Judas Iscariot is the eternal villain of the Western imagination. He is the snake, the sellout. I grew up with the caricature: a man motivated by greed and possessed by Satan, who sold out the Son of God for cash money.
But there is a gap between the Judas of the pulpit and the Judas of the history books.
When you shed the layers of tradition you don’t really find a cartoon villain. You find a void. And into that void, early Christians poured their own theological arguments and anti-Jewish polemics.
I am not here to argue that Judas was innocent. I am arguing that the “monster” we know is a literary creation, not a historical one.
Let’s start with what probably actually happened.
Most mainstream historians, though certainly not all, agree that Judas likely did betray Jesus. They base this on the “criterion of embarrassment.”
The idea is this: the early church wouldn’t have invented a story that made them look this bad. Having one of Jesus’s own followers — of which he handpicked — in his inner circle turn on him is humiliating. It would suggest that Jesus was a bad judge of character or lacked foresight. If early Christians were inventing the entire story, they likely would have blamed a Roman, a Pharisee, or a random stranger.
However, some scholars offer a bit of pushback. They argue the betrayal story might have been invented to solve a narrative problem: How did the Romans catch Jesus if he was surrounded by crowds?
If Jesus was teaching openly in the Jerusalem Temple during the day, why did authorities need Judas to find him, anyway? The “secret arrest at night” scenario raises as many questions as it answers.
Whether historical fact or narrative device, the core tradition agrees:
A disciple turned him in.
But history doesn’t tell us why.
And that is where the myth-making begins.
The earliest Christian writings we have — the letters of Paul (50s CE) — are completely silent on Judas.
When Paul speaks of the Last Supper in 1 Corinthians, he simply says Jesus was “handed over”. In Paul’s theology, it is often God who hands Jesus over to death for the sake of the world.
Now, silence isn’t proof of absence. Paul wasn’t writing a biography. But it is worth noting that for the earliest writer of the New Testament, the who and the how of the betrayal mattered less than the theological why. The specific villainhood of Judas — the kiss, money, and the eventual suicide — wasn’t the focal point to the earliest version of the faith.
For Paul, there is no villain.
There is only the will of God and the death that saves.
When we get to the first Gospel, Mark (written around 70 CE), Judas appears, but he is blank.
He goes to the authorities.
They promise him money.
He betrays Jesus with a kiss.
Mark gives us zero motive: no greed, nor theology, nor backstory.
For a historian, this silence is loud. It suggests the earliest traditions knew that it happened, but clueless on the why.
It is only later (decades later) that the void gets filled. And it gets filled in through conflicting narratives, proving that by the 80s CE, nobody actually knew what happened to Judas.
Matthew (c. 85 CE) decides to color in the lines by referencing the Hebrew Bible. He introduces the “thirty pieces of silver,” a direct pull from Zechariah. He gives Judas a tragic end: Judas returns the money, declares Jesus innocent, and hangs himself. It is a suicide of regret and remorse.
Luke (in Acts 1:18) gives a very different account. The aforementioned remorse is not present. Judas keeps the money, buys a field, falls on his head, and his guts burst open. It is divine retribution, echoing the fate of villains in other Greek tragedy and Jewish folklore.
Later readers tried their best to harmonize these accounts — claiming the rope broke and he fell — but the texts themselves show no awareness of each other. Each author thought they were telling the definitive story.
The fact that the New Testament contains two irreconcilable deaths for its arch-villain shows their hand: the early church didn’t have the facts, so they constructed the myth.
Matthew also leans hard into the symbolism. Judas (whose name is connected to Judah/Jew) becomes a literary tool for the Jewish rejection of Jesus. The anti-Jewish rhetoric that would end up fueling centuries of Christian antisemitism begins to take root in Matthew's account.
By the time we get to the latest Gospels (Luke and John, 90s CE), the human being of Judas has vanished entirely.
Luke adds a supernatural element: “Satan entered into Judas.”
John adds a moral judgment: He calls Judas a thief who embezzled from the group fund.
We can see the trajectory clearly. Within a single generation, Judas evolves from a plot point (Paul/Mark) to a tragic figure (Matthew) to a demonic caricature (Luke/John).
The further we get from the actual event, the more specific, and evil, the story becomes.
By the time Judas becomes Satan-possessed, the symbolism is complete: the “Jew who rejected Christ” is now literally demonic.
While the storytellers were busy constructing a villain, the theologians were left trying to untie the logical knot this created.
For 2,000 years, thinkers from Augustine to Calvin wrestled with the paradox: If Jesus’s death was necessary for salvation, wasn’t Judas a necessary instrument?
They came up with answers — predestination, “felix culpa” (happy fault), the mystery of free will. But often, the theological answer was to push Judas further into the dark: he had to be evil so God could be good.
after the asterisk
When we strip away the “Satan” of Luke and the “Prophecy” of Matthew, we are left with a human being under political pressure.
Maybe he was a disillusioned revolutionary who wanted to force Jesus’s hand.
Maybe he was scared of the Roman crackdown and turned state’s evidence to save his own skin.
Maybe he was just a selfish man who wanted the money.
We don’t have to make him a hero to realize he wasn’t a monster.
He was likely just a person who broke.
Why does this matter?
Because the image of “Monster Judas” has done a ton of damage.
As long as Judas is a demon possessed by Satan, his betrayal is something other — a cosmic evil.
But if Judas was just a disappointed follower or a frightened man?
That’s uncomfortable.
That looks a lot like us.
But more importantly, the monster we created grew legs and took on a life of its own.
Judas Iscariot probably betrayed his friend. That is his burden to carry in history. But the monster — the demon-possessed, hook-nosed villain of medieval plays, the archetype of the treacherous Jew — that invention is ours.
And unlike Judas, we’re still living with what we created.