Entity
Judas Iscariot
The apostle who handed Jesus over to the authorities in the canonical Gospels, and whom a single Coptic gospel later cast, against that grain, as the disciple who understood.
Judas Iscariot was one of the twelve closest followers of Jesus in the Christian Gospels, and the one who delivered him to the authorities who had him killed. His name became, in most of the tradition that followed, a byword for treachery — but the texts that produced that name are fewer, stranger, and more divided than the byword suggests.
All four canonical Gospels list Judas among the Twelve and name him as the betrayer. The Synoptic accounts — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — describe him going to the chief priests and arranging to hand Jesus over; Matthew alone fixes the price at thirty pieces of silver and has Judas identify his teacher with a kiss in the garden. John casts the act in darker terms, saying that Satan entered into him. On the figure’s end the sources already disagree. Matthew has Judas throw the silver into the temple and hang himself; the Acts of the Apostles reports instead that he bought a field and died there in a fall, his body bursting open. The two deaths cannot easily be reconciled, and the discrepancy is old.
What the canonical writers leave almost untouched is motive. They report greed, the entry of Satan, the fulfillment of scripture — but they do not explain the man, and the silence has been filled many times over. Medieval legend supplied Judas with a lurid biography and a place at the lowest point of Dante’s hell; the question of whether his act was freely chosen or foreordained, and whether such a man could be damned for completing what prophecy required, troubled theologians for centuries.
A wholly different portrait surfaces in the Gospel of Judas, a Coptic text preserved in a damaged fourth-century codex that came to scholarly attention and was published in 2006. It belongs to the broad current of second-century thought later called Gnostic, and it inverts the familiar story: here Judas is the one disciple who grasps who Jesus truly is, and the handing-over becomes an act of obedience, releasing the inner self from the body that clothes it. Whether the text means even Judas as a hero remains contested — some readings find him a tragic or sinister figure within it rather than a saved one — but its reversal is real, and it shows how unsettled the early reception of this figure could be.
The historical core is correspondingly thin. That Jesus was handed over by one of his own followers is among the better-attested facts of the narrative, awkward enough that the later church would have had little reason to invent it. Almost everything beyond that bare event — the silver, the kiss, the manner of death, the state of his soul — belongs to interpretation rather than record. The figure that the word “Judas” now carries was assembled afterward, out of texts that did not agree with one another about what he was.
→ Related: Gnosis · The Shepherd Of Hermas · Epistle Of Barnabas