page_title: Judas Iscariot
section_title: Role as an apostle
hierarchical_section_title: Judas Iscariot / Life / Role as an apostle
caption_attribution_description: English: Judas being paid thirty pieces of silver, for the betrayal of Jesus. 16th century fresco painting on the vault in the Saint Sébastien Church, in Planpinet. Clarée valley, Hautes alpes département, France.Français&#160;: Les trentes deniers de Judas. XVIe siècle, auteur anonyme. Fresques ornant la voute de l'église Saint Sébastien de Planpinet, dans la vallée de la Clarée. Hautes alpes, France.
context_page_description: Judas Iscariot was a disciple and one of the original Twelve Apostles of Jesus Christ. According to all four canonical gospels, Judas betrayed Jesus to the Sanhedrin in the Garden of Gethsemane by kissing him and addressing him as "rabbi" to reveal his identity to the crowd who had come to arrest him. His name is often used synonymously with betrayal or treason. Judas's epithet Iscariot most likely means he came from the village of Kerioth, but this explanation is not universally accepted and many other possibilities have been suggested.
  The Gospel of Mark, the earliest gospel, gives no motive for Judas's betrayal, but does present Jesus predicting it at the Last Supper, an event also described in all the later gospels. The Gospel of Matthew 26:15 states that Judas committed the betrayal in exchange for thirty pieces of silver. The Gospel of Luke 22:3 and the Gospel of John 13:27 suggest that he was possessed by Satan. According to Matthew 27:1–10, after learning that Jesus was to be crucified, Judas attempted to return the money he had been paid for his betrayal to the chief priests and committed suicide by hanging.
context_section_description: Although the canonical gospels frequently disagree on the names of some of the minor apostles, all four of them list Judas Iscariot as one of them. The Synoptic Gospels state that Jesus sent out "the twelve" (including Judas) with power over unclean spirits and with a ministry of preaching and healing: Judas clearly played an active part in this apostolic ministry alongside the other eleven. However, in John's Gospel, Judas's outlook was differentiated—many of Jesus' disciples abandoned him because of the difficulty of accepting his teachings, and Jesus asked the twelve if they would also leave him. Simon Peter spoke for the twelve: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life," but Jesus observed then that despite the fact that he himself had chosen the twelve, one of them (unnamed by Jesus, but identified by the narrator) was "a devil" who would betray him.
  One of the best-attested and most reliable statements made by Jesus in the gospels comes from the Gospel of Matthew 19:28, in which Jesus tells his apostles: "in the new world, when the Son of Man shall sit on his glorious throne, you will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel." New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman concludes, "This is not a tradition that was likely to have been made up by a Christian later, after Jesus's death—since one of these twelve had abandoned his cause and betrayed him. No one thought that Judas Iscariot would be seated on a glorious throne in the Kingdom of God. That saying, therefore appears to go back to Jesus, and indicates, then, that he had twelve close disciples, whom he predicted would reign in the coming Kingdom."
  Matthew directly states that Judas betrayed Jesus for a bribe of "thirty pieces of silver" by identifying him with a kiss—"the kiss of Judas"—to arresting soldiers of the High Priest Caiaphas, who then turned Jesus over to Pontius Pilate's soldiers.
  Mark's Gospel states that the chief priests were looking for a way to arrest Jesus. They decided not to do so during the feast [of the Passover], since they were afraid that people would riot; instead, they chose the night before the feast to arrest him. According to Luke's account, Satan entered Judas at this time.
  According to the account in the Gospel of John, Judas carried the disciples' money bag or box (Greek: γλωσσόκομον, glōssokomon), but John's Gospel makes no mention of the thirty pieces of silver as a fee for betrayal. The evangelist comments in John 12:5–6 that Judas spoke fine words about giving money to the poor, but the reality was "not that he cared for the poor, but [that] he was a thief, and had the money box; and he used to take what was put in it." However, in John 13:27–30, when Judas left the gathering of Jesus and his disciples with betrayal in mind, some [of the disciples] thought that Judas might have been leaving to buy supplies or on a charitable errand.
  Ehrman argues that Judas's betrayal "is about as historically certain as anything else in the tradition", pointing out that the betrayal is independently attested in the Gospel of Mark, in the Gospel of John, and in the Book of Acts. Ehrman also contends that it is highly unlikely that early Christians would have made the story of Judas's betrayal up, since it reflects poorly on Jesus's judgement in choosing him as an apostle. Nonetheless, Ehrman argues that what Judas actually told the authorities was not Jesus's location, but rather Jesus's secret teaching that he was the Messiah. This, he holds, explains why the authorities did not try to arrest Jesus prior to Judas's betrayal. John P. Meier sums up the historical consensus, stating, "We only know two basic facts about [Judas]: (1) Jesus chose him as one of the Twelve, and (2) he handed over Jesus to the Jerusalem authorities, thus precipitating Jesus' execution."
caption: A 16th century fresco depicting Judas being paid the 30 pieces of silver
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