Did Judas Iscariot really betray Jesus?

Most Christians in this current era, whether laity, clergy, or theologians, still consider Judas, one of Jesus’ disciples, as a traitor. Indeed the term ‘Judas’ has entered many languages as a synonym for ‘betrayer’, and Judas has become the archetype of the betrayer in Western art and literature. Even the term, ‘Judas goat’ is a derivative from the so-called betrayal of Jesus by Judas. However, some scholars have embraced alternative notions that Judas had merely acted with Jesus' knowledge and consent to ensure the re-enactment of Biblical prophecy, and that his later portrayal as ‘traitor’ was a historical mistake in the interpretation of the real story.

According to the gospel of Mathew, Jesus while sharing his last supper with his disciples said to them, “One of you who had just eaten from this bowl will betray me.” The bowl he was speaking of was the communal bowl in which Jesus and the others had withdrawn the food from with the fingers of their right hands. They never used their left hands when eating as their left hands were used for another purpose that doesn’t need an explanation.

Nowhere in the scriptures is there any evidence that Jesus knew in advance before he made that statement that Judas was going to betray him. That being as it is, how did he suspect that it was Judas and not one of his other disciples who would betray him?

There are a number of theories: First, Jesus was unable to foresee Judas' actions. Although there are a number of passages in the New Testament which specifically states that Jesus was aware that he was going to be betrayed, nevertheless there is no evidence in the scriptures that Jesus knew that it was Judas who would betray him prior to the time of their last supper together. There is also the theory that Jesus knew of Judas' actions months in advance but was unable to prevent it. This also conflicts with the idea of the omniscience and omnipotence of Jesus. If Jesus knew months in advance that Judas would betray him, why didn’t Jesus flee from the province of Judea and escape the terrible consequences that would follow if he was arrested?

There is a more reasonable explanation as to why Jesus said that Judas was betraying him. Consider this. Jesus must have wondered if he was the expected Messiah. Such a person according to Jewish beliefs was someone who would free the Jews from the Roman yoke and that person would lead the attack with a host (that is an army) of angels.Of course, this would be dependent on whether or not Jesus really was the ‘anointed one’. It must be kept in mind that Jesus didn’t free the Jews from the Roman yoke because no host of angels came to Earth to rescue Jesus from the cross; which may explain Jesus’ last words on the cross which were; “Father. Why have you forsaken me?”

If Judas was a ‘Sicarius’ (a sect that wanted to overthrow the Romans) then it's possible that he saw Jesus as the Messiah in the fashion expected by the Zealots: a military leader who would defeat and cast out the Romans. If this scenario was the case, then Judas may well have been trying to force Jesus into a position where he had to reveal himself as the divinely appointed warrior-king who would destroy his enemies.

I am inclined to believe that Judas really did believe that Jesus was the Messiah that everyone was expecting and he was disappointed that Jesus wasn’t calling on God to send him a host of angels to help him rid the Jews of the Romans. Jesus often spoke of the Kingdom of God, but was misunderstood. Several times Judas saw Jesus escape capture and stonings. After seeing Jesus' popularity declining, Judas might have been motivated to hand Jesus over to the Pharisees in an attempt to force the ‘hand of God’. If Judas did betray Jesus, this could have been a motive for him to betray Jesus to the Pharisees who wanted to do harm to Jesus for the simple motive of getting him out of their hair, so to speak. But this theory is merely conjecture.

There is another theory and that one is that Jesus asked Judas to contact the priests and arrange for them to go to the olive grove with the guards and arrest Jesus. I realize that to many of my readers, that doesn’t seem to make sense. But consider what he said to Judas just before Judas left the upper room during the last supper. His disciples asked Jesus who it was that was going to betray him. (and I quote verses 26 and 27 from the Gospel of John)

‘Jesus answered, “He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, (bread) when I have dipped it.” And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon. And after the sop, Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, “That thou doest, do quickly.”

Isn’t it strange that after Jesus had just announced to his disciples that Judas was going to betray him and as Judas got up to leave the table and the room, there is nothing in the New testament saying that any of the disciples tried to stop Judas from leaving the room. They didn’t even express surprise. It is almost as if they knew that it was Jesus’ plan that Judas should meet with the Pharisees. Jesus was in effect, commanding Judas to betray him to the Pharisees. If that is so, then why would Jesus purposely do this knowing that it may bring about his death?

There is a theory in this respect that can’t be simply dismissed out of hand. The theory is that Judas and Jesus conspired together to make certain that Jesus would be crucified, in order to facilitate God's design for humanity. After all, if Jesus was dying on the cross, wouldn’t God send down to Earth a host of angels to rescue his only son? This is the belief of many Gnostic groups and this is the theme of the Gospel of Judas. Yes. Such writings were discovered. I will get to that later in this essay.

Judas was obeying Jesus' covert request to help him fulfill his destiny to die on the cross, thus making Judas the catalyst for the event later interpreted as bringing about humanity's salvation. This view of Judas Iscariot is reflected in the recently discovered and translated mid-second century text, the ‘Gospel of Judas’.

Author William Klassen suggests that Judas did not betray Jesus at all. He suggests that the word ‘betrayal’ found throughout English versions of the Bible is a mistranslation of the Greek word "paradidomi.’ An accurate translation of that word is ‘handed over.’ Klassen suggests that Judas was only planning to hand Jesus over to the Jewish authorities so that they could evaluate his claims. This theory cannot account for the word translated as ‘traitor’ in Luke 6:16. The ‘traitor’ could have been a mistake by the author of Luke, or a copyist's error.

Most Christian denominations teach that the death of an innocent man, to wit; Jesus, was necessary for the salvation of all humans, and if that is so, then Judas would have been unfairly punished for playing a necessary role in the salvation of humanity. Jesus only suffered for a few hours while being whipped and hanging on the cross. If Judas was to suffer eternal damnation in the flames of Hell for his deception and for later committing suicide, then he will suffer punishment far more than Jesus had from the moment Judas died. That seems profoundly unjust. Would that have been the wish of Jesus?

Here is something to think about. Jesus was with the people and the Jewish authorities every day. For the most part, he wasn’t hiding from the authorities. In other words this so-called betrayal was totally unnecessary. Everybody knew him well and could find him very easily. He taught and preached everywhere. Every day he was in Jerusalem, he was quarreling with the priests, the scribes, the Pharisees and even the merchants in the temple. Why would the Pharisees want Judas to betray Jesus to them? They could seize him at anytime they wanted to. The first three gospels and the synoptics, state that when the priests’ guards were about to arrest Jesus, he felt strange and protested that “well, every day I was with you teaching in the Temple and you did not spread your arms about me to arrest me, and now you have come with sticks and knives to arrest me as a thief in the middle of the night.”

The Pharisee’s guards could have easily kept an eye on Jesus and his disciples day and night and they could have followed them to the upper room where they had their last supper together and later to the Garden of Gethsemane. They wouldn’t need Judas to betray Jesus and lead them to him. And even if they didn’t know where he was, how would Judas have known exactly where Jesus would be after they finished their supper unless Jesus told him prior to them sharing the supper together. There is no mention in the New Testament that he disclosed to any of his disciples including Judas where they would later go while the meal was being eaten.

If Judas really knew of Jesus’ plans to be taken by the authorities in advance, then Judas had no free will and could not prevent the arrest from happening because he was following the orders of Jesus; thus he cannot be held morally responsible for his actions.

Now comes the question; why did the Pharisees want Jesus apprehended at night? I suspect that arresting him during the day may have caused a commotion that might have got out of control since Jesus still had many followers in the city.

Arresting Jesus in the dark in the Garden of Gethsemane (which wasn’t a garden but rather an olive grove) would have been difficult even when the guards carried torches while entering the grove so the guards arresting him would need someone to point him out. However, they wouldn’t necessarily need Judas to do that since the private guards that were guarding the olive grove because of the olive press being in it would have been able to identify Jesus because Jesus asked them for their permission several times to enter the grove. Notwithstanding that, Judas did in fact identify Jesus when they were in the grove by kissing him on his cheek as he told the guards of the priests that he would do. However, a kiss was, and still is, a common greeting custom in the Middle East. Using it in this way was the ultimate hypocrisy.

Four gospel writers wrote about the so-called betrayal, two of whom (Matthew and John) were two of the twelve disciples and therefore eye witnesses, and still they were not able to give us sufficient exposition of the events of such that this case demands. That is, as why did Judas betray Jesus? It is very strange indeed that as portrayed in the gospels, the betrayal is sudden, catastrophic and without any known or concrete motive. So I repeat my question: On the basis of the four canonical gospels, why did Judas betray Jesus and what was his motive?

For what reason did Judas repent? Was it because of remorse or because of a guilty conscience? Why was his repentance manifested by the useless act of suicide, by hanging himself according to Matthew? According to Luke, in the book of Acts, the end of Judas occurred by a totally different way. How is it possible to have such a glaring contradiction between Matthew and Luke? What is the meaning of this inspired contradiction?

It seems most likely that various unknown authors among whom are the four authors of the gospels ended up bringing about a myth for the purposely of bringing validity to the so-called prophesies or alternatively, they wrote reflections of other stories and myths. Therefore they had to improvise in order to make up the shape and form of Judas that would serve their version of the events, which in turn they pushed onto the illiterate, miserable and naïve populace. Let us not forget that the final draft of the New Testament took place in the Sixteenth Century under the auspices of King James of England; the final draft being organized, interpreted and written by more than a hundred scholars.

In how many ways does the Gospel according to Mark end, in the manuscripts and codices that have reached us since the year 325 AD.? Why are there five or six such different ways? What has happened with the godly inspiration? Why have the originals of the Gospels (referred back to 185 AD. by the bishop of Lyon Irenaeus) vanished from the face of earth?

Why was the name, ‘Iscariot’ applied to Judas? Normally, he would simply be referred to as the son of Simon. The epithet ‘Iscariot’ is read by the majority of scholars as a Hellenized (Greek) transformation of sicarius. The suffix ‘-ote’ denotes membership or belonging to; in this case to the ‘sicarii’. (Literally, Sicarii meant ‘dagger-men’) This group of zealots was an extremist splinter group of the Jewish zealots, (or insurgents) who attempted to expel the Romans and their partisans from Judea just as the Black September group in our modern era was a splinter group of the Palestinian Liberation Organization that hoped to expel the Jews from Israel.

By applying that name to Judas, it would in effect, define him as part of the sicarii or at least as a sympathizer of that group of insurgents and that being as it is, it would justify the reasoning of those that wrote the New testament that Judas’ real motive to betray Jesus was to force Jesus to act immediately to call upon God to send him a host of angels to throw the Romans out of Judea.

The apocryphal account of the last days of Jesus' life portrays Judas as a loyal disciple, who followed Jesus' orders in handing him over to the authorities and thus allowed him to fulfill the biblical prophecies of saving mankind. The proof of this is found in a fragile 31-page document, which has had a chequered history since it was discovered near Beni Masar in Egypt in the 1970s. It is believed to be a copy of a still earlier Gospel of Judas, which may have been written about 150 years after Jesus' death by Coptic scholars. The first known reference to a Gospel of Judas was around 180 AD, when the influential early Christian bishop Irenaeus denounced it as heretical.

By then there were many accounts of Jesus’ life and times, written by various early Christians during the 150 years after his death, in more than 30 gospels. Bishop Irenaeus helped to clarify the Christian message by arguing that there should be just four approved Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. All others, including the Gospel of Judas, were collectively known as apocrypha and branded as off-limits by early Church fathers.

According to Craig Evans, a professor of the New Testament at Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, "The Gospel of Judas turns Judas’ act of betrayal into an act of obedience. The sacrifice of Jesus’ body of flesh in fact becomes necessary. And so for that reason, Judas emerges as the champion and he ends up being envied and even cursed and resented by the other disciples.

It has been argued that the original Gospel of Judas was probably written by the Gnostics; members of a 2nd Century AD breakaway Christian sect, who became rivals to the early Church. They thought that Judas was in fact the most enlightened of the apostles, acting as he did in order that mankind might be redeemed by the death of Christ. It contains a number of religious themes which are completely alien to the first-century world of Jesus and Judas, but which did become popular later in the second century AD. As an analogy, it would be like finding a speech claiming to be written by Queen Victoria, in which she talked about ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and her CD collection. Judas was not the author of this document, because he died at least 100 years before it was written but that doesn’t necessarily mean that some of his writings weren’t incorporated later into that document.

The Bible presents two conflicting accounts of the manner of Judas' death. This conflict exists because the fourth century editors who decided which writings should be part of the Bible didn't worry about whether one author's story conflicted with another, because they were not concerned with presenting the Bible as error-free; they were more concerned with not offending anyone by presenting the traditional beliefs of just one group.

Matthew says that Judas hanged himself, while Luke (the author of Acts) says that he fell and his guts spilled out. Both of these accounts cannot be true. Either one is, or neither is. Here are the two versions.

‘When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty silver coins to the chief priests and the elders. "I have sinned," he said, "for I have betrayed innocent blood." "What is that to us?" they replied. "That's your responsibility." So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.’ (Matthew 27:1-5)

‘In those days Peter stood up among the believers (a group numbering about a hundred and twenty) and said, "Brothers, the Scripture had to be fulfilled which the Holy Spirit spoke long ago through the mouth of David concerning Judas, who served as guide for those who arrested Jesus----he was one of our number and shared in this ministry." With the reward he got for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out. (Acts 1:15-18)

I see a flaw in that version. If Judas cast the 30 pieces of silver at the feet of the Pharisees, then he couldn’t have used them to purchase a field.

If the latter version is nevertheless to some degree correct, then this means that Judas didn’t hang himself on the day Jesus died and therefore he would have lived long enough to put his thoughts into written form which was later incorporated in the newly located Gospel of Judas.

The Matthew writer may indeed have received second-hand the story about Judas hanging himself, but the story equally easily could have originated from the writer. So, we cannot say if the story is hearsay, or not. In any case, it is almost perfectly clear that the story is fiction clumsily based on misunderstood passages in the books by Jeremiah and Zechariah, so whether the Matthew writer recorded his own fiction, or someone else's, it doesn't really matter.

There's more evidence of hearsay in the Lukan passage. As Joseph Francis Alward argued in one of his blogs, there are indications that the original ‘bursting’ story was never intended by its tellers to be anything other than a metaphorical description of Judas' spiritual death (Judas' failure to accept Jesus' teachings was compared to an old wineskin's bursting when new wine is poured inside). When the story eventually reached ‘Luke,’ his failure to warn the readers that Judas’ belly did not literally burst open indicates that he did indeed receive the story second-hand.

As Mr. Alward correctly put it, the Matthew story is an inept fabrication based on misinterpreted Old Testament passages, while Luke's story is a misconception based on the wineskin metaphor.

Mr. Alward believes that the author (Luke) of this passage in Acts was using literary license to construct a fictional spiritual death scene in which Judas' ‘bursting guts’ were not literally bursting guts, but were represented his failure to accept the new teachings of Jesus, which to Luke evidently was like the spiritual death he alluded to in his gospel in which he said; "And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined." (Luke 5:37) I am in total agreement with Mr. Alward’s hypothesis.

In summary, I do not believe that Judas betrayed Jesus at all. In my respectful opinion, he became the scapegoat that religious traditionalists want to believe was the man who brought down the end of Jesus’ mortal life on Earth. I also believe that he didn’t hang himself. I believe that he survived long enough to write his own version of the events leading up to Jesus’ death and then simply died from what everyone eventually dies from, a heart attack sometime later in his life.