Gospels cast Judas as traitor; one Gnostic text casts him as insider
Judas Iscariot appears in all four canonical Gospels as one of the Twelve who handed Jesus over in Gethsemane. Mark and Matthew mention payment—Matthew names thirty silver pieces—while Luke and John speak of Satanic influence. The Gnostic Gospel of Judas instead frames his act as obedience to Jesus’s own instruction.
The canonical scene is intimate: in Gethsemane Judas greets Jesus with a kiss and the word master, marking him out for the arresting crowd sent by the Sanhedrin. All four Gospels have Jesus foretell the betrayal at the Last Supper. Christian theology treats the handover as the step that led to crucifixion and resurrection, which makes Judas both essential to the story and a byword for treachery ever since.
His end is told two ways. In Matthew, a remorseful Judas tries to give the money back to the chief priests and hangs himself; they spend it on a burial ground for strangers, the Field of Blood. Acts has Peter say Judas bought the field himself and died when he fell and burst open. Matthias later took his place among the Twelve.
The Gospel of Judas, a Gnostic work Irenaeus condemned as heresy around 180 AD, recasts him as the one disciple who grasped that the creator god of the Old Testament differs from a higher, unknowable God, and who acted on Jesus's own orders. From the Middle Ages onward, by contrast, Judas was often made a symbol of the Jewish people and used to justify Christian antisemitism.
Most secular historians accept that he existed, but not all. Paul's earliest reference to the night Jesus was handed over names no one, and the Greek verb could even mean God giving Jesus up. Hyam Maccoby in 2006 and John Shelby Spong in 2009 argued the figure was built as an attack on Judaeans, noting that Mark first introduces him in the early 70s. Most scholars answer that Judas was an extremely common Jewish name and that several other New Testament Judases, including Jesus's brother Jude, appear in a good light.
Source: Judas Iscariot
