Judas (Judah) Iscariot (died c. 30 ce) was one of the Twelve Apostles, notorious for betraying Jesus. Judas’s surname is more probably a corruption of the Latin sicarius (“murderer” or “assassin”) than an indication of family origin, suggesting that he would have belonged to the Sicarii, the most radical Jewish group, some of whom were terrorists. Other than his apostleship, his betrayal, and his death, little else is revealed about Judas in the Gospels. Always the last on the list of the Apostles, he was their treasurer. John 12:6 introduces Judas’s thievery by saying, “as he had the money box he used to take what was put into it.”
The 2nd-century apocryphal Gospel of Judas, a gnostic text written in Greek, depicts him as a collaborator and close confidant of Jesus. According to the gospel—a Coptic translation from circa 300 was discovered in the 1970s and published in 2006—Judas was the only apostle who understood Jesus’ message. In the account of the gospel, during the celebration of Passover, Jesus takes Judas aside and reveals secret knowledge about God and creation to him, declaring that Judas is greater than the other Apostles. Jesus seems to instruct Judas to report him to the authorities, so that Jesus’ spiritual self may escape from the material body in which it is trapped.
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Jesus and Judah
The gospel writers typological narratives after the Jewish revolt | Judah of Sicarri and Barabbas the rebel (assassins, rebels, bandits, thieves) Jesus in his last days is surrounded by this contrast including those crucified with him.
Ideal types simplify a complex reality
The gospel writers have the crowd choose the ideal rebel type (Barabbas) contrasting their internationalist gentile interpretation of Yeshua. The crowd chooses the rebellion and the betrayer is sicarri. The influential target audience of the gospel writers are primarily government administrators (tax collectors) and soldiers (including roman centurions).
The Gospel of Judas is the most recently discovered Gospel to be published, and is arguably the most important and intriguing Christian text to appear since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library in 1945. Details of the discovery and the mishandling of the manuscript by antiquities dealers are provided in the exhaustive account of Herb Krosney. The manuscript containing the Gospel preserves three other gnostic works as well: the “Letter of Peter to Philip,” known in a slightly different version from the findings at Nag Hammadi; the “(First) Apocalypse of James,” also known from Nag Hammadi; and a treatise entitled the “Book of Allogenes,” unrelated to the Nag Hammadi treatise also called “Allogenes” (= the Stranger). All four texts are in Coptic, but they are clearly translations of Greek originals. The manuscript was discovered by peasants rummaging through a burial cave in the Al Minya province of Egypt in 1978; but its existence was not known to the scholarly world at large until the Swiss Coptologist Rudolf Kasser announced its discovery and pending publication at the Eighth International Conference of Coptic Studies in Paris, in July 2004.
Bart Ehrman
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