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And now, let’s talk about… (cue the foreboding background music) …
Every good story has an antagonist.
Someone who betrays the hero. Someone the audience loves to hate.
If you grew up like I did, you probably knew exactly who that person was in the story of Jesus.
Judas Iscariot.
The disciple who sold Jesus out for money, identified him with a kiss, and couldn’t live with what he’d done. At least, that’s the version of Judas most of us carry around in our heads.
But how much of that picture actually comes from our earliest sources? And how much of it comes from attempting to harmonize all four Gospels together?
That’s the question I want to explore.
Over the last few articles, we’ve watched the story of Jesus grow as the Gospel writers retold it. His baptism takes on new meaning. His birth is told in dramatically different ways. John moves the cleansing of the Temple from the end of the story to the beginning to create space for a different inciting incident. And in the previous post, we saw that the Last Supper evolved as each writer explains it through their own lens.
Now it’s Judas’s turn.
So let’s ask…
Who did each of the Gospel writers seem to believe Judas was… and what purpose did he serve for each of their stories?
Judas actually appears far less often in the New Testament than most people realize. Compared to Peter, James, or Andrew, he’s a relatively minor character. But every time he appears, something new is added to his story.
So instead of focusing only on the betrayal, let’s follow Judas through each Gospel from beginning to end. By the time we’re finished, we’ll have four snapshots taken over roughly thirty years. Those snapshots won’t just tell us about Judas. They’ll let us watch one of Christianity’s most infamous characters develop over time.
As always, we’ll begin with the earliest Gospel.
Most scholars believe Mark was written around the year 70, making it our earliest surviving Gospel. If we’re trying to get as close as we can to the earliest Christian memory of Judas, this is where we begin.
Here is every significant appearance of Judas in Mark:
Mark 3:13–19 – Judas is chosen as one of the Twelve.
Mark 14:10–11 – Judas goes to the chief priests.
Mark 14:17–21 – Jesus predicts the betrayal during the Last Supper.
Mark 14:43–46 – Judas identifies Jesus with a kiss.
The first thing of note is how Mark introduces him: Judas Iscariot. That may not sound important until you realize how common the name Judas was in the first century. Another of Jesus’ disciples was also named Judas—our English Bibles usually call him Jude to avoid confusion—and one of Jesus’ brothers carried the same name. Simply saying “Judas” wouldn’t have clearly identified the right person.
But what does Iscariot mean?
The honest answer is that we don’t know for certain. The oldest explanation is that it means “man of Kerioth,” a town in Judea, which would make Judas the only Judean among the Twelve. Other theories have been proposed over the centuries, including one connecting the name to the Latin word sicarius, meaning “dagger-man.” Today, though, most scholars think the geographical explanation is the strongest.
The next thing we notice is the way Mark introduces Judas. He doesn’t simply write, “Judas Iscariot.” He writes, “...Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.”
Speaking as a professional storyteller myself, that’s a rather strange way to introduce a character. Imagine opening a novel and reading, “Elizabeth, who would later murder her husband.”
Most storytellers don’t begin with the ending. Mark does. The simplest explanation is that he assumes his readers already know the basic story of Jesus. Judas isn’t a mystery to them. His betrayal is already part of the tradition, so Mark simply reminds readers who this character is before the story even begins.
After that, Judas almost disappears until the final week of Jesus’ life. Mark tells us he goes to the chief priests, who promise him money if he’ll hand Jesus over. That’s all we get. Mark never tells us how much money changed hands. More surprisingly, he never says Judas betrayed Jesus because of the money. That’s something many of us assume because we’ve heard the story our whole lives, but Mark never actually says that Judas betrayed Jesus for money.
At the Last Supper, Jesus announces that one of the Twelve will betray him. One by one the disciples ask whether it’s them, but Mark never has Judas ask Jesus directly if he’s the betrayer. Instead, Jesus simply says the betrayer is one of the Twelve who is sharing the meal with him. The emphasis isn’t really on Judas. It’s on the shocking fact that someone from Jesus’ own inner circle is about to hand him over.
The final scene is equally brief. Judas identifies Jesus with a kiss, a common way to greet a friend. Jesus is arrested. And Judas disappears from Mark’s Gospel.
There’s no explanation.
No remorse.
No dramatic suicide or death scene for Judas.
Nothing. He just disappears from the story.
When we put all of those passages together, what is most surprising in Mark’s account is what he doesn’t say.
Mark never explains his motives. He never tells us whether Judas regretted what he’d done. He never tells us how he died. The earliest Gospel leaves Judas almost completely unexplained and his story unresolved.
That’s striking because it’s so different from the Judas most of us picture today. The greedy disciple. The tragic figure overcome with guilt. The man influenced by Satan. The traitor whose gruesome death became part of the story.
None of that is in the earliest gospel account.
Mark gives us something much simpler.
One of Jesus’ closest followers “hands him over” for some reason.
Why?
Apparently, Mark either didn’t know... or didn’t think that was the most important question.
Here’s a quick video from biblical scholar Dan McClellan about Mark’s account:
About fifteen or twenty years later, Matthew tells the story again.
Like the other articles in this series, the interesting question isn’t where Matthew agrees with Mark.
It’s where he adds to the story or changes it.
Here are the significant appearances of Judas in Matthew:
Matthew 10:1–4 – Judas is named among the Twelve.
Matthew 26:14–16 – Judas goes to the chief priests.
Matthew 26:20–25 – Judas speaks at the Last Supper.
Matthew 26:47–50 – Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss.
Matthew 27:3–10 – Judas returns the money and dies.
Matthew begins exactly where Mark does. He introduces “Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.” Again, there’s no suspense. Readers already know Judas’s role in the story.
But Matthew begins adding details almost immediately.
The first comes when Judas approaches the chief priests. Unlike Mark, Matthew tells us exactly what Judas receives:
Thirty pieces of silver.
That number isn’t random. Matthew consistently interprets the life of Jesus through the lens of Israel’s Scriptures, and here he appears to be doing the same thing.
In the book of Zechariah, written roughly five centuries before Jesus, the prophet tells a symbolic story about a shepherd rejected by his own people. When the shepherd asks to be paid, he’s given thirty pieces of silver—an amount God sarcastically calls “the handsome price at which they valued me.” God then tells the prophet to throw the money into the Temple in connection with a potter.
If that seems like an odd story, just hold onto it for a minute.
Matthew is setting something up.
He also changes Judas’s role in a subtle way. In Mark, the chief priests promise Judas money. In Matthew, Judas initiates the negotiation himself: “What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?” Money has moved much closer to the center of Judas’ motivations.
Matthew also gives Judas a voice at the Last Supper. When the other disciples ask, “Surely you don’t mean me?”, Judas asks the same question.
Jesus answers simply,
“You have said so.”
It’s only a brief exchange, but Judas is no longer just part of the crowd. Matthew lets him step into the foreground.
Then comes Matthew’s biggest addition.
After Jesus is condemned, Judas is overcome with remorse. He returns the thirty pieces of silver and tells the chief priests, “I have sinned, for I have betrayed innocent blood.” When they refuse to help him, Judas throws the money into the Temple and leaves.
If you’ve been thinking about Zechariah, the parallels are now hard to miss. The rejected shepherd. The thirty pieces of silver. The money thrown into the Temple. The connection with the potter. Matthew has woven all of those images into Judas’s story. The priests refuse to place the money into the Temple treasury because it is “blood money.” Instead, they use it to purchase… a potter’s field.
Then Judas hangs himself.
None of that appears in Mark.
Matthew is the first Gospel writer to tell us what became of Judas.
One small detail is worth mentioning here. When the author of Matthew later says these events fulfilled the words of the prophet, he attributes the quotation to Jeremiah, even though the closest parallel is found in Zechariah 11.
Scholars have debated that for centuries. Some think Matthew intentionally blended imagery from Jeremiah and Zechariah into a single quotation. Others think he inherited the attribution from an earlier source.
And then there’s the simplest explanation.
Some scholars—including Bart Ehrman—think Matthew simply made a mistake.
If you grew up believing the Bible could never contain an error, that possibility may feel unsettling.
Historically, though, it shouldn’t.
Ancient authors were human. They quoted from memory. They occasionally combined passages. They sometimes misremembered details, just as writers do today. Whatever the explanation, Matthew’s larger point is clear: he wants his readers to see Judas’s betrayal as part of Israel’s much larger story… even if he maybe gets his Old Testament books mixed up from time to time.
Compared to Mark, Matthew’s Judas is a much more developed character.
He now has a financial motive.
He speaks.
He confesses his guilt.
He experiences remorse.
And his story receives an ending, albeit a tragic one.
Matthew never suggests Satan caused Judas to betray Jesus. The decision still belongs to Judas. But Judas is no longer simply the disciple who betrayed Jesus.
He has become a tragic figure whose story is woven into Israel’s Scriptures and whose betrayal ends in despair.
Like Matthew does over and over and over again in his gospel, here again with Judas he reimagines the Hebrew Scriptures as prophecies being fulfilled and as stories being repeated in the life and death of Jesus.
Luke gives us one portrait of Judas in his Gospel and then returns to him in the opening chapter of Acts. Since both books were written by the same author, it makes sense to read them together.
Let’s look at every significant appearance of Judas in Luke’s two-volume work.
Luke 6:12–16 – Judas is chosen as one of the Twelve.
Luke 22:1–6 – Satan enters Judas.
Luke 22:21–23 – Jesus predicts the betrayal.
Luke 22:47–48 – Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss.
Acts 1:15–20 – Judas’s death and the selection of Matthias.
The first major difference appears before Judas has done anything. Luke tells us, “Then Satan entered Judas.” Neither Mark nor Matthew says that.
Mark never explains Judas’s motives. Matthew focuses on the money and the remorse that follows. Luke frames the betrayal within a much larger struggle between God’s kingdom and the powers of evil. Judas still chooses to go to the chief priests, but Luke wants his readers to understand that more is happening than a disciple making a terrible decision.
Judas is now part of a cosmic battle between good and evil.
At the Last Supper, Luke stays fairly close to Mark. Jesus predicts the betrayal, and Judas remains one of the Twelve. Unlike Matthew, however, Luke doesn’t include the brief exchange in which Judas asks Jesus if he is the betrayer.
The biggest change comes after the Gospel ends.
Luke returns to Judas in Acts, and this is where many readers first realize the New Testament preserves more than one tradition about the death of Judas.
Matthew says Judas returns the money, hangs himself, and the priests purchase the potter’s field.
Acts tells a different story.
Here Judas does not return the money. He instead acquires a field with the reward of his betrayal. He falls headlong, his body bursts open, and all of his intestines spill out. The author of Luke-Acts almost seems to linger over the gruesome details of his demise. Luke says the place became known in Aramaic as Akeldama, meaning “Field of Blood.”
This creates another interesting contrast with Matthew. Both accounts end with a place known as the Field of Blood, but they explain the name differently. In Matthew, the field receives its name because it was purchased with “blood money,” intentionally echoing Zechariah’s imagery of the rejected shepherd, the thirty pieces of silver, and the potter. In Acts, the name comes from Judas’s gruesome death instead.
Some scholars think both authors may be offering different explanations for the name of a place their readers already knew. Interestingly, the area itself may have been associated with potters because of its distinctive reddish (blood-like) clay, which could help explain why Matthew connects it with a potter’s field in the first place. We can’t know for certain, but it’s another reminder that Matthew and Luke are telling the story in different ways.
For centuries, Christians have tried to reconcile these accounts. Perhaps Judas hanged himself and later fell. Perhaps the priests bought the field on his behalf. Those explanations, while technically possible, seem unlikely.
The simpler explanation is that Matthew and Luke inherited different traditions. By now, that shouldn’t surprise us. We’ve already seen several examples in this series of stories developing as they were remembered and retold. Luke seems less concerned with exactly how Judas died than with what his death represents.
Acts immediately turns to the selection of Matthias to replace Judas as one of the Twelve. For Luke, Judas’s story becomes the bridge between Jesus’ ministry and the beginning of the church.
Compared to Matthew, Luke shifts the focus once again.
Judas is no longer simply a tragic figure consumed by guilt. He has become part of a larger spiritual drama. Satan enters him, and his gruesome and deserved death marks the end of one chapter and the beginning of another.
The story hasn’t changed completely.
But its meaning has.
By the time we reach John, we’ve learned to expect something different.
Throughout this series we’ve watched John reshape familiar traditions to reveal what he believes they ultimately mean. He moved the cleansing of the Temple. He changed the chronology of the Last Supper. Judas follows that same pattern.
Here’s every significant appearance of Judas in John’s Gospel:
John 6:64–71 – Jesus identifies Judas as the future betrayer and calls him “a devil.”
John 12:1–8 – Judas objects to Mary’s anointing of Jesus and is described as a thief.
John 13:2–30 – The devil prompts Judas to betray Jesus, Satan enters him, and Judas leaves into the night.
John 18:1–11 – Judas leads the soldiers to Jesus.
One thing becomes obvious almost immediately.
John begins telling us who Judas is long before Judas actually betrays Jesus.
Mark introduces Judas when the betrayal story begins. Matthew expands that story. Luke places it within a cosmic struggle.
John starts shaping Judas’s character almost from the beginning of his Gospel.
After many disciples leave Jesus in chapter six, Jesus says,
“Did I not choose you, the Twelve? Yet one of you is a devil.”
John immediately tells his readers Jesus is speaking about Judas.
There’s no mystery. Judas’s role has already been established.
The portrait becomes even darker in chapter twelve. When Mary anoints Jesus with expensive perfume, Judas complains that it should have been sold and the money given to the poor.
At first, he sounds compassionate.
Then John interrupts his own story.
He tells readers Judas didn’t really care about the poor because he kept the disciples’ money and regularly stole from it.
None of the earlier Gospels make that accusation.
By the Last Supper, John takes the story another step. He tells us the devil had already put betrayal into Judas’s heart. Then, after Jesus hands him a piece of bread, Satan enters him.
Jesus simply says,
“What you are about to do, do quickly.”
Judas leaves.
John adds only four more words.
“And it was night.”
Of course it was night.
But if you’ve been reading John’s Gospel carefully, you know that night means much more than the time of day. From the opening chapter, John has contrasted light and darkness, day and night, belief and unbelief, life and death.
Judas doesn’t simply leave the room.
He walks into the darkness that has been growing throughout the Gospel from the very beginning.
John changes another famous detail as well.
There is no kiss.
In Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Judas identifies Jesus with a kiss. John doesn’t need that scene. Jesus steps forward voluntarily, asks whom they are seeking, and identifies himself before Judas ever says a word.
Even in his arrest, Jesus remains completely in control.
Then John does something else that’s easy to overlook.
He never tells us how Judas dies.
Matthew does.
Luke does.
John doesn’t.
Once Judas has fulfilled his role, the story simply moves on.
When we compare John to Mark, the difference is remarkable.
Mark gives us a disciple who hands over Jesus for reasons we never fully understand.
John gives us something much larger.
Judas has become the embodiment of betrayal itself.
The devil plants betrayal in his heart.
Satan enters him.
He walks in darkness.
This is one of the reasons John’s Gospel has always felt different to me than the other three. The Synoptics often read like history remembered. John reads more like epic mythology. Ordinary events become symbols of larger realities. Water becomes new birth. Bread becomes life itself. Jesus is introduced as the Lamb of God. Judas becomes an evil, demon-possessed villain.
He becomes the personification of darkness standing over against the Light of the World.
That’s how John tells stories. Historical people become symbols of larger realities. Because for John, meaning trumps accuracy.
If you asked me what I think most likely happened historically, my answer is actually pretty simple.
I don’t know for certain whether there was a historical Judas. Most scholars think there probably was, and I find that persuasive.
If there was a historical Judas, I suspect Mark gets us closest to the earliest recoverable tradition.
A disciple named Judas betrayed Jesus. Exactly why he did it, no one seems to have known.
From there, we can watch the tradition grow.
Matthew connects Judas’s story to Israel’s Scriptures. Luke places it within a larger struggle between God and the powers of evil. John transforms him into the embodiment of betrayal itself.
They are snapshots taken over time.
Together, they allow us to watch one tradition being remembered, interpreted, and placed into new contexts as early Christians wrestled with a haunting question:
How could one of Jesus’ own disciples have betrayed him?
History may never answer that question completely. But by reading the Gospels in the order they were written, we can watch the answers evolve.
The earliest tradition remembers a disciple who betrayed Jesus for reasons no one could fully explain. Over the next thirty years, that memory becomes connected to Israel’s Scriptures, placed within a cosmic struggle, and finally transformed into the embodiment of betrayal itself.
We’re watching one of history’s most influential traditions grow before our eyes.
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Part One: Jesus’ Baptism
How the story of Jesus’ baptism develops from Mark to John, and what those changes reveal about the growing understanding of Jesus’ identity.
Part Two: The Birth of Jesus
Why Matthew and Luke tell such different birth stories—and what ancient biography can teach us about why.
Part Three: The Cleansing of the Temple
Why John moves one of Jesus’ most famous acts from the end of Jesus’ ministry to the beginning.
Part Four: The Last Supper
How a final meal became one of Christianity’s central rituals—and how its meaning accumulated over time.
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