Judas Iscariot: The Betrayer Among the Twelve

The twelfth and final installment in a series on the Twelve Apostles.

Of all the men Jesus called, only one is known to people who know nothing else about the Gospels. A stranger to the Bible may not be able to name a single one of the Twelve — but everyone has heard of Judas. His name became a common noun. To call a man “a Judas” is to call him a traitor; the “Judas kiss” is treachery wearing the face of affection; “thirty pieces of silver” is the going rate for selling out a friend. He is the apostle who became a synonym.

This series has spent ten installments recovering apostles the centuries half-forgot — Simon the Zealot, who is barely a name; Jude Thaddaeus, the patron of lost causes; Bartholomew, the apostle of silence. Judas is the opposite problem. He is over-remembered, and remembered for one thing only, and the one thing is so terrible that it has flattened him into a cardboard villain. The aim here is not to rehabilitate him — the Gospels will not allow that, and neither will I — but to read him as closely and honestly as the others, because the traitor turns out to raise the hardest questions in the New Testament. What does his name actually mean? Why does the Bible give him two completely different deaths? Did he receive the Eucharist at the Last Supper? And the question that has haunted Christians for two thousand years: is Judas in hell, and does the Church dare to say so?

The answers are stranger, and more disciplined, than the cardboard villain suggests. So this final post takes Judas with the same rules the series has used throughout: the New Testament evidence first, read closely; then the name, and what it can and cannot bear; then the two deaths, side by side and unforced; and last, the theology — the damnation question, the Eucharist question, and the freedom question — handled with the reticence the Church herself insists on. The Twelve began with Peter, the rock. They end, for now, with the man who sold the rock’s Master for the price of a slave.

Judas in the New Testament

A name that is always last

Every Synoptic Gospel gives a roster of the Twelve, and in all three of them Judas occupies the same position: last. Matthew ends his list “Simon the Cananean, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed him.”⁠¹ Mark ends his the same way, “and Judas Iscariot who betrayed him.”⁠² Luke closes with “Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.”⁠³ The position is not accidental. The Evangelists are writing decades after the events, and the betrayal has already happened; every time they name him, they name the wound with him. Matthew and Mark use the same relative clause — “who betrayed him” — and Luke, sharpening it into a noun, calls him outright a “traitor.”

Then comes the silence that says everything. When Luke writes Acts and lists the apostles in the upper room before Pentecost, Judas is simply gone, and his slot is filled by another man with the same common name: “James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James.”⁠⁴ The roster of eleven is itself a verdict. The wound is now an absence.

It is worth pausing on that other Judas — “Judas son of James,” the apostle this series has already met under his other name, Jude Thaddaeus. John’s Gospel goes out of its way to keep the two apart, introducing the faithful one at the Last Supper as “Judas, not the Iscariot.”⁠⁵ “Judas” was one of the most common Jewish names of the period — it is simply “Judah,” the name of the patriarch and the southern kingdom — and the Twelve contained two of them. By the second century the faithful would so dread the association that they left Jude largely uninvoked, which is the traditional reason he became the patron of hopeless causes. One name, two men: one the apostle of last resort, the other the reason his name needed a disclaimer.

What “Iscariot” actually means

Judas alone among the Twelve carries a surname that is not a patronymic, an epithet, or a place we can confidently locate. “Iscariot” attaches to him and, in John, to his father — “Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot.”⁠⁶ That detail matters, because it points away from a nickname and toward a family name, most likely geographic.

The leading explanation, and the only one the Catholic translation endorses, reads the name as a lightly disguised Hebrew phrase: ʾish-Qerīyyōth, “man of Kerioth.” The NABRE note says simply, “the name Iscariot may mean ‘man from Kerioth,’” Kerioth being a town in the far south of Judah.⁠⁷ If that is right, it carries a quiet irony: the rest of the Twelve were Galileans, men of the north, and Judas would have been the lone southerner, the one Judean — a man already a little apart from the company he kept.

Two rival theories deserve mention, because they keep recurring. The first ties “Iscariot” to the Latin sicarius, “dagger-man” — the Sicarii were the cloak-and-dagger assassins of the later Jewish resistance — which would make Judas a former militant, a partner in zeal to Simon the Zealot. It is a vivid reading, and it runs into a wall of chronology: the Sicarii are attested in the decades after Judas, not before, and most scholars set the theory aside. The second derives the name from a Semitic root meaning “to hand over,” so that “Iscariot” would be less a surname than a label — “the one who was to betray him” — pinned on him in retrospect. Benedict XVI, in his catechesis on Judas, ran through all three possibilities without forcing a choice: “man from Kerioth,” a variant of “hired assassin” alluding to the dagger, or “the one who is to hand him over.”⁠⁸ The honest verdict is that we do not know. Even the Evangelists, writing within living memory, may no longer have been sure.

The Betrayer’s Story

Thirty pieces of silver

Matthew alone preserves the price, and he preserves it because he sees a prophecy in it. “Then one of the Twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, ‘What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?’ They paid him thirty pieces of silver.”⁠⁹ The phrase has rung down the centuries as the very sound of a cheap soul, and that is exactly Matthew’s point. Thirty pieces of silver is not a fortune; it is, in the Law, the compensation owed when an ox gores a slave to death (Exodus 21:32), and in the prophet Zechariah it is the contemptuous wage flung at a rejected shepherd.⁠¹⁰ The Son of God is valued at the price of a dead slave.

John adds the detail that turns the bargain from a sudden fall into a long corrosion. Judas was the group’s treasurer, and not an honest one. At the anointing in Bethany, when Judas objects that the costly oil should have been sold for the poor, John strips the piety away: “He said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief and held the money bag and used to steal the contributions.”⁠¹¹ The man who sold his Master had been quietly robbing him for some time. Avarice, in the Gospels, is not Judas’s incidental flaw; it is the door through which everything else came in. As John Chrysostom would thunder centuries later, “Hear, you covetous, consider what befell him; how he at the same time lost the money, and committed the sin, and destroyed his own soul. Such is the tyranny of covetousness.”⁠¹²

The morsel and the night

The betrayal becomes intimate at the table. John’s account of the Last Supper is the most psychologically exact scene the traitor is given anywhere. Jesus is “deeply troubled” and says, “Amen, amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me.” The disciples look at one another, lost; the beloved disciple, leaning against Jesus, asks who it is; and Jesus answers, “It is the one to whom I hand the morsel after I have dipped it.” He dips it and hands it to Judas. Then comes the sentence that has chilled readers for two thousand years: “After he took the morsel, Satan entered him. So Jesus said to him, ‘What you are going to do, do quickly.’”⁠¹³ The others think the treasurer has been sent to buy something for the feast. And John ends the scene with five words that no novelist could improve: “So he took the morsel and left at once. And it was night.”⁠¹⁴

Both Luke and John reach past Judas’s own motives to name a darker agency. Luke writes, with stark economy, “Then Satan entered into Judas, the one surnamed Iscariot, who was counted among the Twelve.”⁠¹⁵ This is not an excuse — the Gospels never let Judas off — but it is a refusal to make the betrayal merely a matter of greed or disappointment. Something larger had its hand on him. John had already said as much in the harshest verse spoken about any apostle: at Capernaum, long before the end, Jesus asks, “Did I not choose you twelve? Yet is not one of you a devil?” — “He was referring to Judas.”⁠¹⁶

The kiss

The arrest in Gethsemane gives us the image that became the proverb. Matthew records that Judas had arranged a signal in advance — “The man I shall kiss is the one; arrest him” — and then carried it out with a greeting: “Immediately he went over to Jesus and said, ‘Hail, Rabbi!’ and he kissed him.” Jesus answers him with a single devastating word of address: “Friend, do what you have come for.”⁠¹⁷ Luke sharpens the irony to its finest point, putting the contradiction of the act into Jesus’ own mouth as a question: “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?”⁠¹⁸ The sign of friendship and the act of treachery are made the same gesture. That is why the “Judas kiss” entered the language — and why Giotto, in the fresco at the head of this post, painted the two faces almost touching, Judas’s golden cloak swallowing Christ whole.

John, characteristically, omits the kiss entirely. In the Fourth Gospel there is no embrace at all; Judas merely stands “with them,” and Jesus identifies himself — “I AM” — at which the arresting party “turned away and fell to the ground.”⁠¹⁹ John will not let the traitor’s gesture be the thing that delivers Jesus up; in his telling, Jesus hands himself over, and Judas is reduced to a bystander at his own betrayal. The difference is not a contradiction so much as a difference of theological emphasis — and it is the first of several places where the four accounts of Judas refuse to be flattened into one.

Two Deaths, One Field

Here the New Testament does something it does nowhere else with the same starkness: it tells us, twice, how a man died, and the two accounts cannot both be literally true in every detail. This is not a difficulty to be hidden. It is, handled honestly, one of the most instructive things in the Gospels about how the New Testament actually works.

Matthew: remorse and the rope

Matthew gives Judas a final scene that the other Gospels do not — a scene of genuine, if useless, remorse. “Then Judas, his betrayer, seeing that Jesus had been condemned, deeply regretted what he had done. He returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, ‘I have sinned in betraying innocent blood.’” The priests brush him off: “What is that to us? Look to it yourself.” And then: “Flinging the money into the temple, he departed and went off and hanged himself.”⁠²⁰ The chief priests, unwilling to return blood money to the treasury, use it instead to “buy the potter’s field as a burial place for foreigners. That is why that field even today is called the Field of Blood.”⁠²¹

In Matthew, then: Judas repents, returns the money, throws it into the temple, and hangs himself; the priests buy the field; and the field is called the Field of Blood because it was bought with the price of blood.

Acts: the wages and the fall

Now set beside it the account Peter gives in Acts, on the day the eleven choose Judas’s replacement. “He bought a parcel of land with the wages of his iniquity, and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle, and all his insides spilled out. This became known to everyone who lived in Jerusalem, so that the parcel of land was called in their language ‘Akeldama,’ that is, Field of Blood.”⁠²²

In Acts: Judas himself buys the field; he does not hang but dies in a grotesque fall, his body bursting open; and the field is called the Field of Blood because of his own blood spilled on it.

The two accounts agree on three things — the betrayal money, the field, and the name “Field of Blood” — and diverge on nearly everything else. Who bought the field? Matthew says the priests; Acts says Judas. How did he die? Matthew says hanging; Acts says a fall and a rupture. Why is the field called bloody? Matthew says the blood money; Acts says Judas’s own blood. The NABRE’s own notes do not paper this over. On Acts, the editors write that “Luke records a popular tradition about the death of Judas that differs from the one in Mt 27:5, according to which Judas hanged himself.”⁠²³

Harmonizing the irreconcilable?

For most of Christian history readers tried to fit the two together. The most famous attempt is the oldest, and it comes from a man who may have known people who remembered the apostles. Papias of Hierapolis, writing in the first half of the second century, preserved a third tradition — one in which Judas does not so much hang as swell and burst. In the fragment that survives in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, “Judas walked about in this world a sad example of impiety; for his body having swollen to such an extent that he could not pass where a chariot could pass easily, he was crushed by the chariot, so that his bowels gushed out.”⁠²⁴ Later Christians stitched the accounts together mechanically — Judas hanged himself, the rope or the branch broke, and the bloated body fell and burst on the field below — and that harmonization is still repeated. It is not impossible. But it is worth being honest that it appears nowhere in Scripture itself; it is a later reader’s reconciliation, not a Gospel datum.

The more disciplined approach is to recognize what kind of writing this is. Matthew and Luke are each pressing the death of Judas into a theological shape — Matthew toward fulfilled prophecy and priestly guilt, Luke toward the desolation of the betrayer and the necessity of replacing him — and they are working from oral traditions that had already diverged. The shared core is solid: Judas betrayed Jesus, came to a bad end, and a field in Jerusalem bore the memory of it. The details differ because the Evangelists are theologians before they are coroners. Forcing them into a single forensic timeline misunderstands what they were doing — and, as we will see, it is the same instinct that produces the strangest footnote in the whole story.

The Jeremiah problem

That footnote is Matthew’s own. Having described the purchase of the field, Matthew adds a fulfillment formula: “Then was fulfilled what had been said through Jeremiah the prophet, ‘And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the value of a man with a price on his head … and they paid it out for the potter’s field.’”⁠²⁵ The trouble is that the quotation is not in Jeremiah. The thirty pieces of silver and the potter come from Zechariah 11:12–13. The NABRE note states the problem without flinching: “Matthew’s attributing this text to Jeremiah is puzzling, for there is no such text in that book, and the thirty pieces of silver thrown by Judas ‘into the temple’ (Mt 27:5) recall rather Zec 11:12–13.”⁠²⁶ The usual explanation, which the same note gives, is that Matthew has fused the Zechariah oracle with Jeremiah’s images of a potter (Jeremiah 18) and the buying of a field (Jeremiah 32), and cited the conflation under the name of the more prominent prophet.

Augustine, faced with the same difficulty fifteen centuries earlier, worked through it at length in his Harmony of the Gospels and reached essentially the modern answer — that the prophets so share a single Spirit that words spoken by one are, in his phrase, “really as much” the other’s, and that Matthew, with the whole prophetic corpus in view, named one prophet for words that belonged to the chorus.⁠²⁷ Whatever one makes of the solution, notice the discipline: the Catholic tradition has never pretended the problem away. It is printed in the footnotes of the official Catholic Bible. A faith that can put that in its own apparatus is not afraid of its hardest texts — which is the right posture for the hardest question of all.

“Better If He Had Never Been Born”: The Question of Judas’s Damnation

What Jesus says

No one in the New Testament is spoken of as darkly as Judas. At the Last Supper, foretelling the betrayal, Jesus says: “The Son of Man indeed goes, as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would be better for that man if he had never been born.”⁠²⁸ And in the high-priestly prayer of John 17, Jesus tells the Father that of those given to him he guarded them all, “and none of them was lost except the son of destruction.”⁠²⁹ “Son of destruction” — the older translations say “son of perdition” — is as close as Scripture comes to naming a man as lost. If any individual in the Bible looks damned, it is Judas. Many Christians across the centuries simply assumed it, and Dante, as we will see, put him at the very bottom of hell.

What the Church does not say

And yet here the Catholic Church practices a reticence that surprises people, including many Catholics. The Church has a formal process — canonization — by which she declares, with her full authority, that a particular named person is in heaven. She has done this thousands of times. She has no corresponding process for hell. There is no anti-canonization, no list of the certainly damned, and the Church has never, in two thousand years, declared that any specific human being — not Judas, not Nero, not Hitler — is in hell.

This is not soft sentiment; it is doctrine, and it follows from what the Catechism teaches about hell itself. Hell, in Catholic teaching, is not a sentence God imposes on the unwilling but a “definitive self-exclusion from communion with God,” a door, as the image goes, locked from the inside. The Catechism is precise about the divine role: “God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end.”⁠³⁰ Because the Church cannot see the final interior disposition of a dying man — the last secret movement of a soul toward or away from grace — she will not pronounce on it. She prays, instead, for the salvation of all.

That reticence extends even to Judas, and the clearest modern statement of it came from Benedict XVI. Preaching on Judas to close his own series on the apostles, the pope noted the remorse of Matthew 27 and then drew the line exactly where the Church draws it: “Even though he went to hang himself, it is not up to us to judge his gesture, substituting ourselves for the infinitely merciful and just God.”⁠³¹ The “woe to that man,” Benedict acknowledged, is a “very severe judgement”; the betrayal “remains, in any case, a mystery.” But the eternal verdict belongs to God, and the Church declines to anticipate it. We are permitted to fear for Judas. We are not permitted to bury him.

Despair, not betrayal

What, then, was the sin that undid him — if even the betrayal does not let us pronounce him lost? The patristic and medieval tradition gives a remarkably consistent answer, and it is not the one most people expect. The fatal thing was not the betrayal but the despair.

The comparison the tradition always reaches for is Peter. Both men failed catastrophically on the same night; both, in a sense, betrayed Jesus — Judas with a kiss, Peter with an oath that he never knew the man. The difference is what came after. “After his fall,” Benedict said, “Peter repented and found pardon and grace. Judas also repented, but his repentance degenerated into desperation and thus became self-destructive.”⁠³² Peter wept and stayed; Judas threw down the silver and hanged himself. Chrysostom had made the point with brutal clarity a millennium and a half earlier: to throw down the money and confess the innocent blood “were all acceptable things; but to hang himself, this again was unpardonable, and a work of an evil spirit. For the devil led him out of his repentance too soon, so that he should reap no fruit from thence.”⁠³³

Thomas Aquinas located the precise danger of despair in the same place. Despair, he argued, is in one respect more perilous than other sins, because “hope withdraws us from evils and induces us to seek for good things, so that when hope is given up, men rush headlong into sin”; he quotes Isidore’s stark line, “To commit a crime is to kill the soul, but to despair is to fall into hell.”⁠³⁴ The point is not that despair is unforgivable in the sense that God refuses to forgive it. It is that despair is the refusal to ask — the one sin that, while it lasts, slams shut the door through which forgiveness would come. Judas’s tragedy, in the tradition’s reading, is that mercy was available to the very end and he would not turn to take it. The door of the locked room was always openable from the inside; he died with his hand off the latch.

Mercy as a mystery

Which leaves the Church, and the believer, in a posture that is neither presumption nor despair but something harder to hold: hope without a verdict. Pope Francis gave that posture its most memorable image. He often spoke of a medieval carved capital in the Basilica of Saint Mary Magdalene at Vézelay, where the great pilgrimage road to Santiago begins. “On that capital,” Francis said, “one side shows Judas hanged, his eyes open, his tongue sticking out, while the other side shows the Good Shepherd who carries him. If we look carefully at the face of the Good Shepherd, the lips on one side are sad but on the other they are smiling. Mercy is a mystery. It is a mystery. It is the mystery of God.”⁠³⁵

The medieval sculptor did not resolve the question; he held both sides of it in stone — the suicide and the Shepherd, the open eyes of the dead man and the half-smiling face of the one who lifts him. That is exactly where the Church leaves us. Benedict ended his own sermon on Judas not with a verdict but with a rule for the rest of us, borrowed from Saint Benedict’s monastic Rule: “Never despair of God’s mercy.”⁠³⁶ The warning of Judas is real. So is the refusal to close the book on him.

Did Judas Receive the Eucharist?

One question about Judas has exercised theologians for centuries, and it turns out to have a careful Catholic answer: was Judas present when Jesus instituted the Eucharist, and did he receive Holy Communion before he went out to betray him?

The difficulty is that the Gospels seem to disagree on the timing. In Luke, the institution of the Eucharist (Luke 22:19–20) comes before Jesus announces that the betrayer’s hand is “with me on the table” (22:21) — which places Judas at the table for the institution. In John, Judas takes the dipped morsel and leaves “at once” before the long discourse, and John gives no institution narrative at all. Reading Luke, Judas communicated; reading John’s sequence, one might think he left first.

Aquinas takes the question up directly and comes down, with the weight of the tradition, on the affirmative. He notes that Hilary of Poitiers had held that Christ did not give his body to Judas, and concedes that “this would have been quite proper, if the malice of Judas be considered.” But, he argues, Christ was setting a pattern for his Church: he would not publicly cut off “a hidden sinner” from Communion “without an accuser and evident proof,” lest the Church’s pastors take it as license to do the same. And so, Aquinas concludes, “it remains to be said that Judas received our Lord’s body and blood with the other disciples, as Dionysius says … and Augustine.”⁠³⁷ The exclusion was Judas’s own doing, not Christ’s: “Christ for His part drinks the wine even with Judas in the kingdom of God; but Judas himself repudiated this banquet.”⁠³⁸

There is a crucial distinction here that careless readers miss, and Aquinas insists on it. The Eucharist Judas received was the bread and cup of the institution, shared with the Twelve. The morsel Jesus hands Judas in John 13 — the dipped bit that marks him out as the betrayer — is a different thing entirely. “Without any doubt,” Aquinas writes, “Judas did not receive Christ’s body in the dipped bread; he received mere bread.”⁠³⁹ The picture, then, is as grim as it is precise: Judas ate the Body of the Lord and rose from that table to sell him. Saint Paul’s warning about receiving the Eucharist “unworthily” — eating and drinking judgment on oneself — has no darker illustration in all of Scripture.

The Predestination Problem

Beneath the damnation question lies an even older one, and Judas is its sharpest test case. Jesus says the betrayal was foretold — “the Son of Man indeed goes, as it is written of him” — and yet in the same breath pronounces “woe to that man.” If Judas’s act fulfilled Scripture, if it was somehow necessary to the plan of salvation, how can Judas be blamed for it? Was he not, in the cruelest sense, used?

The Catholic answer holds two things together that the human mind wants to pull apart: God’s foreknowledge is total, and Judas’s freedom was real. Aquinas frames it with care. God’s permission of a man’s fall does not cause the man’s sin: “guilt proceeds from the free-will of the person who is reprobated and deserted by grace.”⁠⁴⁰ Foreknowledge is not coercion; that God eternally knows what Judas will freely choose no more forces the choice than my watching a man cross a room pushes him across it. The betrayal was foreseen and woven into the divine plan; the guilt of it was Judas’s alone, drawn entirely from his own will.

Benedict put the same paradox pastorally. Jesus, he said, “does not force his will or protect it from the temptations of Satan, respecting human freedom”; and then, in a line that turns the whole tragedy toward the Cross, “In his mysterious salvific plan, God assumes Judas’ inexcusable gesture as the occasion for the total gift of the Son for the redemption of the world.”⁠⁴¹ Note the exact word: inexcusable. God draws the world’s redemption out of the betrayal without authoring the betrayal’s guilt. The kiss remains Judas’s free and culpable act even as the Cross it leads to becomes the salvation of the very man who gave it — if only he would have turned and received it. The mystery of Judas is, at bottom, the mystery of how a real human “no” can be folded into a divine “yes” without ceasing to be his own.

After Judas: Matthias and the Restored Twelve

The Twelve could not stay eleven. The number mattered — twelve apostles for the twelve tribes, the sign that the Church was Israel reconstituted — and so the first act of the apostolic Church, before Pentecost, was to fill the empty seat. Peter stands up among the hundred and twenty, cites the Psalms over Judas (“Let his encampment become desolate, and may no one dwell in it” … “May another take his office”), and sets the qualification: the replacement must be one who had accompanied them from John’s baptism to the Ascension, a witness to the Resurrection.⁠⁴²

Two men meet the test, Joseph called Barsabbas and Matthias. And then the apostles do something they never do again: they cast lots. “Then they gave lots to them, and the lot fell upon Matthias, and he was counted with the eleven apostles.”⁠⁴³ Matthias is the only apostle chosen this way, by lot, and the only one added after the Ascension and before Paul. Of him the New Testament tells us nothing further — no scene, no saying, no recorded death. He is a name that fills a wound, the quiet seal on a broken circle. With his enrollment the Twelve are whole again, and the apostolic succession by which the Church would be governed has its first link forged in the very act of replacing the traitor. Benedict drew the lesson plainly: “while there is no lack of unworthy and traitorous Christians in the Church, it is up to each of us to counterbalance the evil done by them with our clear witness to Jesus Christ.”⁠⁴⁴

Judas Beyond the Gospels

The Gnostic counter-gospel

The most dramatic modern chapter in the afterlife of Judas opened in 2006, when the National Geographic Society announced the conservation and translation of a long-lost Gnostic text: the Gospel of Judas, surviving in a battered fourth-century Coptic manuscript called Codex Tchacos. The text itself is old — Irenaeus of Lyons, around A.D. 180, already complained of heretics who “style the Gospel of Judas” and held that Judas alone “knew the truth as no others did.”⁠⁴⁵ The 2006 announcement carried a sensational claim: that this gospel rehabilitated Judas, casting him as the favored disciple, the only one who understood Jesus, who handed him over at Jesus’ own request to free the divine spirit from the prison of the body.

The headlines did not survive contact with the scholarship. Within a year, the Coptologist April DeConick and others argued that the initial translation was badly skewed — that the text does not make Judas a hero at all but a “demon,” a figure separated from the holy generation rather than set apart for it.⁠⁴⁶ The debate continues, but the “heroic Judas” of 2006 is now widely regarded as a media artifact rather than a finding. And in any case, the more basic point is one of dating: the Gospel of Judas is a second-century Sethian Gnostic composition, written more than a hundred years after the events, presupposing the canonical Gospels and reflecting the cosmology of its own sect. It is a fascinating window into second-century Gnosticism. It tells us precisely nothing about the man who walked into Gethsemane. The Church that excluded it from the canon was not suppressing a secret truth about Judas; it was declining to confuse a sectarian myth with apostolic memory.

Spy Wednesday and the Wednesday fast

Judas left a mark on the Christian calendar that most worshippers carry without noticing. The Wednesday of Holy Week is called, in older English usage, “Spy Wednesday” — the day commemorating Judas’s covert bargain with the chief priests, the spy’s secret deal struck before the open arrest. And the ancient Christian discipline of fasting on Wednesdays is tied, in the tradition, to the betrayal. The connection runs deep: the Didache, a Christian manual from around the turn of the second century, already directs believers to “fast on the fourth day and the Preparation” — Wednesday and Friday — though the Didache itself gives no reason for the choice.⁠⁴⁷ The explicit linkage of Wednesday to Judas’s betrayal is a later development, but it became universal: to this day Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Christians fast every Wednesday of the year in memory of the day Judas sold the Lord, as they fast every Friday in memory of the Cross. The traitor is woven, quietly, into the rhythm of the Christian week.

Dante’s lowest circle

Where the Church withholds a verdict, the poets have rarely been so restrained. Dante, at the very bottom of the Inferno, placed Judas in the deepest pit of hell, in the central mouth of the three-faced Satan frozen in the ice of Cocytus — the worst of the three arch-traitors, set above Brutus and Cassius. Virgil points him out to the pilgrim: “That soul up there which has the greatest pain,” the Master said, “is Judas Iscariot; / With head inside, he plies his legs without.”⁠⁴⁸ Head buried in Satan’s gnawing jaws, legs kicking helplessly in the frozen dark — it is the most famous literary judgment ever passed on Judas, and it is worth remembering that it is a poet’s judgment and not the Church’s. Dante was writing a moral universe, not a magisterial decree. The Inferno tells us what medieval Christendom feared about Judas; it does not tell us what God has done with him.

“A Judas”

And so the betrayer passed into the bloodstream of the culture. His name became the word for treachery in a dozen languages; his kiss became the image of betrayal disguised as love; his thirty pieces of silver became the proverb for a soul sold cheap. The painters made him unmistakable — Giotto’s golden-cloaked embrace, and Leonardo’s Judas, in the Last Supper, clutching the money bag and recoiling, the only figure at the table whose hand has knocked over the salt. He is the apostle who became an adjective, the friend whose name is now a curse. There is no other career like it among the Twelve, and there is a warning in the very ubiquity of it: that the man closest to the light can fall the farthest, and that proximity to Christ is no guarantee of fidelity to him. Judas saw everything the others saw, heard everything they heard, and ate the Bread the others ate. It was not ignorance that destroyed him.

What the Traitor Leaves the Church

It is a strange place to end a series on the Twelve — not with a martyr’s triumph but with a suicide’s empty seat. And yet Judas belongs here, last and necessary, because he is the apostle who guards the rest from sentimentality. The other eleven can be admired safely; Judas cannot be admired at all, and that is his use. He stands at the end of the Twelve as the permanent refutation of the idea that being chosen is the same as being saved, that nearness to Jesus does the work that a free and faithful “yes” must do.

But notice what the Church refuses to do even with him. She will not pronounce him damned. She prints the contradictions in his death without flinching, names no soul to hell, and leaves the carved Good Shepherd of Vézelay stooping to lift the hanged man’s body onto his shoulders. The same tradition that gives us Dante’s frozen pit gives us Benedict’s “never despair of God’s mercy” and Francis’s “mercy is a mystery.” Both are true at once, and the discipline of holding them together — fearing for Judas without burying him, condemning the betrayal without claiming the keys of hell — is itself a school of Christian hope. If mercy can be hoped for even at the latch of that locked door, it can be hoped for anywhere.

The Twelve began with a man who denied Christ three times and was forgiven and made the rock. They end with a man who betrayed him once and would not be forgiven, because he would not turn and ask. Between Peter and Judas runs the whole distance of the Christian life — the same fall, and two different mornings after. The series closes on that distance, and on the field outside Jerusalem that still, in its name, remembers the price of a friend.

Further reading

For the New Testament evidence in its Catholic translation, the relevant chapters of Matthew, Luke, John, and Acts at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ edition of the New American Bible, Revised Edition carry the explanatory notes cited throughout this post, including the candid note on the “Jeremiah” problem and the divergence between the two death accounts. Benedict XVI’s General Audience of 18 October 2006 is the single most useful magisterial treatment of Judas, balancing the severity of the Gospel texts against the Church’s refusal to pronounce on his fate. On the death accounts and the patristic reception, the relevant homilies of John Chrysostom and the fragment of Papias are available in the Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers at New Advent. For the question of Judas and the Eucharist and the freedom-and-foreknowledge problem, the relevant articles of the Summa Theologiae (III, q. 81 and I, q. 23) are the classic loci. On the Gospel of Judas, the cautionary scholarship of April DeConick is the necessary corrective to the 2006 publicity.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Judas Iscariot in hell?

The Catholic Church has never declared that Judas — or any other specific named person — is in hell. She canonizes saints by name, formally declaring them in heaven, but she has no corresponding process for damnation. The Catechism teaches that “God predestines no one to go to hell,” and hell is understood as a person’s own definitive self-exclusion from God, not a sentence God imposes. Benedict XVI, preaching on Judas, said directly that judging his eternal fate “is not up to us.” Christians may fear for Judas in light of Jesus’ severe words (“better for that man if he had never been born”), but the Church declines to pronounce him lost, and prays for the salvation of all.

What does the name “Iscariot” mean?

Most likely “man from Kerioth,” a town in southern Judah — which would make Judas the only Judean among the otherwise Galilean Twelve. This is the reading the NABRE adopts. Two rival theories tie the name to the Latin sicarius (“dagger-man,” linking him to anti-Roman assassins) or to a Semitic root meaning “to hand over” (so the name would mean “the betrayer”). The sicarius theory faces a chronological objection, since those assassins are attested only after Judas’s lifetime. The honest answer is that the meaning is genuinely uncertain.

Why does the Bible give Judas two different deaths?

Matthew 27 says Judas repented, returned the silver, and hanged himself, after which the priests bought the Field of Blood; Acts 1 says Judas himself bought a field and died falling headlong, his body bursting open, the field taking its bloody name from his own death. The two accounts agree only on the betrayal money, the field, and the name “Field of Blood.” The NABRE’s own notes acknowledge the divergence, calling the Acts version “a popular tradition … that differs” from Matthew. The two Evangelists are each shaping the death theologically rather than writing a forensic report; later attempts to harmonize them (the rope broke and the body fell) appear nowhere in Scripture itself.

Did Judas receive Communion at the Last Supper?

The dominant Catholic view, defended by Thomas Aquinas, is yes: Judas received the Eucharist with the other disciples before going out to betray Jesus. Aquinas argues that Christ did not publicly cut off a hidden sinner from Communion, setting a pattern for the Church. Aquinas is careful to distinguish, however, between the Eucharist of the institution (which Judas received) and the dipped morsel of John 13 (which, he says, was “mere bread,” not the Body of Christ). A minority view, held by Hilary of Poitiers, denied that Judas communicated at all.

Was Judas just a pawn in God’s plan?

No. The Catholic tradition holds together two truths: God foreknew and permitted the betrayal, and Judas freely and culpably chose it. As Aquinas puts it, the guilt “proceeds from the free-will” of Judas himself; God’s foreknowledge does not coerce the choice any more than seeing an act causes it. Benedict XVI called Judas’s gesture “inexcusable” even while affirming that God drew the world’s redemption out of it. The betrayal was foreseen and woven into the plan of salvation; the guilt of it belonged to Judas alone.

Does the “Gospel of Judas” change how we should see him?

No. The Gospel of Judas is a second-century Gnostic text, surviving in a battered fourth-century Coptic manuscript, written more than a hundred years after the events and reflecting the theology of a Gnostic sect rather than any historical memory of the apostle. The 2006 publicity that cast Judas as a hero who betrayed Jesus at his own request has been largely overturned by later scholarship, which reads the text as portraying Judas as a “demon.” Either way, the work tells us about second-century Gnosticism, not about the real Judas.

Footnotes

1. 1. Matt 10:4 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The NABRE (New American Bible Revised Edition) is the canonical English Catholic translation used in the United States.

2. 2. Mark 3:19 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

3. 3. Luke 6:16 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

4. 4. Acts 1:13 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The eleven named in the upper room include "Judas son of James" — the apostle also called Jude Thaddaeus — but not Judas Iscariot, who is now dead.

5. 5. John 14:22 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org: "Judas, not the Iscariot, said to him…"

6. 6. John 6:71 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org: "He was referring to Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot." The epithet attaches to the father as well, which favors a family or place name over a personal nickname.

7. 7. NABRE note on Luke 6:16, bible.usccb.org: "Judas Iscariot: the name Iscariot may mean 'man from Kerioth.'" Kerioth (Kerioth-hezron) is listed among the towns of the far south of Judah at Joshua 15:25.

8. 8. Benedict XVI, General Audience, 18 October 2006, "Judas Iscariot and Matthias," vatican.va: the name is variously explained as "a 'man from Kerioth,'" as "a variant of the term 'hired assassin,'" alluding to the dagger (Latin sica), or as "the one who is to hand him over."

9. 9. Matt 26:14–16 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

10. 10. NABRE note on Matt 26:15, bible.usccb.org: the thirty pieces "derived from Zec 11:12 where it is the wages paid to the rejected shepherd, a cheap price (Zec 11:13). That amount is also the compensation paid to one whose slave has been gored by an ox (Ex 21:32)."

11. 11. John 12:6 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org; cf. John 13:29, where the disciples assume Judas, who "kept the money bag," has been sent to make a purchase.

12. 12. John Chrysostom, Homily 85 on Matthew (on Matt 26:67ff., treating the betrayal and the Field of Blood), NPNF1, vol. 10, trans. George Prevost, rev. M. B. Riddle, newadvent.org.

13. 13. John 13:21, 25–27 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

14. 14. John 13:30 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

15. 15. Luke 22:3 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org; cf. John 13:27, "After he took the morsel, Satan entered him."

16. 16. John 6:70–71 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The NABRE phrases v. 70 as a question: "Did I not choose you twelve? Yet is not one of you a devil?"

17. 17. Matt 26:48–50 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

18. 18. Luke 22:48 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

19. 19. John 18:5–6 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The NABRE note on John 18:1–14 observes that "John does not mention the agony in the garden and the kiss of Judas."

20. 20. Matt 27:3–5 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

21. 21. Matt 27:7–8 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

22. 22. Acts 1:18–19 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The NABRE renders the Aramaic name "Akeldama" (without an initial H).

23. 23. NABRE note on Acts 1:18, bible.usccb.org: "Luke records a popular tradition about the death of Judas that differs from the one in Mt 27:5, according to which Judas hanged himself."

24. 24. Papias of Hierapolis, Fragments III, ANF, vol. 1, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, newadvent.org. The ANF preserves only this short form; a longer and far more grotesque recension (swollen eyelids, worms, stench) circulated under the name of Apollinaris of Laodicea but is not part of the ANF text.

25. 25. Matt 27:9–10 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

26. 26. NABRE note on Matt 27:9–10, bible.usccb.org: "Matthew's attributing this text to Jeremiah is puzzling, for there is no such text in that book… It is usually said that the attribution of the text to Jeremiah is due to Matthew's combining the Zechariah text with texts from Jeremiah that speak of a potter (Jer 18:2–3), the buying of a field (Jer 32:6–9)," and so on.

27. 27. Augustine, The Harmony of the Gospels III.7, NPNF1, vol. 6, trans. S. D. F. Salmond, newadvent.org. Augustine argues that "words spoken by Jeremiah are really as much Zechariah's as Jeremiah's, and, on the other hand, that words spoken by Zechariah are really as much Jeremiah's as they are Zechariah's."

28. 28. Matt 26:24 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The NABRE reads "if he had never been born" (the older RSV/KJV: "if that man had not been born").

29. 29. John 17:12 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. "Son of destruction" renders what older versions give as "son of perdition."

30. 30. Catechism of the Catholic Church §1037, vatican.va; cf. §1033, which defines hell as "definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed."

31. 31. Benedict XVI, General Audience, 18 October 2006, vatican.va.

32. 32. Benedict XVI, General Audience, 18 October 2006, vatican.va.

33. 33. John Chrysostom, Homily 85 on Matthew, NPNF1, vol. 10, newadvent.org.

34. 34. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 20, a. 3, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1920), newadvent.org, quoting Isidore, De Summo Bono II.14.

35. 35. Pope Francis, Meeting with the Polish Bishops, Kraków, 27 July 2016, vatican.va.

36. 36. Benedict XVI, General Audience, 18 October 2006, vatican.va, quoting the Rule of St. Benedict, ch. 4: "Never despair of God's mercy."

37. 37. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 81, a. 2, newadvent.org, citing Pseudo-Dionysius, Eccl. Hier. iii, and Augustine, Tractates on John 62.

38. 38. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 81, a. 2, ad 1, newadvent.org.

39. 39. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 81, a. 2, ad 3, newadvent.org.

40. 40. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 23, a. 3, ad 2, newadvent.org.

41. 41. Benedict XVI, General Audience, 18 October 2006, vatican.va.

42. 42. Acts 1:15–22 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org; the Psalm citations are Ps 69:26 and Ps 109:8.

43. 43. Acts 1:26 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The NABRE note observes that replacing Judas "was probably dictated by the symbolism of the number twelve, recalling the twelve tribes of Israel."

44. 44. Benedict XVI, General Audience, 18 October 2006, vatican.va.

45. 45. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies I.31.1, ANF, vol. 1, newadvent.org, on the sect that "produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas." Whether Irenaeus knew the very text preserved in Codex Tchacos is debated.

46. 46. April D. DeConick, The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says (London: Continuum, 2007); see also her op-ed "Gospel Truth," The New York Times, 1 December 2007. The critical edition is Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst, eds., The Gospel of Judas from Codex Tchacos (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2006).

47. 47. Didache 8, ANF, vol. 7, trans. M. B. Riddle, newadvent.org: "fast on the fourth day and the Preparation (Friday)." The text prescribes the Wednesday fast but gives no reason; the explicit association with Judas's betrayal is a later tradition.

48. 48. Dante Alighieri, Inferno XXXIV, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (public domain), Project Gutenberg.