Name and background The name "Judas" () is a
Greek rendering of the Hebrew name
Judah (, , Hebrew for "praise" or "praised"), which was an extremely common name for Jewish men during the first century AD, due to the renowned hero
Judas Maccabeus. Consequently, numerous other figures with this name are mentioned throughout the New Testament. This interpretation is supported by the statement in the
Gospel of John that Judas was "the son of Simon Iscariot". Nonetheless, this interpretation of the name is not fully accepted by all scholars. One of the most popular alternative explanations holds that "Iscariot" (, in Syriac Aramaic, per the
Peshitta text) may be a corruption of the Latin word , meaning "dagger man", which referred to a member of the
Sicarii ( in Aramaic), a group of Jewish rebels who were known for assassinating people in crowds using long knives hidden under their cloaks. This interpretation is problematic, however, because there is nothing in the gospels to associate Judas with the Sicarii, and there is no evidence that the Sicarii existed during the 30s AD, when Judas was alive. A possibility advanced by
Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg is that "Iscariot" means "the liar" or "the false one", from the Hebrew .
C. C. Torrey suggests instead the
Aramaic form or , with the same meaning. Stanford rejects this, arguing that the gospel writers follow Judas's name with the statement that he betrayed Jesus, so it would be redundant for them to call him "the false one" before immediately stating that he was a traitor. Some have proposed that the word derives from an Aramaic word meaning "red color", from the root . Another hypothesis holds that the word derives from one of the Aramaic roots or . This would mean "to deliver", based on the
Septuagint rendering of Isaiah 19:4 (a theory advanced by J. Alfred Morin). However, in the Gospel of John, Judas's outlook was differentiatedmany of Jesus's disciples abandoned him because of the difficulty of accepting his teachings, and Jesus asked the twelve if they would also leave him. Simon Peter spoke for the twelve: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life," but Jesus observed then that although he himself had chosen the twelve, one of them (unnamed by Jesus, but identified by the narrator) was "a devil" who would betray him. One of the best-attested and most reliable statements made by Jesus in the gospels comes from the
Gospel of Matthew , in which Jesus tells his apostles: "in
the new world, when the
Son of Man shall sit on his glorious throne, you will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the
Twelve Tribes of Israel." New Testament scholar
Bart D. Ehrman concludes, "This is not a tradition that was likely to have been made up by a Christian later, after Jesus's deathsince one of these twelve had abandoned his cause and betrayed him. No one thought that
Judas Iscariot would be seated on a glorious throne in the Kingdom of God. That saying, therefore appears to go back to Jesus, and indicates, then, that he had twelve close disciples, whom he predicted would reign in the coming Kingdom." Matthew directly states that Judas betrayed Jesus for a bribe of "
thirty pieces of silver" by identifying him with a kiss ("the
kiss of Judas") to arresting soldiers of the High Priest
Caiaphas, who then turned Jesus over to
Pontius Pilate's soldiers. Mark's Gospel states that the chief priests were looking for a way to
arrest Jesus. They decided not to do so during the feast [of the
Passover], since they were afraid that people would riot; instead, they chose the night before the feast to arrest him. According to Luke's account,
Satan entered Judas at this time. According to the account in the Gospel of John, Judas carried the disciples' money bag or box (, ), but the Gospel of John makes no mention of the thirty pieces of silver as a fee for betrayal. The
evangelist comments in John 12:5–6 that Judas spoke fine words about giving money to the poor, but the reality was "not that he cared for the poor, but [that] he was a thief, and had the money box; and he used to take what was put in it." However, in John 13:27–30, when Judas left the gathering of Jesus and his disciples with betrayal in mind, some [of the disciples] thought that Judas might have been leaving to buy supplies or on a charitable errand. (between 1304 and 1306) depicts Judas's identifying kiss in the
Garden of Gethsemane Ehrman argues that Judas's betrayal "is about as historically certain as anything else in the tradition", pointing out that the betrayal is independently attested in the Gospel of Mark, in the Gospel of John, and in the Book of Acts. Ehrman also contends that it is highly unlikely that early Christians would have made up the story of Judas's betrayal, since it reflects poorly on Jesus's judgment in choosing him as an apostle. Nonetheless, Ehrman argues that what Judas actually told the authorities was not Jesus's location, but rather Jesus's secret teaching that he was the Messiah. This, he holds, explains why the authorities did not try to arrest Jesus prior to Judas's betrayal.
John P. Meier sums up the historical consensus, stating, "We only know two basic facts about [Judas]: (1) Jesus chose him as one of the Twelve, and (2) he handed over Jesus to the Jerusalem authorities, thus precipitating Jesus's execution."
Death Many different accounts of Judas's death have survived from antiquity, both within and outside the New Testament. states that after learning that Jesus
was to be crucified, Judas was overcome by remorse and attempted to return the 30 pieces of silver to the priests, but they would not accept them because they were blood money, so he threw them on the ground and left. Afterwards, he committed suicide by hanging himself in accordance with Mosaic law (). The priests then used the money to buy a
potter's field, which became known as
Akeldama (חקל דמא –
khakel dama, the Field of Blood) because it had been bought with blood money. states that Judas used the money to buy a field, and "[fell] headlong... burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out." In this account, Judas's death is apparently by accident, and he shows no signs of remorse. The early
Church Father Papias of Hierapolis records in his
Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord (which was probably written around 100 AD) that Judas was afflicted by God's wrath; his body became so enormously bloated that he could not pass through a street with buildings on either side. His face became so swollen that a doctor could not even identify the location of his eyes using an optical instrument. Judas's genitals became enormously swollen and oozed with
pus and worms. Finally, he killed himself on his own land by pouring out his innards onto the ground, which stank so horribly that, even in Papias's own time a century later, people still could not pass the site without holding their noses. This story was well known among Christians in antiquity and was often told in competition with the two conflicting stories from the New Testament. According to the apocryphal
Gospel of Nicodemus, which was probably written in the fourth century AD, Judas was overcome with remorse and went home to tell his wife, who was roasting a chicken on a spit over a charcoal fire, that he was going to kill himself, because he knew Jesus would rise from the dead and, when he did, he would punish him. Judas's wife laughed and told him that Jesus could no more rise from the dead than he could resurrect the chicken she was cooking. Immediately, the chicken was restored to life and began to crow. Judas then ran away and hanged himself. In the apocryphal
Gospel of Judas, Judas has a vision of the disciples stoning and persecuting him. The discrepancy between the two different accounts of Judas's death in and has proven to be a serious challenge to those who support the idea of
Biblical inerrancy. This problem was one of the points leading
C. S. Lewis, for example, to reject the view "that every statement in Scripture must be historical truth". Nonetheless, various attempts at
harmonization have been suggested. Generally they have followed literal interpretations such as that of
Augustine of Hippo, which suggest that these simply describe different aspects of the same event: that Judas hanged himself in the field, and the rope eventually snapped and the fall burst his body open, or that the accounts of Acts and Matthew refer to two different transactions. Some have taken the descriptions as figurative: that the "falling prostrate" was Judas in anguish, and the "bursting out of the bowels" is pouring out emotion. Modern scholars reject these approaches; ancient historical works could display differences when reporting events, with variations between
Tacitus,
Suetonius, and
Plutarch on
Otho's death being similar to those in the gospels. Arie W. Zwiep argues that neither story was meant to be read in light of the other and against harmonizations, though other scholars argue Luke-Acts used Matthew or vice versa. David A. Reed argues that the Matthew account is a
midrashic exposition that allows the author to present the event as a fulfillment of prophetic passages from the Old Testament. They argue that the author adds imaginative details such as the thirty pieces of silver, and the fact that Judas hangs himself, to an earlier tradition about Judas's death. Matthew's description of the death as fulfilment of a prophecy "spoken through Jeremiah the prophet" has caused difficulties, since it does not clearly correspond to any known version of the
Book of Jeremiah but does appear to refer to a story from the
Book of Zechariah which describes the return of a payment of thirty pieces of silver. Even writers such as
Jerome and
John Calvin conclude that this was obviously an error. Evangelical theologian James R. White has suggested the misattribution arises from a supposed Jewish practice of using the name of a
major prophet to refer to the whole content of the scroll group, including books written by minor prophets placed in the same grouping. Some scholars have suggested that the writer may also have had a passage from Jeremiah in mind, such as chapters and which refer to a potter's jar and a burial place, and chapter which refers to a burial place and an earthenware jar.
Raymond Brown suggests "the most plausible [explanation] is that Matthew 27:9–10 is presenting a mixed citation with words taken both from Zechariah and Jeremiah, and... he refers to that combination by one name. Jeremiah 18–9 concerns a potter (18:2–; 19:1), a purchase (19:1), the Valley of Hinnom (where the Field of Blood is traditionally located, 19:2), 'innocent blood' (19:4), and the renaming of a place for burial (19:6, 11); and Jer 32:6–5 tells of the purchase of a field with silver." Classicist
Glenn W. Most suggests that Judas's death in Acts can be interpreted figuratively, writing that πρηνὴς γενόμενος should be translated as saying his body went prone, rather than falling headlong, and the spilling of the entrails is meant to invoke the imagery of dead snakes and their burst-open bellies. Hence Luke was stating that Judas took the body posture of a snake and died like one. However, the Catholic biblical scholar
John L. McKenzie states "This passage probably echoes the fate of the wicked in..." the
Deuterocanonical book Wisdom of Solomon 4:19: "...[the Lord] will dash them speechless to the ground, and shake them from the foundations; they will be left utterly dry and barren, and they will suffer anguish, and the memory of them will perish." ==Betrayal of Jesus==