed Jesus to the Romans, resulting in his crucifixion. We simultaneously hit on a point of confusion: if the crucifixion of Christ was the final sacrifice for the sins of mankind, wasn’t it good that that had happened? Wouldn’t it have been bad if it hadn’t happened? And if that were true, wouldn’t Judas’s role have been not only of central importance but even laudable?
Turns out neither of us were alone in this thinking, and so today I’ll be exploring the story and the theology of Judas Iscariot.
We’ll start with a review of the story of Judas as told across the four canonical gospels before getting into the details of what appears in which gospel and how the gospels differ. First, a review of the gospels themselves.
The gospels are the books of the Bible which tell the story of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, who is believed by Christians to be the messiah, the incarnation of God, and the salvation of humankind. There are four gospels, titled by the names of their supposed authors, although these names are now considered by scholars to be pseudonymous: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The first three, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are the synoptic gospels, “synoptic” from the Greek meaning “appearing together” or “similar in appearance.” Scholars believe that there was an early gospel, now lost, called the Q source, which collected the sayings of Jesus. Mark, it is believed, was based on the Q source, and then Matthew and Luke were based on Mark, which accounts for their similarity. John is an outlier, quite different from the other three both in terms of content and tone. It’s my favorite of the gospels and one of my favorite books of the Bible, very mystical and poetic.
We have good reason to believe that most of what is contained in all four gospels is fictitious, written for the purpose of converting people to the new Christian religion in the 1st century, but we also have good reason to believe that some of the details are historical, specifically: that Jesus lived, that he was a Jewish teacher, zealot, and apocalypticist, and that he was betrayed by one of his followers to the Romans and then executed by crucifixion. There’s not much certainty to be had about the life of Jesus and there are many who doubt that he ever existed in the first place, but I’ve found consistently that inference to the best explanation leads us to the conclusion that Jesus most likely did exist and that he was a Jewish apocalypticist who was betrayed by one of his followers and subsequently crucified by the Romans, but that most of the details of his life were exaggerated or fabricated by the early Christians.
I’ll note quickly that the gospels’ being largely fictitious doesn’t mean that they can’t or don’t contain authentic spiritual insights, or that they can’t be a source of such insight for people. The Bhagavad Gita is not believed by Hindus to describe historical events but is nevertheless considered a source of wisdom. We are a species of storytellers, and the story of Jesus being exactly that doesn’t diminish its potential value.
Back to the gospels and the story of Judas.
Early in Jesus’ ministry, he set twelve of his followers apart as his closest disciples. These were the Apostles, and Judas was among their number. Later on, Jesus ran afoul of the Pharisees, a Jewish sect famed for their strict adherence to tradition and the Mosaic Law. Jesus preached that the point of the Law was not slavish, mindless adherence but rather that they encourage and inspire love and fellowship, and the chief priests of the Pharisees considered this blasphemous and threatening to their order. Judas agreed to betray Jesus to them in exchange for thirty shekels, thirty silver coins. After Jesus shared a dinner with the Apostles in celebration of the feast of Passover, Judas brought the priests to them and told the priests that the one that he kissed would be Jesus. He went to Jesus and kissed him in greeting, and the priests siezed him and delivered him to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate for judgement. Jesus was then tortured and executed by crucifixion. Judas, ashamed, returned the silver to the Pharisees and hung himself.
Now let’s get into the details of the individual gospels.
Mark is the tersest of the gospels and mostly just includes the narrative I’ve already presented. Matthew adds the detail that, when Judas tried to return the silver to the priests, they rejected it, but he tossed it out at them regardless as he ran away to hang himself. The priests weren’t sure what to do with it; they couldn’t admit it to the treasury because it was “the price of blood” (27:6), so they use it to buy a field in which to bury people whose identities are unknown, and this field thusly comes to be known as the “field of blood.”
Luke 22:3 adds an interesting detail: “Then entered Satan into Judas surnamed Iscariot, being of the number of the twelve.” This possession is directly linked in the text to Judas betraying Jesus. According to Luke, Judas didn’t betray Jesus of his own accord, but rather was forced to because he was possessed by Satan. More on this presently.
John includes a very interesting passage. In chapter 6, Jesus is offering some teachings to his followers, one of which includes the doctrine that his followers must eat him in order to attain salvation: “Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me” (6:57). At this point, many of his disciples decided that the whole apocalyptic Jesus cult thing wasn’t for them and parted ways (6:66). The Apostles remain, and Jesus asks them, “Do you also wish to go away?” (6:67). Simon Peter affirms that they remain confident in Jesus and his teachings, and Jesus responds, “Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?” (6:70). That’s the King James verse; the New Revised Standard Version gives “Did I not choose you, the twelve? Yet one of you is a devil.” The chapter continues, “He was speaking of Judas son of Simon Iscariot, for he, though one of the twelve, was going to betray him” (6:71).
John 12 is where it really gets interesting. You might be familiar with the story of Lazarus. In the previous chapter, Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead. In chapter 12, they stop back in for a meal with Lazarus’s family—maybe a kind of post-resurrection checkup—and Lazarus’s sister Mary anoints him with an expensive oil. Judas thinks that this is a ridiculous expense: “Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” he says (12:5). The author is quick to point out that Judas wasn’t saying this because he actually cared for the poor; rather, because he carried the Apostles’ collective purse and stole from it, and selling the ointment would give him more money to steal (12:6). Jesus’ response, though, is quite interesting: “Look, this is for my funeral, so just let me have this. The poor aren’t going anywhere” (12:7-8, obviously my paraphrase).
Continuing on to John 13, we have the beginning of the Last Supper, when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet. In the context of 1st century Judean culture, washing feet was servants’ work, and so it’s unusual that Jesus washed the feet of those who followed him rather than the other way around. The Apostles are quite astonished by this. Simon Peter initially refuses, but Jesus explains that those whose feet he doesn’t wash have “no part” with him (John 13:8). Simon Peter then jokes that, in that case, Jesus had better wash his hands and head as well! Jesus says, “No, your hands and head are already clean. But that doesn’t go for everyone here” (John 13:10). He sits down and talks about how he wants the whole foot-washing routine to serve as an example to his followers, but then he follows that by saying, “I am not speaking of all of you; I know whom I have chosen. But it is to fulfill the scripture, ‘The one who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me’” (13:18). In other words, he means that guidance—for people to serve each other—for all but one of them. “I know whom I have chosen,” he says, switching here to the King James Version. He reiterates that he chose Judas as a disciple knowing full well what would happen. “But that the scripture may be fulfilled, he that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me.” The New Revised Standard Version quotes that last part from Psalm 41:9, but in the King James it’s just part of the normal flow of his speech. If someone lifts up their heel in your direction it means they’re walking away from you, so this is an explicit reference to the betrayal. Jesus states here quite clearly that Judas’ betrayal is all part of the plan. And why’s he telling them this anyway? “I tell you this now, before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe that I am he” (13:19). Jesus wants them to believe and understand that the betrayal was part of the plan. If he tells them now—and he explains this very fact to them—then they’ll know it was part of the plan and not just some coincidence.
In the next verse, John 13:20, Jesus says to the disciples, “…whoever receives one whom I send receives me; and whoever receives me receives him who sent me.” This verse seems to come out of nowhere, especially given the following verse, in which Jesus states explicitly his earlier implication that one of his followers would betray him. Verse 13:20 correlates with Verse 20:21, in which Jesus, having recently risen from the dead, speaks to the eleven remaining disciples, saying to them, “…as the Father has sent me, so I send you.” I think that Jesus intended his words in 13:20 to clarify that he’s still being inclusive of Judas as part of the overall mission.
One of the Apostles then privately asks Jesus who will betray him, and Jesus says that he will show who it is by dipping a morsel of bread and giving it to the betrayer, a sign of honor and respect. He does so, giving the morsel to Judas. Then “Satan entered into [Judas],” and Jesus says to him, “Do quickly what you are going to do” (13:27). Judas gets up and leaves, and Jesus says to the Apostles, who are a bit confused at this point, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him” (13:31).
There are additional parts of the gospels in which Judas is referred to obliquely, without being directly named, either as being the one who betrayed Jesus or as being one among the twelve Apostles. For example, in Matthew 19:28, Jesus speaks to the Apostles (Judas included), saying “Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” There’s also an interesting footnote in the book of Acts, which was written by the same author as the gospel titled by the name Luke: “Now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness; and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out” (1:18). The author here seems to be responding directly to the gospel of Matthew, saying, “That’s not how it happened; this is what happened: Judas purchased the field himself with the money he got for betraying Jesus, then killed himself in the field in such a way that his bowels gushed out over it, and that’s why they call it the field of blood.”
Now, to me, it’s obvious enough that the gospels were written by four different people for four different purposes. I wouldn’t expect that they would all line up perfectly and it wouldn’t make sense to me to try to construct a single narrative out of all four of them. However, many Christians believe that the Bible is an infallible and divinely-inspired document and so take the gospels collectively as describing the life, death, and resurrection with perfect accuracy… this despite the fact that some of the details directly contradict one another. If we’re to take that tack ourselves, we find ourselves with some interesting facts regarding Judas which are not often taken into account: one, Jesus knew Judas would betray him from the beginning and chose him knowing that fact (John 6:70). Two, Judas could not be held morally accountable for betraying Jesus because he did so while possessed by Satan (Luke 22:3; John 13:2). Three, Judas will be glorified in heaven along with the other Apostles (Matthew 19:28). Revelation 4:4 describes twenty-four thrones surrouding the throne of God in Heaven: twelve representing the twelve tribes of Israel and twelve for the Apostles. If we’re to take Jesus at his word, Judas gets one of those thrones. I’ve heard some suggest that the Apostle Matthias, who was chosen by the other eleven in Acts 1 to replace Judas, will ultimately be the one to hold one of the twelve thrones, but this conflicts quite directly with what Jesus himself said. Jesus stated quite clearly that he knew that Judas would betray him and made no qualifications in Matthew 19:28 about whom among those he was speaking to would attain the heavenly thrones.
What’s more, Jesus states several times in the gospels that he knew that he was going to be killed; combine that with the fact that he selected Judas knowing that Judas would betray him and it’s hard not to see Judas as being part of the plan from the beginning, which makes his subsequent suicide tragic and his condemnation across the centuries monstrously unjust.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m not the only person in history to have thought about the situation this way. Let’s turn now to the Gospel of Judas, an apocryphal (i.e. non-canonical) gospel written some time in the 2nd century. The introduction to the text reads as follows: “The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week three days before he celebrated Passover.” And remember, the Passover celebration was the night of Judas’ betrayal.
First, we’ll have to cover some background on Gnostic Christianity, since this text is a part of the Gnostic tradition.
Christianity arose after the death of Jesus not as a unified religion but as a collection of disparate sects, one of which eventually won out over the others. Among these sects were those which we now describe as Gnostic, from the Greek word gnosis, meaning “knowledge.” The general idea of Gnostic Christianity is that salvation comes not from accepting the substitutionary atonement of Jesus but rather from knowing what it is that Jesus came to teach people, which is that they—certain people, at least—contain sparks of divinity which have been imprisoned in human bodies by an evil god—the Demiurge, sometimes identified with the God of the Old Testament—who created this world, broken and dysfunctional as it is, out of malice and incompetence. For anyone who has ever asked why the character of God in the Old Testament seems so different from that of the New Testament, the Gnostics have an answer: they’re different gods. The sparks of divinity are described, in some texts, as being fragments of a being called Barbelo, the first emanation of the true and good God, “emanation” here meaning a kind of fundamental cosmic principle, like a Platonic Form manifest as a kind of demigod. Barbelo is described as being either female or distinctly androgenous. Another Gnostic text, the Apocryphon of John, describes her (or perhaps them) thusly: “This is the first thought, his [the true God’s] image; she became the womb of everything, for it is she who is prior to them all, the Mother-Father, the first human, the holy Spirit, the thrice-male, the thrice-powerful, the thrice-named androgynous one, and the eternal aeon among the invisible ones, and the first to come forth.”
The Gospel of Judas begins with the Apostles offering a prayer of thanks for their meal, and Jesus laughs at them, saying that they’re only doing it to please their god. When they respond that they thought that Jesus was the son of their god, he responds that they do not understand who he is. The Apostles become angry, all except for Judas, who tells Jesus that he knows that Jesus is “from the immortal realm of Barbelo.” Jesus then takes Judas aside and, on a few occasions, offers him various secret teachings which are unfit for those who do not understand who Jesus truly is. There are lines missing from the codex throughout the text, most of them at the end, unfortunately, but it seems that Jesus praises Judas as being exalted among all of his other followers. Jesus says to Judas, “But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” Because of the missing lines, it’s not clear to whom Jesus is referring when he says “you will exceed all of them,” but the few words still remaining hint that he’s referring to those who perform a certain kind of sacrifice. And Judas will exceed all of them, he says, “For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” By “the man that clothes me,” Jesus is not referring to the one who gave him the clothes that he is wearing, but rather to his own physical body, which “clothes” his underlying divine being.
There’s a bit more broken text, and then a truly beautiful passage:
And then the image of the great generation of Adam will be exalted, for prior to heaven, earth, and the angels, that generation, which is from the eternal realms, exists. Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. The star that leads the way is your star.
Judas lifted up his eyes and saw the luminous cloud, and he entered it. Those standing on the ground heard a voice coming from the cloud, saying…
And again there are more lines missing. After this is the conclusion, in which Judas betrays Jesus to the priests after the Last Supper.
Clearly, the interpretation of these 2nd-century Gnostics was that Judas was not only part of the plan all along but that he was a knowing and willing part of the plan, and that he would be exalted for having had the courage and the will to sacrifice his teacher for the greater good. Likely, they would have read Luke and John’s passages stating that Judas had been possessed as being the corrupting influence of the Demiurge on those authors. Given what we’ve seen in the canonical gospels, it’s hard not to take their interpretation—not of Gnosticism in general but of the Judas narrative in particular—as being the most reasonable one.
But we need not stop at the gospels in looking to the Bible for information about Judas and keys to the interpretation of his narrative. Looking to the Book of Zechariah, one of the Twelve Minor Prophets, we find the remarkable eleventh chapter, an enigmatic prophecy written just after the return of the Jewish people to their homeland after the end of the Babylonian Exile. I actually wrote a rather in-depth analysis of the chapter but it ended up being a rather long tangent that distracted from this episode’s central narrative on Judas rather than adding to it. Long story short, Zechariah describes a shepherd who betrays his flock for thirty shekels. It’s quite an interesting chapter and I might do a short episode on it at some point. According to the prophecy, God abandons his people in retribution for the shepherd’s betrayal, and sends to the world a kind of dark messiah who will “devour[] the flesh of the fat ones, tearing off even their hoofs” (11:16).
As long as we’re on the topic, what is thirty shekels—thirty silver coins—worth? It’s difficult or impossible to put a dollar figure on, but consider that, for a 1st-century Judean laborer, two shekels would be about a month’s wage, and so thirty shekels would represent fifteen months of work. So with regards to Judas at least, thirty shekels was a substantial sum. Of course, Zechariah wrote five hundred years before Judas and shekels would have been worth a different amount; regardless, the shekel was one of the largest denominations, and the prophet Jeremiah paid seventeen shekels for a field of land in Jeremiah 32:9.
What then are the New Testament authors seeking to accomplish by connecting Judas to this prophecy? It may be that they’re merely using the thirty shekels as a symbol of betrayal without connecting the narrative to the wider prophecy. Or they may not have understood Zechariah’s prophecy in the first place, a possibility I strongly suspect given how strange and abstract the prophecy is.
I had a great deal of difficulty figuring out how to wrap up this essay because I couldn’t settle on a single through-line that ties everything together. I finally realized today that that itself is, I think, the most important takeaway from the Judas narrative: Judas represents a depth of complexity and contradiction that I find missing in much of modern Christianity. Not even the authors of the Bible themselves knew quite what to do with him. Putting this all together, we have John—the biblical author who provides the most detail about Judas—calling Judas a devil but also saying that he was possessed by Satan when he betrayed Jesus. John portrays Judas as being a thief, someone of low moral character, but also has Jesus explicitly state that the betrayal is all part of the greater plan. The author seems intent on denigrating Judas in spite of Jesus trying to honor him, so we’re certainly faced with some mixed signals in interpreting the narrative of Judas in light of the Gospel of John. The other gospels, while providing less detail overall, are similarly conflicted. In Matthew, Judas participates in the Eucharist, the ritual consumption of bread and wine which have been transformed into the body and blood of Christ (26:26-28), which has come to be the highest and most honored sacrament of the Christian religion. Just prior to that, Jesus says “The Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that one by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that one not to have been born” (26:24).
Recall that, being that the betrayal of Jesus by Judas is portrayed in both the synoptic gospels and in John (as well as in other contemporaneous texts), it was likely a historical event. Why did the historical Judas betray the historical Jesus? It may have been out of simple greed, or perhaps resentment that Jesus wasn’t more active in resisting the oppression of the Romans. Perhaps he thought that by betraying Jesus, Judas would force his hand, forcing him to use the power of God to defeat their common enemies. It may have indeed been because Jesus believed his death would fulfill scripture and effect the salvation of humankind. But it’s doubtful we’ll ever have the real answer to this question.
Keep in mind as well that the complete formulation of modern Christianity—that humans are condemned to Hell as a result of sin, including original sin, and that Christ died as a substitutionary atonement for those sins, allowing those who accept the atonement an eternal afterlife in paradise—is not presented in the gospels in its final form but rather was pieced together by theologians over the subsequent centuries as they combined the new revelations with the Jewish religious tradition, the Greek philosophical tradition, and the pragmatic and political concerns of various power interests. The narrative of Judas gives us a window into the minds of the scriptural authors: they followed a man whom they believed to be the messiah but who had died the death of an ignominious criminal. They reconciled this contradiction by making the seeming defeat of the crucifixion into a victory in the greater spiritual war between good and evil. But in doing so, they put Judas—and all of Christianity—in an irreconcilable position. I think that the ultimate reconciliation of this problem, for Christians, comes from seeing that the real test of a Christian is not how much they love Jesus. After all, Jesus—morally perfect, God in human form, the salvation of humanity—is easy to love.
In the Gospel of John, at the Last Supper after Judas departs, Jesus says, “Where I am going, you cannot come. I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (13:33-34). What Christian can say that they have this love for Judas, without whom the prophecies never would have come to pass, without whom the salvation never would have manifested?
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