Reading the Gospel of Judas VIII: Judas's Legacy

It is clear from the gospels that during Jesus’s life, many groups persecuted Jesus and his followers and they wanted to kill Jesus and end his Church. The outside persecution could be endured, what made a difference was the treachery inside and its conspiracy with the persecutors. As I have noted before:

The most deadly combination for the Church in its first century was apostates within colluding with persecutors without. Judas Iscariot had used that combination to kill Jesus, and others found it equally effective in killing his Church.[1] 

This was Judas’s legacy to the first century Church.

Whenever 3 John was written, probably in the last half of the first century, John notes Diotrephes would not permit him to come to the Church because Diotrephes wanted to be in charge (3 John 1:9).

In the seventies and eighties, a number of Christians left their faith, although the man who recorded this did not care why they did so only that they did so.[2]

Jude’s grandsons were denounced as politically dangerous in the late eighties or early nineties, but they were released even though they were Christians.[3] This means that someone had to make accusations to Roman authorities about them, accusations so serious that they carried the death penalty.

At the end of the beginning of the Second Century, Pliny writes to his friend, the emperor Trajan, and notes that he is receiving anonymous accusations against individuals accusing them of being Christians.[4] Pliny wants to know whether simply being a Christian is automatically sufficient cause for execution, and it seems that whoever wrote the accusation must have thought so.

Hegesippus records that also about this time a certain faction of Christians at Jerusalem accused Symeon, bishop of Jerusalem, to the authorities and had him put to death.[5] Hegesippus also says: “until that time, the Church had remained a pure and uncorrupted virgin since until that time those who corrupted it lay undeclared in darkness.”[6]

Clement of Rome says that in Trajan’s day the Church was filled with “unholy sedition,”[7] as proof of that he pointed to “everyone abandoning the fear of God, and becoming blind to his faith, neither walking in the ordinances of his appointment, nor comporting according to the Christian duty, but walking according to wicked lusts of his own heart.”[8]

This tale of Christianity to the beginning of the second century shows that various individuals tried to sabotage the Christian faith, often by betraying the leaders to get gain or imagined power. Between the betrayal of Jesus and the similar betrayals of local Christian leaders lies about a half century hiatus. Other betrayals may have occurred, obscured from our view. The legacy of Judas was alive and well at the end of the first century.

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[1] John Gee, “James, First and Second Peter, and Jude: Epistles of Persecution,” in The Life and Teachings of the New Testament Apostles: From the Day of Pentecost through the Apocalypse, ed. Richard Nietzel Holzapfel and Thomas A. Wayment (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2010), 190.

[2] Pliny, Epistles 10.96.6.

[3] Eusebius, History of the Church, 3.19.1-20.8.

[4] Pliny, Epistles 10.96.2.

[5] Eusebius, History of the Church, 3.32.1-3.

[6] Eusebius, History of the Church, 3.32.7.

[7] Clement of Rome, Corinthians, 1.1.

[8] Clement of Rome, Corinthians, 3.4.

Reading the Gospel of Judas VI: Thirty Pieces of Silver

Only Matthew gives the amount of money that Judas was paid to betray Jesus: thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:15; 27:3). How much was that? The term for “pieces of silver” is arguria. The Roman silver coin was the denarius. (The aureus was gold; the sestertius and dupondius were brass; and the as was copper).

What exactly would 30 denarii buy? In Egypt, it would buy half a year’s worth of wages for a day laborer. In Judea, the wages were higher (as were the prices) and so it would buy less. Still, it was a fair sum of money, about enough to buy a cow at the time.

By comparison, the ointment which provoked Judas’ betrayal, he valued at 300 denarii (John 12:5). So Judas was willing to betray his lord for a mere tenth of the value of something he planned to steal.

Reading the Gospel of Judas V: Judas the Apostate

Gospel writers can scarcely mention Judas without mentioning that he betrayed Jesus (Matthew 10:4; 26:14-16, 46-50; Mark 3:19; 14:10-11, 43-46; Luke 6:16; 22:3-6, 47-48; John 6:71; John 12:4). Though many of them wrote their accounts many years, in some cases decades, after the fact the sting of Judas’ betrayal was still keenly felt, not just by those who were eyewitnesses to it, but by Mark and Luke who were not eyewitnesses. We tend to think of Judas as betraying Jesus, but Judas betrayed more than just Jesus. He betrayed the other apostles too. They knew it and they clearly felt it. He was one of their own and that made his actions all the more despicable.

John gives the occasion of Judas’s alienation from Jesus when a woman lavished an expensive container of oil on Jesus’s feet. Judas, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, noted that the ointment was worth 300 denarii (John 12:5).  That amounts to 1200 drachmas or 7200 obols, a fifth of a talent. It was a significant sum of money. Judas piously complained that the oil could have been sold and given to the poor (John 12:5). John, who had worked closely with Judas for at least three years, observed as an aside, “not that he cared for the poor” (John 12:6). Judas tried to mask his greed with piety.

Earlier Jesus had observed, with some evident satisfaction, “the poor have the gospel preached to them” (Matthew 11:5; Luke 7:22). Judas, however, was unhappy with what Jesus was doing and at that point, John seemed to think, decided that Jesus was an impediment. Perhaps Judas thought that if Jesus and his inconvenient program were out of the way that he, Judas, would then be able to control the money that had been given for Jesus’s use “because he was a thief, and had the bag” (John 12:6).

When things were not developing the way that Judas thought they ought to go, he went to his religious leaders: “Judas Iscariot went unto the chief priests” (Matthew 26:14). “And from that time he sought opportunity to betray him” (Matthew 26:16). All the way along, the gospel writers note that Judas sought to put a pious façade on his actions. He could claim that what he was doing had the approval of his religious leaders and so it must be right. The heinousness of his act did not faze him. He was past feeling. So he could rationalize that he was doing what was right and proper and with the full approval of the proper ecclesiastical authorities.

On another level, Judas allowed himself to be used by Jesus’s enemies to bring about Jesus’s destruction. Jesus had many enemies who wanted to get rid of Jesus, and Judas let them use him to accomplish that task. Unfortunately for them, it did not get rid of Jesus.

It is this Judas, the greedy, the selfish, the hypocritically pious, the power-hungry traitor that is remembered in history. Dante puts Judas in the lowest circle of hell in the mouth of the devil himself as the “anima là sù ch’ha maggior pena.”[1] The Oxford English Dictionary notes that since the fifteenth century, in English, a Judas is “one who treacherously betrays under the semblance of friendship; a traitor or betrayer of the worst kind.”

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[1] Dante, Inferno 34.61-63.

Reading the Gospel of Judas IV: Judas the Apostle

That the Gospel of Judas is ascribed to Judas already alerts the reader to specific things. To understand those things, we need to understand who Judas was. 

The name Judas is simply the Greek version of Hebrew Judah.

Judas was called as an apostle (Matthew 10:4), given power to heal sickness and cast out demons (Matthew 10:1), and sent forth to preach the gospel (Matthew 10:5), which he did.

Judas must have had some real financial capacity. After all, he was the one who held the bag and was in charge of the finances of Jesus and the twelve apostles (John 12:6; 13:29). Of the other apostles, we know that Peter was a successful fisherman and owned his own boat (Luke 5:4); so Peter had been successful in his own business. Matthew, presumably the same as Levi, was a tax collector (Matthew 10:3; Luke 5:27-32) who made a living accounting for the government’s, other people’s, and his own money. In spite of this, Judas had the bag and charge of the finances for the group.

Judas also had some weaknesses, which the other apostles did as well. He wanted to be important and in charge. He wanted to be the greatest (Matthew 18:1-6; 20:20-29; 23:1-12). He did not approve of some of the things that Jesus did and found fault with them (John 12:3-6). These faults were and are not uncommon among mortals. Judas shared many of the same faults as his fellow-apostles. In spite of any of his short-comings, Judas was an apostle. He was a leader in Jesus’s church. Even up to Jesus’s last supper, none of the twelve thought Judas as anything different than the rest of them, neither better nor worse. Judas was simply one of them.

That is why Judas could not melt into mere mediocrity.