The REAL Reasons JUDAS Betrayed Jesus.

[AlltheRoses]

Judas Did NOT betray Jesus out of some misguided, noble belief and hope that, once arrested, Jesus would publicly and miraculously prove that he was messiah in front of the Sanhedrin and everyone else.

John 5 gives us the real reasons:
Judas had become a willful, practicing, unrepentant, habitual thief
against the Son of God himself (who had bestowed many miraculous powers upon
the 12 and upon Judas himself when he, Jesus, sent them out in two’s to evangelize).

The Friday before the Crucifixion, Mary anointed Jesus with expensive oil worth 300 silver pieces. This made the greedy Judas madder than hell, and as John TELLS US, Judas, using a PHONY PRETEXT of caring for the poor, whom he cared NOTHING about, as John indicates, griped about Jesus being anointed with this oil.
Jesus, knowing Judas’s real motive, raw greed, rebuked him gently in front of every one.
That was IT. Judas was livid. He wanted that money for himself. As John tells us,
he used to steal from the money box of Jesus and the other 11. REGULARLY.
Even though he himself had many supernatural powers which Jesus had bestowed upon him. He KNEW who he was turning against. IT was RIGHT AFTER THIS MILD REBUKE that Judas went to the Priests, whom he KNEW PLANNED TO MURDER JESUS, and ASKED THEM FOR MONEY to betray him to them. They paid him, he took it,
and then HE PERSONALLY led a mob armed with knives and clubs to Gethsemane to arrest Jesus and the other apostles. JESUS urged the armed mob to let the others go, NOT JUDAS. They COULD HAVE killed Jesus right then and there, in the Garden, and the other 11 too.

Satan had entered into Judas at the Last Supper.
After the Sanhedrin condemned Jesus to die, the Devil overwhelmed Judas with
guilt over the ENORMITY of his own malice, and Judas killed himself after throwing the money back into the temple. He did not follow through on his remorse by repenting. Instead, he killed himself.

I bring all this up because I am TIRED, really TIRED, of all these Jesus movies and modern theologians (even orthodox ones) trying to overly-humanize JUDAS by saying that he had noble but misguided motives for betraying Jesus.
HE DID NOT. John tells us why he did it. He was a THIEF, a habitual thief, against the Son of God Himself, Jesus rebuked him, making him livid with rage, and that anger and spite led to the betrayal, for which he had the gall to ask the Priests to pay him in advance to arrange. Please, no more of these “deep down really nice” Judas Iscariot theories. Well-intentioned by some, I’m sure, but totally, terribly, wrong.

Well, you certainly won’t get a Judas was “so noble” speech from me. I always saw his betrayal of Jesus and his surrendering to despair rather than repenting for his betrayal as the epitome of human frailty. He betrayed Jesus for the selfish reason of wanting more money, and he killed himself rather than seek a reconciliation with God, even though we know from Peter’s experience that Jesus will forgive even betrayal. Judas’ greatest sin wasn’t betraying Jesus, it was despair (the belief that God couldn’t forgive his crime) and self-slaughter. Judas’ actions display everything ignoble in humanity, rather than everything noble. He is a clear example of everything a Christian should take care not to be.

 

[AlltheRoses]

I’m tired of people trying to put a positive spin on the High Priesthood. How many times have you heard “The Romans killed Jesus, not the Jews.”

Well, I beg to differ.

See, to be honest, I never understood this whole concern with whether it was the Romans or the Jews who killed Jesus. It always seemed to me that, since Jesus died so that everybody’s sins could be forgiven, we all put Him on that cross where He shed His blood for our sake. Every time we sin we betray Him and drive a nail into His body. Jesus died for us all, and so we are all responsible.

I see no point in apportioning certain amounts of blame to various parties (debating whether the Romans, the Jewish priests, or Judas were most at fault for Jesus’ execution), especially since, historically, that has led to some really nasty behavior and bigotry toward Jewish people. I think Jesus would not want His death, meant to bring hope and salvation, to become a cause for people to hate and blame one another. That’s just my two cents, however.

 

[Jaypeeto4]

Okay,
my thread was intended to point out that the “Noble, Well-Intentioned Judas Iscariot” theories are horribly wrong.

It has turned into a discussion of whether the Jews, as a people, are or were
a bunch of Christ-Killers.
Let me state plainly: I DO NOT BELIEVE ANY SUCH THING ABOUT
THE JEWISH PEOPLE IN GENERAL.

That stated, both the Jewish Scriptures (the Tanakh, or as we call them, the
“old testament,”) are FULL of instances of mass numbers of the Jewish people apostasizing from God and the Jewish faith and into idolatry, EVEN THE PRIESTS of the temple themselves, the Jewish Kings, and nearly the entire populace of the Holy Land.
The prophets, though begging the people to repent constantly,
are full of raging condemnations of the horrendously unfaithful behavior, many times,
of the Temple Priests and the Kings and the people at large, too.
They were constantly falling into idolatry, even of the grisliest sorts, including practicing child sacrifice to Molech, the canaanite deity. Most notoriously, King Manasseh, son of righteous King Hezekiah, led the ENTIRE land of Judea and all of Jerusalem into this particularly horrific form of pagan idolatry, and practiced it himself, killing his own little children in the fires of Molech, and murdering many thousands of innocent people from one end of Jerusalem to the other.
An ancient Jewish tradition even has it that MANASSEH had the Prophet Isaiah
SAWED IN HALF to shut him up.
Even though Manasseh repented, and God restored him not only to his fortunes, but to the very Davidic Throne itself, the nation NEVER recovered from the idolatry and wickedness that Manasseh led them into, and the LORD sent the Babylonian armies in in 587/586 B.C. after having prophet after holy prophet after holy prophet warn the people to REPENT, AND warned King Zedekiah, repeatedly, NOT to rebel against the Babylonian occupiers or else Jerusalem would be destroyed to it’s foundations. Zedekiah, of course, did not pay attention to the prophets of the LORD. And we all know what happened.
Nebuchadnezzar sent in his thuggish troops, Jerusalem was destroyed, and the holy Temple burnt and razed to the ground.

JESUS told the people that the generation in which he was living, was a very WICKED and GODLESS generation. He said this many times, and even warned of the coming destruction of Jerusalem by saying that the blood of all the prophets that had ever before been spilled, would come crashing down upon the heads of the people of THAT generation.
All nations, including ancient Israel, go through periods of spiritual GREATNESS and spiritual DECLINE. In 30 A.D. (C.E. if you prefer), Jesus said Israel was in great spiritual decline. The Temple Priests of this period were NOT people who loved the Tanakh. They were Sadduccees. They accepted ONLY the Torah as from God, nothing else, AND they were from VERY RICH BLUE-BLOOD families AND were APPOINTED to their Temple Offices BY the occupying pagan Roman authorities. I.e., these men were not devout Jews but pawns in the pocket of Rome. As for the various King Herods, the comment above is VERY mistaken in calling Herod Antipas, “the Jewish King Herod…”----
The HERODs were NOT, NOT, NOT JEWS. They were Idumeans, EDOMITES, descendants ultimately of ESAU, the unspiritual, rival brother of Isaac’s son JACOB (ISRAEL). To have an Idumean, a Herod, on the THRONE OF DAVID in Jerusalem, must have been (understandably!!!) particularly GALLING to the Jewish people. Nonetheless, though the Herods too were in the pocket of, and appointed BY, ROME, the Jewish people tolerated them because Herod “the so-called GREAT” had, after all, enlarged and beautified the Second Temple. But make no mistake: the Kings HEROD were NOT JEWS. NOT at ALL.
As for the Pharisees, who with the Sadduccees made up the Sanhedrin, their story is particularly sad. THEY started out, around the time of the Maccabees or before, as a group of very holy Jewish men, deeply devoted to prayer and scripture and the torah and devoted to purifying Judaism from the idolatrous and sodomite-influenced paganism of the Greek empire and later, too, of Antiochus the tyrant and his school of followers, emulators, and admirers. The Pharisees started out as TRULY GREAT Jewish reformers, but by the time of Christ had become overly legalistic people concerned more with outward appearances than interior realities.
THAT is not an indictment of Judaism alone, no!! : this kind of thing, “going through the motions” and becoming VERY self-righteous happens all the time, including in our own Catholic Church, and THAT, many times throughout our history.
Some Catholic apologists, for example, state boldly that “the Catholic Church never ever had any heretics killed.” Wow. That’s like those Jews who say that NO Jews were in any way responsible for the Romans killing Jesus.
NO, the Catholic church never, itself, lit the fire pyres and set the heretics on fire on their stakes. But as is well documented in many archives of many European countries, MANY Catholic bishops STRONGLY URGED the governments to burn recalcitrant heretics at the stake, JUST AS the leaders of the Sanhedrin URGED and INSISTED that Pilate hand Christ over to the soldiers to be crucified.
The bishops, some of them, of our church, are NOT innocent of having insistently encouraged these things. That doesn’t mean that “catholics go around burning heretics” any more than the Sanhedrin’s actions in 33 AD mean in any way that “Jews are a bunch of Christ killers”. BOTH STATEMENTS are GROSSLY OVER-REACHING.

 

[Jaypeeto4]

**Well, you certainly won’t get a Judas was “so noble” speech from me. I always saw his betrayal of Jesus and his surrendering to despair rather than repenting for his betrayal as the epitome of human frailty. He betrayed Jesus for the selfish reason of wanting more money, **

Howdy !! I certainly agree with what you have said (in bold) above.
I was also making the observation, however, that in addition to greed,
Judas betrayed Jesus out of SPITE as well, having been STUNG by Jesus’s
rebuke of his feigned “love for the poor” when he, Judas, objected to Mary using
COSTLY ointments to anoint Jesus. i.e. this “betrayal” was also an act of revenge.
It was right after the rebuke that he SOUGHT OUT the high priests. THEY didn’t even
seek out him or any other apostle to betray Jesus to them. It was JUDAS’s own idea, the whole thing. They took advantage of it, but HE instigated the whole thing, KNOWING that they and the Herodians wanted Jesus dead, and Jesus Himself had warned him and the other apostles many times that “the Son of Man is to be handed over to men and they will kill him and on the third day, he will rise again.” At the Last Supper, Jesus gave a final warning to Judas: “the Son of Man is going to be betrayed, BUT WOE TO THAT MAN THROUGH WHOM he is betrayed, it would be better for him if he had never been born.” Jesus knew the abjectly malicious motives behind this coming handing-over.
Yes, he later told Judas, “do quickly what you have to do,” but that was out of resignation, not a genuine wish for Judas to commit such a heinous sin of such deliberate cruel malice.

One person thougtfully commented above that the “reason” Judas betrayed Jesus was that he didn’t believe that Jesus would actually give himself to us as the Eucharist.
Nah. I see the point being made, but that’s not the reason really.
However, it IS TRUE, as the poster notes, that Judas DID NOT BELIEVE Jesus’s promise of the Eucharist, and that Jesus always knew which one of the twelve would betray him.
It’s funny that Judas could possess supernatural powers, which he did, which HE KNEW that JESUS HIMSELF HAD bestowed upon him, and yet still not believe His promise of the Eucharist!!

 

[patrick457]

My two cents.

I agree that some of the theorized reason/s as to why Judas acted as the middleman (paradidomi, ‘to hand over’ or ‘to deliver up’ is the word used in the Gospels for Judas ‘betraying’ Jesus: Jesus is handed over by Judas to the chief priests, who hand Him over to Pilate, who in turn hand Him over to the soldiers to be crucified - the Passion narrative is one huge chain of handing-overs ) are overly cliched and done to death.

If you ask me, personally it could be as simple as cowardice and greed on Judas’ part: he realized that Jesus was a marked man and so thought to get out of any trouble while he still could, all the while making a profit out of it - hey, as Jaypeeto points out, Judas was already stealing from the common purse. So no, I don’t see Judas as ‘noble’ either: if anything, he’s really humanity at its worst.

As an aside, I did see an interpretation of Judas which shows him as a wealthy Judaean merchant (as opposed to Jesus other peasant disciples, who are all from the Galilee) and a mole for the high priests who decided to earn a few extra bucks by selling Jesus off because he was tired of Jesus’ rambling and all the other disciples having their heads in the clouds, and partly also to slyly test Jesus’ predictions of His death and resurrection.

Sometimes I wonder, perhaps Judas was like The Silmarillion’s Maeglin. (For those who don’t know, Maeglin was an Elf-lord of the hidden city of Gondolin, who loved mining. He once defied Turgon the king’s order to stay within the mountains and mined further and further into the ground: as a result, he was captured by Orcs and brought to Angband before Morgoth the fallen Vala (Tolkien’s version of Satan, really), where he was put into torture. It was only after Morgoth promised him both Gondolin and Turgon’s daughter Idril - whom Maeglin lusted after - in return for the location of the hidden city, that he agreed to reveal where Gondolin was, resulting in its downfall: Maeglin is unique in that he is the only Elf to have willingly served Morgoth.) But that’s just me.

 

[patrick457]

In 30 A.D. (C.E. if you prefer), Jesus said Israel was in great spiritual decline. The Temple Priests of this period were NOT people who loved the Tanakh. They were Sadduccees. They accepted ONLY the Torah as from God, nothing else, AND they were from VERY RICH BLUE-BLOOD families AND were APPOINTED to their Temple Offices BY the occupying pagan Roman authorities. I.e., these men were not devout Jews but pawns in the pocket of Rome.

Mostly right in the target. Though I should point out that while the “Sadducees accept only the Torah” is popular wisdom nowadays, we only begin to hear of this from some Church Fathers such as Origen and St. Jerome, and their testimony is quite suspect at this point since they seem to have confused the then-extinct Sadducees with the Samaritans. Josephus’ (our sole contemporary source) statement about the Pharisees and Sadducees in Antiquities 13.297 is also invoked, but in reality the quote is more concerned with Sadducean rejection of Pharisaic traditions.

περὶ μέντοι τούτων αὖθις ἐροῦμεν. νῦν δὲ δηλῶσαι βούλομαι, ὅτι νόμιμά τινα παρέδοσαν τῷ δήμῳ οἱ Φαρισαῖοι ἐκ πατέρων διαδοχῆς, ἅπερ οὐκ ἀναγέγραπται ἐν τοῖς Μωυσέως νόμοις, καὶ διὰ τοῦτο ταῦτα τὸ Σαδδουκαίων γένος ἐκβάλλει, λέγον ἐκεῖνα δεῖν ἡγεῖσθαι νόμιμα τὰ γεγραμμένα, τὰ δ᾽ ἐκ παραδόσεως τῶν πατέρων μὴ τηρεῖν.

What I would now explain is this, that the Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses; and for that reason it is that the Sadducees reject them, and say that we are to esteem those observances to be obligatory which are in the written word, but are not to observe what are derived from the tradition of our forefathers.

It doesn’t say anything about canons of Scripture, but Sadducees rejecting Pharisaic traditions.

As for the various King Herods, the comment above is VERY mistaken in calling Herod Antipas, “the Jewish King Herod…”----
The HERODs were NOT, NOT, NOT JEWS. They were Idumeans, EDOMITES, descendants ultimately of ESAU, the unspiritual, rival brother of Isaac’s son JACOB (ISRAEL).

Yes. The Herods aren’t biological Jews in origin (Herod’s father Antipater was an Idumaean and his mother was a Nabataean named Cypros), but were converts to Judaism. By that time Herod the Great was around, the Idumaeans and Nabataeans were Jews by religion, ever since the Hasmoneans conquered their territory and forced them to adopt Jewish practices and beliefs. So at best, the Herods’ critics would have probably seen many of the family as *half-*Jews, which isn’t enough. (Herod Agrippa is an exception to this, since he had Jewish blood through his mother, Antipas’ second wife Mariamme the Hasmonean.)

Herod doesn’t seem to have been a very nice man personally, but he was certainly a very able politician. And like many of our politicians today, he was a Jew when it suited him to be one. But who cares? The people love it, whatever makes them happy. You get the drift.

Oh, and while we’re at it, Herod the Great and Herod Agrippa are really the only Herods who officially held the title of ‘King’. Antipas, despite Mark calling him a ‘king’, is, along with his brothers Archelaus and Philip, really a tetrarch, ruler of a fourth (Luke gets this detail right; Matthew also does so at first in his account of John the Baptist’s death, but for some reason he begins to call him king like Mark halfway down the story).

Upon Herod the Great’s death, his kingdom was divided among his three sons: Archelaus son of Herod and Malthace the Samaritan receiving the lion’s share of the portion, namely the area of Judaea, Edom and Samaria, while Philip (the Tetrarch, aka (Herod) Philip II), Herod’s son with his fifth wife Cleopatra of Jerusalem, and Antipas, Archelaus’ full brother, respectively getting the northeast portion of the kingdom and the Galilee and Peraea. Archelaus eventually got into trouble because of his excessive cruelty towards his subjects and so in AD 6 his territory was reorganized into the Province of Judaea, with a prefect as its head, while Antipas and Philip continued ruling their tetrarchies.

 

[patrick457]

As for the Pharisees, who with the Sadduccees made up the Sanhedrin, their story is particularly sad. THEY started out, around the time of the Maccabees or before, as a group of very holy Jewish men, deeply devoted to prayer and scripture and the torah and devoted to purifying Judaism from the idolatrous and sodomite-influenced paganism of the Greek empire and later, too, of Antiochus the tyrant and his school of followers, emulators, and admirers. The Pharisees started out as TRULY GREAT Jewish reformers, but by the time of Christ had become overly legalistic people concerned more with outward appearances than interior realities.

“Reformers.” Yes. In fact, it seems now that the trend is to view the Pharisees as the religious liberals (and political conservatives) at the time, with the Sadducees being the traditionalists (and political left-wingers) of a sort.

While the Sadducees tried to keep the old ways fossilized and seem to have had a narrow outlook: laying a huge stress on the Temple, its sacrifices and the privileged position of the priesthood (many of them were priests and men of power after all), the Pharisees apparently had a broader viewpoint: they were of the opinion that the Jewish people as a whole, and not just a select few, are “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” just as Scripture says, and so all Jews, even the humblest one, must therefore be like priests and keep themselves pure, even in daily life. (Don’t get started on the Essenes: they apparently think that only those who belong in their community are the “sons of light,” the ones who will triumph, while “the sons of darkness,” aka everybody else gets to be destroyed in the final eschatological battle. And they seem to be even more legalistic than a stereotypical Pharisee is. )

THAT is not an indictment of Judaism alone, no!! : this kind of thing, “going through the motions” and becoming VERY self-righteous happens all the time, including in our own Catholic Church, and THAT, many times throughout our history.
Some Catholic apologists, for example, state boldly that “the Catholic Church never ever had any heretics killed.” Wow. That’s like those Jews who say that NO Jews were in any way responsible for the Romans killing Jesus.
NO, the Catholic church never, itself, lit the fire pyres and set the heretics on fire on their stakes. But as is well documented in many archives of many European countries, MANY Catholic bishops STRONGLY URGED the governments to burn recalcitrant heretics at the stake, JUST AS the leaders of the Sanhedrin URGED and INSISTED that Pilate hand Christ over to the soldiers to be crucified.
The bishops, some of them, of our church, are NOT innocent of having insistently encouraged these things. That doesn’t mean that “catholics go around burning heretics” any more than the Sanhedrin’s actions in 33 AD mean in any way that “Jews are a bunch of Christ killers”. BOTH STATEMENTS are GROSSLY OVER-REACHING.

Amen.

 

[patrick457]

This thread is in danger of being derailed by the “Jews killed Jesus” line. Pope Benedict in his latest book Jesus of Nazareth does an excellent job of explaining that “the Jews” being referred to in the NT, were those Jerusalem Jews who were either jaded, corrupt or unfamiliar with Jesus, and may have been incensed by a Galilean making the preposterous claims they heard Jesus was. Meanwhile Jesus comes into Jerusalem surrounded by Jews from all of Judea, Galilee and the surrounding countryside, full of love and admiration of Jesus. These were the ones waving palms and throwing their cloaks on the ground where Jesus was to pass. These Jews had nothing to do with the plotting Jews of the Temple and Jerusalem partisans like the Pharisees and Herodians.

True. If you’ve ever read all four Gospels in between the lines, you’ll notice that there seems to be an implication that Jesus is well-known and popular in His native region (where the Synoptics focus a good chunk of their narrative), but not so much in Judaea - at least if John’s Gospel is to be believed. I guess the Judaeans that Jesus encountered happened to have have some form of regional discrimination toward ‘strangers’.

The word Ioudaioi (‘Judaeans’, ‘Jews’) in the 1st century did not have the same connotations we now associate with the word ‘Jews’. While there are times when the word is used to refer to the Jewish people in general, there are also instances where this is used to refer to a specific group.

In the Gospel of John, for example - which has the most numerous instances of the word within the New Testament - the word does not always have the same meaning. For example, in one place (7:1-18), it seems to refer to ‘Judaeans’ (i.e. people who are from the Roman region of Iudaea, as opposed to, say, the Galilee or Samaria), or a group hailing from it, as Jesus remained in Galilee because of the Ioudaioi in Judaea. In another place (9:22), it means a subgroup of Judaism, specifically the synagogue leadership (or a faction within it). In yet another, Ioudaioi is used for good friends of Mary and Martha who came at the death of Lazarus and who eventually become believers (11:31, 33, 45) - here we can see that the term is not totally used in a negative manner. In some instances Ioudaioi is used alternatively with the Temple priesthood and the Pharisees, indicating an identification between the word and these leaders or the specific groups they are affiliated with (the Sadducean and Pharisaic parties, for example).

Thus, the meaning of Ioudaioi within the Fourth Gospel is not uniform. It is not an inclusive term as “Jews” is in our common usage: while at times it can have a general, ethnic meaning, many usages of the word in the New Testament and especially in John seem to have a more restricted reference: to people or groups/faction who live, come from, or are based within Iudaea Province, some of whom (but not all) are antagonistic to Jesus and the movement He started.

 

[debraran]

Anyone who throws the money away (it had no meaning to him) and killed himself, was mentally ill at the time and full of despair. Our church doesn’t judge suicide the way it did many years ago, thankfully, because many people had to lie about how a relative died or lived with the despair of thinking the person went straight to hell. There is always hope and judging actions from mental reasons is in God’s hands. I am still trying in subtle ways to get a coworker back to the church after how she was treated 30 years ago when her husband, full of despair killed himself.

Pope John Paul ll
Even when Jesus says of Judas, the traitor, “It would be better for that man if he had never been born” (Mt 26:24), His words do not allude for certain to eternal damnation

 

[NewEnglandPriest]

I don’t think there’s any way to know for sure the motivation behind Judas’ betrayal. I’ve always liked the theory that Judas thought of Jesus as a revolutionary messiah and thus thought once Jesus was arrested by the Romans he’d begin their overthrow.

 

[Michael_Francis]

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