A Speculation -- Why Judas Betrayed Jesus

This is a post by Bell from his weblog Bell in the Breach which he kindly invited Jack to publish or link to.

Happy Jack will follow this up with an article considering Judas' eternal fate in a few days time. So, for now, please focus on Judas' motives.

I

Which disciple has the greatest influence on the world today? Peter, the buffoon who tried to walk on water? The braggart who swore allegiance up and down and then disappeared so fast when the squeeze went on there was nothing left behind but a hologram of dust? No, not him. How about John, the beloved? Loyal to the foot of the cross, right there to the last breath of the Body? Please. Paul, then, the brilliant intellect and zealous converter of souls? In a world where “it’s all good”, not so much. No, it’s none of them. I’ll give you a hint – it’s Judas Iscariot. Forgot about him, didn’t you? But he was an apostle too, and that’s a troubling thought.

In truth, we know nothing about him. The only historical sources we have on him are the four gospels (and yes, scholars do consider them historical sources) and they’re oddly coy about him. In Matthew and Mark, aside from the initial naming of the twelve, he just appears at the end, diabloli ex machina. He does the deed, then vanishes, no explanation, no by-your-leave, just collect 30 pieces of silver and do not pass go. Luke just tells us “the devil entered into him”, like it was nothing to do with him personally, and only John even mentions him in a context outside the betrayal. This comes in Chapter 12, verses 4-6, where he upbraids Mary, the sister of Lazarus, for pouring spikenard over the feet of Our Lord rather than selling the expensive ointment and giving the money to the poor. But actually, by telling us this, John may have said a mouthful.

It’s worth quoting the verses entirely. “Then one of His disciples, Judas Iscariot, he that was about to betray Him, said: why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor? Now he said this, not because he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and having the purse, carried the things that were put therein.”

This is a hard accusation, and appears to be a very explicit one: Judas wanted the money given to him, the keeper of the common purse, ostensibly to feed the poor, but in reality, to pocket it himself. Certainly, a cursory scan of the verses would support that reading, but what justification is there in the gospels to back up what John is saying? There isn’t any. Should we then dismiss what he says? By no means. There is an alternative reading here. We’ll get back to it, but before then, we need to look at John.

The first mark against him – and his brother James – is the sobriquet “sons of thunder” given to them by Jesus (Mark 3:17). It’s never made explicit why He did this, but since He never did anything without a reason, we may surmise. In Luke 9:54, when Jesus and His disciples were not made welcome in a Samaritan village, John and James asked if they should call down fire from Heaven to consume the place. A quick temper and a sense of outrage seem to be the defining characteristics of the young John, so Jesus may have given the name as a rebuke, or possibly in jest. Humour is not a characteristic we associate with Jesus, but He was completely human as well as divine.

What else do we know of John? That he was possibly of a wealthy family. In Mark 1, 19-20, it is mentioned that Zebedee, the father of John, had “hired men” on the payroll. Again, in his own gospel, at 18 15-16, (although this one is a little more tenuous) John tells us that “...Simon Peter followed Jesus, and so did another disciple, and that disciple was known to the High Priest and went in with Jesus into the court of the High Priest. But Peter stood at the door without. The other disciple, therefore, who was known to the High Priest, went out and spoke to the portress and brought in Peter”.

Now that disciple was clearly a man of some influence. Who was he? Could it have been the author himself, John? If it was, we might reasonably ask why he didn’t simply state as much? On the other hand, nowhere else does either John or Matthew, the other apostle-evangelist, refer to himself in the first person, so why do so here? (It’s not entirely clear if the “I” in John 21:25 is John himself or a scribe taking down John’s testimony. The use of the first person is extremely rare in the New Testament, and this usage is unique in the Gospels) It may just have been simple modesty. According to his own gospel, only one disciple stood at the foot of the cross, the rest having scattered, but he does not directly claim that honour by naming himself. This person is only “the disciple”. But if it was another disciple, why not name him?

It’s all very confusing, and all completely speculative, but here’s my vision of John – he was a rich kid with a fast temper, a caustic tongue and an easily outraged code of morality whose native sense of justice demanded punishment of the wrongdoer out of all proportion to the sin, and he was the very man to call it down on them. Does that sound familiar? *Cough* social justice warriors *Cough*. That tells us why we shouldn’t believe John when he calls Judas a thief – because in the minds of such people, “bad guys” are always entirely bad and guilty of every sin, therefore it would not be wrong to call him a thief even if he didn’t know him to be one. Now, what tells us we should believe him?

Well, assuming he is “the disciple”, there’s that sense of modesty. You don’t get that striding in and out of the High Priest’s lodgings all your days like you live there yourself, or from ordering the servants around. Yet, (again, assuming John to be the disciple known to the High Priest) it’s there in the anonymity. So where did it come from? To understand that, it’s necessary to remember that he set down his gospel decades after the events described therein, probably in the sixties AD, perhaps later. (Despite the common dating of John around 90 AD, this is more of a gentlemen’s agreement between scholars than a proven, established fact; it could well have been before 70 AD). Put shortly, he’d been through the mill and come out the other side with the wisdom of experience and suffering. He’d been ground down like corn and I submit that by the time he came to write his gospel, he knew better than to lie about people just because they were bad guys and he didn’t like them. Which brings us back to that alternative reading of 12 4-6, and although it doesn’t literally meld with the direct accusation that Judas was a thief, it does accord with a more nuanced interpretation; John may have regarded Judas as a thief, but I suspect he meant something else than a common tea leaf.

II

We’ve dealt with John, but what do we know about Judas? The biggest, most obvious standout is that he’s the only one of the twelve with a surname, Iscariot. Peter is sometimes called Simon Bar Jonah, but that’s not a surname in the way we usually interpret the term. It just means his birth name was Simon and his father was called Jonah. But “Iscariot” sounds like a proper name, like Jones, or Thompson or Murphy. Is it?

Unlikely. It’s not a name that seems to appear anywhere else. There’s no Iscariot family we’ve ever heard of – or if there was, they dropped the name PDQ, a bit like the Hitlers. Did it signify anything? There is some speculation that it might have designated Judas as one of the Sicarii, the “dagger-men”, a group of Jewish zealots who used terrorist-style tactics to secure independence from Rome. This explanation would fit with the supposition that the Jews were waiting for a political messiah, rather than a spiritual one, and in this regard, Jesus was a disappointment at best, and a false messiah at worst. Certainly, that would explain why Judas, if he were a zealot, might have betrayed Jesus to the authorities; from his point of view, Jesus would have been a fraud.

But there are problems with this interpretation. One is that by no means all Jews were waiting for a worldly leader. It has become a common assumption today that they were, but Judaism was a much broader church then than now. It should be remembered the Bible was compiled by the Catholic Church. Yes, all the books which make it up were in circulation at the time of Christ, but there was no authority saying this book was canonical while that one was not, so while the Sadducees recognized only the five books of Moses, the Pharisees acknowledged a different set and other groups another set again, and those who gave a particular weight to the prophecies of Isaiah, for example, would not have been counting on a military messiah at all, but rather, exactly the kind of messiah they got with Jesus, albeit they would not have been expecting God Incarnate Himself. Against this background, would Judas not simply have deserted, rather than outright betray Him? Christ would, from the zealot perspective, have just have been another false dawn, another one of the Isaiah people.

The second problem is chronology. The Sicarii only appear in the historical record after the Crucifixion; they don’t seem to have existed at the time of Christ. And finally, we just don’t have any evidence that Judas was a zealot at all. He may have been, but there’s nothing saying he was. Despite the numerous depictions of him as such on film and in books, such as Ian McShane’s portrayal in 1977’s Jesus of Nazareth, it’s really just an assumption on our part.

There is, however, another, much more intriguing interpretation of the name, and one that opens up a far more relevant – for us – question to ponder. The name could be descriptive in the same way as “Simon Bar Jonah”. Just as Peter’s original name simply meant that he was the son of Jonah, so “Iscariot” may be a corruption of the Hebrew is, meaning “man”, and Qeriot, a town in Judea south of Jerusalem, thus we have “Judas, man of Qeriot”. Now this is fascinating, because at once it separates Judas from the other eleven, certainly geographically, and very possibly sociologically. The others were all Galilean, not only from a provincial fastness, but also from what was – administratively – another country, since Galilee was nominally under the rule of Herod Antipas. So, if Judas really was a “man of Qeriot”, then he was an outsider in the group, and it’s a fair bet, as a “townie”, more worldly than the others. Some, such as the biblical scholar Géza Vermes, hold that the name comes from the word qiryah, which simply means town. This would not specifically link Judas to a particular place, but in the context of a movement which came out of the countryside, I would submit that the descriptor “man of the town” is significant. I think we’re talking about the age-old tension between the “salt of the earth” country folk and the sophisticated city slicker.

III

But why was it the city boy who was to be the traitor? Because city people are hard headed and worldly? Because they are prideful of that worldliness? Maybe. Pride is the queen of sins, after all, and the essence of Christianity is humility, the recognition that there is something greater than yourself. Many people acknowledge this in the abstract, but living it is another matter, and living it is what Jesus asked, and in the fourteenth chapter of John we see an even bigger ask from Jesus when He says

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me.”

Earlier, in chapter six, we hear the biggest ask of them all:

“Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you.”

This is the only time in scripture where people got up and walked away from Jesus. They had to accept what He was telling them as the literal truth or go, and when they went, He didn’t call them back. And here’s the rub – who would find these things easier, town or country? Clue – chapter six takes place outside of Capernaum. Capernaum was not a metropolis by any means, but at its peak it may have contained about 1500 souls, so not some mountain village like Nazareth. Big enough, however, to be the cock of the regional dung heap, and the place which, for a time, was the centre of Jesus’ ministry. Matthew, in his gospel, tells us at 11 20-24,

“Then began He to upbraid the cities wherein were done the most of His miracles, for that they had not done penance. Woe to thee, Corozain, woe to thee, Bethsaida: for if in Tyre and Sidon had been wrought the miracles that have been wrought in you, they had long ago done penance in sackcloth and ashes. But I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment, than for you. And thou Capharnaum, shalt thou be exalted up to heaven? thou shalt go down even unto hell. For if in Sodom had been wrought the miracles that have been wrought in thee, perhaps it had remained unto this day. But I say unto you, that it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee.”

Nothing He did in the city persuaded the city of who He was.

Penance, according to the Catholic Church, is “...a supernatural moral virtue whereby the sinner is disposed to hatred of his sin as an offence against God and to a firm purpose of amendment and satisfaction. The principal act in the exercise of this virtue is the detestation of sin, not of sin in general nor of that which others commit, but of one’s own sin. The motive of this detestation is that sin offends God.” (Catholic Encyclopaedia)

Starting to see where this is going yet? One final definition, charity. No, theologically, it doesn’t mean the local food bank or the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, worthy as these things are. Charity is the third and greatest of the theological virtues – the others being faith and hope – and is defined as the love of God for His own sake and the love of man for the sake of God. That last bit is important because it tells us that the love of man is incidental to the love of God. If you love God, the works of mercy follow, but you don’t love Him through those works, or by those works. This can be confusing, since the Catholic Church has always held that faith without works is dead, but it becomes more apparent when you turn it the other way around – you can wave your faith like the Oriflamme of France, but if there are no good works coming forth on foot of it, we need a rethink about Who we love.

IV

So, we have a world-wise townie who thinks of the poor before he thinks of God, and a city – read “society” – which does not think it needs to do penance or atone for anything, least of all for walking away from God. After all, it’s really concerned about the poor, so that’s all right, isn’t it? Does this sound at all familiar? First, let’s get back to that alternative reading of Judas as a thief. What did he steal? The money? Maybe he did, but money’s only metal. What he really stole was the worship and glory due to God. He didn’t love Him for His own sake, so how could he love the poor for His sake? Maybe that’s what John meant when he called him a thief, and if it is, then it raises some pretty uncomfortable questions for us because it raises an image of God which doesn’t at all fit with the “Jesus of the Poor” image the Church – in fact, all the churches and, in the secular sphere, all the political parties – puts out nowadays. Is it the case that the old Baltimore Catechism nailed it? That the purpose of man is to know, love and serve God, not one another? That bit follows, but it’s incidental. If that is the case, does John’s accusation now make more sense?

The modern definition of theft in most common law jurisdictions is, “to dishonestly appropriate property belonging to another with the intention to permanently deprive”. Note that there is no necessity here for the thief to enrich himself. It is sufficient that he purloins – for whatever purpose – that which belongs to someone else. By that definition, Robin Hood was as big a thief as Dick Turpin, so even if Judas actually had been concerned about the use to which the spikenard was put, he was still a thief by John’s lights. More importantly, he was a thief by God’s lights. Giving the money to the poor would not cleanse the sin.

And the question is, if God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived (to use St Anselm’s definition), then how could you not love Him? And we know the answer to that one – because we don’t really believe. We’re hardwired to believe, even the atheists concede that one, although they will argue that the wiring is done by nature for evolutionary reasons, but in the end, we have to make that leap of faith that it took even Peter decades to finally make. That’s why Christ didn’t call them – us – back in chapter six of John. In this instance, God proposes, but ultimately it must be man who disposes, or rather, each individual man or woman.

Judas made his choice, and he didn’t make it for money, not in the end. In the end, it’s never about that. He just couldn’t bring himself to believe. Pride. It was as simple as that, but that was enough to change everything, and it was the wound from which all that followed flowed.