Judas Iscariot

The betrayal is in all four Gospels and in Paul's account of the last supper, and almost every detail beyond the bare fact varies.

Mark, the earliest, gives no motive at all: Judas goes to the chief priests, they are glad and promise him money, no sum is named. Matthew has him ask what they will give and names thirty pieces of silver, a figure taken from Zechariah 11:12-13, where it is the contemptuous price of a shepherd. Luke and John both say Satan entered him, which is a theological explanation rather than a human one, and John adds separately that he was a thief who helped himself to the common purse. That last charge appears nowhere else and reads as later hostility.

The deaths are irreconcilable. Matthew has him throw the money into the temple, go out and hang himself, with the priests buying a potter's field with the returned silver. Acts has him buy a field with the money himself and fall headlong in it so that he burst open. These are not two angles on one event; they are two stories that share only a field and a bad end. A third, preserved by the second-century writer Papias and quoted later, has him swell to monstrous size and die of it.

Even the betrayal's content is unclear. What did Judas actually supply that the authorities lacked? Jesus taught publicly in the temple and was widely recognised. The usual answers, a place to arrest him away from crowds, or an identification in the dark, are inferences, not statements in the text.

The surname is unexplained. The commonest derivation reads it as ish Kerioth, a man of Kerioth, a Judaean town, which would make him the only non-Galilean of the twelve. A rival derivation connects it to sicarius, the Latin for dagger-man, used of a faction of first-century Judaean assassins, but that faction is attested only later than the events, which weakens it. Neither is secure.

In 2006 the Gospel of Judas, a second-century Coptic text within the Sethian Gnostic orbit, was published to considerable publicity. The National Geographic team presented it as portraying Judas as the favoured disciple who betrayed Jesus at his own request, freeing him from the body. That reading was challenged almost immediately and in detail by April DeConick, who argued the translation had inverted key terms: the text calls Judas a daimon, and says he will be cursed and will not ascend, so that far from rehabilitating him it makes him the worst of the disciples in a text that despises all twelve. Her reading has been broadly persuasive. In neither reading is the text a historical source about the man; it is second-century polemic.

The most consequential later use of Judas is not textual at all. From the medieval period his name was made to stand for Jews generally in European art, drama and sermon, and the passion plays that did this were an engine of antisemitic violence. The Gospels present him as one of the twelve, all of whom were Jews, and none of them draws that inference. It was supplied by later readers, and it killed people.