by DAVID BRAKKE
The mystery of why Judas forsook Jesus goes to the heart of Christianity. A newly translated gospel offers a new view
Why did Judas do it? The betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth by Judas Iscariot, one of his 12 disciples, has become the paradigmatic act of treachery in Western culture. Modern historians are sceptical of many and even most details of Jesus’ life and death found in the gospels of the New Testament, but nearly all agree that one of Jesus’ disciples did facilitate his arrest and eventual execution by Roman authorities. Why would early Christians have made up such a disturbing scenario, and why would St Paul and the multiple authors of the gospels have repeated it if it were not a fact they had to confront? Knowing whether and why one of Jesus’ closest followers betrayed him might shed light on how Jesus understood his mission and why he was so controversial, questions of compelling interest for the history of the Roman Empire and its religions.
If the gospels agree that a disciple named Judas betrayed Jesus, they do not agree on why he did so. Matthew, Mark and Luke all report that Judas received money from Jewish leaders, but only Matthew explicitly makes greed Judas’ motive. According to Luke and John, Satan entered Judas, and John has Jesus then immediately command Judas: ‘Do quickly what you are going to do.’ Mark takes a somewhat fatalistic approach – 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.’ Likewise, Mark doesn’t report what happened to Judas. Matthew has Judas die by suicide in remorse, while Luke reports in the Acts of the Apostles, the sequel to his Gospel, that Judas fell and spontaneously combusted: ‘his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out.’ The writers of the New Testament gospels believed as a matter of faith that it was God’s plan for Jesus to die, that indeed dying for others was the Son of Man’s primary mission (‘as it is written’). They did not consider the possibility that Judas handed over Jesus for a noble reason.
The Gnostic Christian author of the Gospel of Judas, however, did suggest that. Even though Judas’ act of betrayal was bad, Judas knew why he had to do it – because Jesus had told him why. No historian thinks that the Gospel of Judas reports what really happened or gives us any insight into the real Judas’ character or motivations: it was almost certainly written decades later than the New Testament gospels, and it is no less shaped by theological commitments than they are. Nonetheless, this author’s decision to place Judas at the centre of the story and to depict him as doing what Jesus wanted must have been intentionally provocative. It signalled a Gnostic protest against central beliefs and practices of emerging orthodox Christianity such as Jesus’ identity as the son of the God of Israel, his death as a sacrifice for the sins of human beings, and the Eucharist as a commemoration of that sacrifice. In this gospel, the question of why Judas did it raises the larger questions of who Jesus is, what god Christians should worship, and whether their rituals save people. In other words, the nature of Christianity itself was at stake.
The Gospel of Judas did not become available to most scholars and the wider public until the spring of 2006, though historians had long known that a gospel of Judas existed in antiquity. Several early Christian authors refer to it; the earliest is Irenaeus, a Christian leader in Lyons, who briefly mentions it in his massive anti-heretical work On the Detection and Overthrow of Knowledge, Falsely So-Called of around 180 CE.
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