I find Judas one of the most interesting characters in our Christian mythology. There are a plethora of different interpretations of his motives for the betrayal and resultant ignominious death.
The Gnostics believe he was the most faithful of the Apostles, that he was designated by Christ himself to betray him and thus fulfilling the prophecies of the Old Testament, such as that of Jeremiah, that led to the salvation of man by the son of god (as I described in a former post here and @hsrch describes above). Greek author Nikos Kazanzakis, in his excellent book The Last Temptation of Christ, also promotes the idea that Judas was the only Apostle trustworthy enough to be recruited by Jesus to betray him, to get the job done, to get the prophecies underway—at great personal sacrifice to both of them.
The Cainites believed that Judas acted under the influence of the Sophia, or Divine Wisdom, and represented a victory over the materialist world.
Mathew 27:3 – 10 says that Judas returned the money to the priests and committed suicide by hanging himself. They used it to buy the potter’s field. The Gospel account presents this as a fulfillment of prophecy.
The Acts of the Apostles says that Judas used the money to buy a field, but “fell headfirst, and burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.” This field is called Akeldama or The Field of Blood.
Here is where the books of the Apocrypha get really interesting: The Gospel of Barnabas states that it was Judas and not Jesus who was crucified on the cross. The Gospel of Mary, Jesus’ mother, even states that Mary initially thought the person arrested was her son because of the physical similarities. But nothing further is mentioned as to the identity of the actual crucifixion victim after that one passage.
The Eastern Orthodox Church teaches that Judas Iscariot criticized Jesus for his extravagance when Jesus got his feet washed by a woman with expensive oils and perfumes and suggested that the money be better spent on the poor. Evidently they argued and this is why Judas spoke to the priests about betraying Christ for money. (For some reason, it is important in the Greek versions that Judas is a redhead, but I don’t understand the significance of this.)
Another account, by the Greek Papias from about 100 A.C.E., states that Judas unhappily went on for a couple of years leading an “impious” life, got really, really fat and, one day while walking on a road where “two chariots could pass easily”... “was crushed by the chariot, so that his bowels gushed out.”
Dante placed Judas in the lowest circle in hell; the Ninth Circle of Traitors. Here, he is eternally chewed on by the three-headed Satan. According to Dante, there were only three people so evil as to earn this punishment: Cassius and Brutus, the assassins of Julius Caesar, and Judas. Obviously Senior Alighieri hadn’t yet heard of the atrocities committed by Ghengis Khan, his contemporary, or anticipated Vlad the Impaler, Transylvanian Elizabeth Bathory (a distant relative of Vlad’s through the bloody House of Drăculești), Stalin or Hitler—all betrayers of humanity itself. I suspect the three-headed devil down on the 9th is happily masticating to SRO crowds by now.
Some of the oldest surviving English ballads are those by Francis Child from the mid-13th century, contemporary with Dante Alighieri, one of which is called the Ballad of Judas.
In the ballad, the blame for Christ’s betrayal is placed upon Judas’ sister. Christ gives Judas 30 pieces of silver to buy food for the Apostles; on his way to the market, Judas is waylaid by his sister, who lulls him to sleep and steals the money. Unwilling to confess his loss, Judas sells Christ to the Romans for the same amount. (I guess you had to be there.)
So who was this Judas Iscariot? The Greek New Testament calls him Loudas, interpreted from the Hebrew to mean “God is Praised.” The name Iscariot is interpreted in Hebrew as “a man from Kerioth,” a region in Judea. The Gospel of John refers to him as the son of Simon of Iscariot. Another theory is that “Iscariot” identifies Judas as a member of the Sicarii. These were a cadre of assassins among Jewish rebels intent on driving the Romans out of Judea. Another interpretation is that “Iscariot” derives from the Aramaic word for “liar” or “false one.” Another associates “Iscariot” to yet another Aramaic word meaning “to deliver.”
C.S.Lewis specifically used the conflicting biblical stories of Judas to declare that the Bible was not historical truth. St. Augustine, the Great Harmonizer, suggested that these apparently conflicting depictions 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. C. S. Lewis and others before him took the metaphorical view, that the “falling prostrate” was Judas in anguish, and the “bursting out of the bowels” was his pouring out emotion.
But all these conflicting stories, all this inconsistency occupying vast numbers of people in argument—wars even—constantly from the time of the Gospels themselves soon to be followed by Constantine’s major redactions, from the Levant to the Greeks to Rome and beyond—are about fixing the Bible, setting all the stories of our mythology on an anvil and pounding them into one comprehensive epic devoid of inconsistency and perfect in it’s understandably human continuity—A book that tells, metaphorically at least, the legend of how we came to be and how we aspire to higher things in spite of our many faults.
But what that means is that it’s not about fixing the Bible, is it? It’s about fixing us.
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