Theopedia

Judas Iscariot

Judas Iscariot was one of the twelve disciples Jesus chose (Matt. 10:2-4; Mark 3:16-19; Luke 6:14-16) and the one who betrayed him to the Jewish authorities for thirty pieces of silver (Matt. 26:14-16). The surname distinguishes him from another of the Twelve, Judas the son of James (Luke 6:16). His betrayal, and his death immediately after it, are recorded in all four Gospels and in Acts.

Life

Judas carried the disciples’ common money box (John 12:6; 13:29), a position of trust that John’s Gospel says he abused, calling him “a thief” who used to help himself to what was put into it (John 12:6, ESV). Some months before the betrayal, when many of Jesus’s followers turned back over his hard teaching, Jesus told the Twelve, “Did I not choose you, the twelve? And yet one of you is a devil,” identifying him as “Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was going to betray him” (John 6:70-71, ESV).

At the Last Supper Jesus told the disciples that one of them would betray him, and after Judas left to carry it out, said of him that “it would have been better for that man if he had not been born” (Matt. 26:20-25; Mark 14:17-21, ESV). Judas had already agreed with the chief priests to hand Jesus over for thirty pieces of silver (Matt. 26:14-16; Mark 14:10-11; Luke 22:3-6), and he identified Jesus to the arresting party with a kiss in the garden of Gethsemane (Matt. 26:47-49; Mark 14:43-46; Luke 22:47-48).

The Gospels and Acts give two accounts of Judas’s own death. Matthew reports that, after Jesus was condemned, Judas returned the silver to the chief priests in remorse and hanged himself, and that the priests used the money to buy a field, “the Field of Blood,” to bury foreigners in (Matt. 27:3-10). Acts reports that Judas himself used the reward of his wickedness to acquire a field, where he fell headlong and burst open, and that the place became known, in the language of the residents of Jerusalem, as Akeldama, “Field of Blood” (Acts 1:16-19). His place among the Twelve was filled by Matthias, chosen by lot (Acts 1:20-26).

Judas in Reformed Theology

Providence and the betrayal

Reformed theology has treated the betrayal itself as a case study in how God’s providence works through, without authoring, a sinful human act. John Gill traces the betrayal to the same providential pattern he finds throughout Scripture, in which God permits Satan to work through a human agent for an end God himself has determined:

“The same malicious spirit put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot to betray his Lord, as was foretold; whereby the crucifixion of Christ, according to the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, was effected; and by that the redemption and salvation of men.”1

Fulfillment of messianic prophecy

The betrayal price also functions in Reformed systematic theology as evidence that Christ’s suffering was foretold in the Old Testament. Charles Hodge reads Zechariah’s prophecy of a rejected shepherd-king as pointing to exactly this event: the Messiah “represented as a shepherd who makes a last attempt to gather his flock” would be “rejected by those whom He came to save, and sold for thirty pieces of silver.”2 Benedict Pictet likewise lists the thirty pieces of silver, alongside the vinegar and gall offered Christ on the cross and the division of his garments, among the “plain and well known prophecies concerning Christ” fulfilled in the passion narrative.3

A test case for the perseverance of the saints

Because Judas was numbered among the Twelve and shared their ministry, Reformed theologians have used his case to answer the objection that a true believer can lose salvation. James Petigru Boyce treats it as the leading example:

“The case of Judas is the most prominent. It would seem more nearly to correspond, than any other, with the privileges referred to in Heb. 6:4, 5, and yet Christ proclaimed his condition, as not that of a Christian, about a year before his betrayal… We need no better proof that this man, in the betraying of our Lord, did not fall from a state of grace and salvation into the perdition to which he was doomed.”4

John Gill reaches the same conclusion by close attention to Christ’s own prayer that the Father would keep those given to him, “and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition” (John 17:12). Gill argues the “loss” in view cannot be Judas’s later, temporal death, since at the time Christ prayed those words Judas had not yet betrayed him or died:

“Judas was not, at this time, lost in such sense; he had not yet betrayed Christ, and it was after his condemnation that he went and destroyed himself.”5

On this reading, Judas was never among those the Father had truly given the Son to keep; his eventual ruin is not a believer’s fall but the unmasking of a profession that was never genuine.

Common gifts without saving grace

Judas’s place among the Twelve, preaching and working in Christ’s name, also serves Reformed theology as a warning against equating spiritual gifts with grace. Gill uses him as the standing example that even extraordinary, apostolic gifts can exist without regeneration:

“Nor are ‘gifts’, ordinary or extraordinary, sanctifying grace; Judas Iscariot, no doubt, had both, the ordinary gifts of a preacher, and the extraordinary gifts of an apostle, and yet not a holy man.”6

The Gospel of Judas and the Canon

Among the Gnostic writings the early church did not receive as Scripture was a gospel bearing Judas’s own name. Ronald Heine places it among several Gnostic gospels that broke sharply with the church’s received account of Jesus: “Some of the Gospels used by the gnostics said nothing about Jesus’s death and resurrection; some denied that he had had a physical body; one even made Judas a hero rather than a villain in his betrayal of Jesus.”7

Its content aside, a work claiming Judas’s own name could never have been received into the New Testament canon on the same grounds that excluded the other Gnostic gospels. As Michael Kruger puts it, the early church’s recognition of Scripture rested on a document’s apostolic origin as much as its doctrine: “books from Judas or Pilate or Herod, regardless of their content, would not be considered canonical.”8

Related Doctrines

References

  1. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book III, chap. 4. ↩

  2. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), chap. 7, “The Divinity of Christ,” 483-522. ↩

  3. Benedict Pictet, Christian Theology, trans. Frederick Reyroux (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845), book VI, 219-288. ↩

  4. James Petigru Boyce, “Chapter XXXVIII. Final Perseverance of the Saints,” in Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 425-436. ↩

  5. Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book VI, chap. 15. ↩

  6. Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book VI, chap. 14. ↩

  7. Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 2, “Christian Scripture,” 9-23. ↩

  8. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 3, “My Sheep Hear My Voice.” ↩