Judas, the betrayer of Jesus, surnamed Iscariot, most probably a native of Kerioth in the tribe of Judah, and, if so, the only southerner among the twelve disciples. He must at first at least have been fired with real faith and zeal, for there was no worldly reward to gain when he first left his old life to obey the call of the new prophet of Nazareth. He acted as steward to the company on their journeys, and John tells us that he was covetous and dishonest from the beginning. It was the temptation of money, according to Matthew and Mark, that made him betray his master to the chief priests for thirty pieces of silver. Luke gives the additional motive that Satan had entered into him. The Synoptics represent Jesus as conscious of the meditated treachery, which, moreover, was plainly foretold by himself, and even prophesied in the Old Testament; John makes Jesus himself hasten it forward (xiii. 27). Whatever sudden or long-premeditated temptation it was that turned the head of Judas, he had not wholly lost moral sentiment, for when he saw the awful consequences of his guilt he was filled with the remorseful horror of despair, and had the grace to go and hang himself. The two variant accounts of his end in Matthew (xxvii. 3-10) and Acts (i. 16-20) have this much in common, and moreover that the blood-money was exchanged for a piece of ground which bore before or after the ill-omened name of Aceldama, or the Field of Blood.
The mere desire for gold can hardly be accepted as a motive adequate enough for a crime so monstrous, which has made its perpetrator's name to all time a synonym for shameful treachery. Yet it is almost as hard to find it in the promptings of disappointed ambition, vindictive hatred, or revenge. Theophylact, the elder Lightfoot, Bahrdt, Niemeyer, and Schmidt sought to explain the treachery by a belief in the miraculous powers of Jesus, which would necessarily protect him from the consummation of any deed of violence. The ancient Gnostics, and Noack among moderns, credited Judas with a desire to bring about the redemptive death of Jesus and the consequent triumph of Christian truth. Again Paulus, Winer, Hase, G. Schollmeyer, and Whately believed that the worldly-minded and ambitious Judas had become impatient of the delay in the establishment of the earthly kingdom, and that he adopted his policy with a view to drive Jesus to action by forcing his hand. Keim's explanation is that the force of old associations may have overcome his wavering belief in the Messiahship of Jesus during the excitement of the festival, when a burning mental struggle burst out in his heart under the immediate influence of relatives ardently devoted, as he himself once was, to the old religion associated with the sanctuary of Israel. The old legal and pietistic prepossessions of his materialistic rather than spiritual temperament glowed up anew within his heart, and hurried him without deliberation to a course, the quick reaction from which was hopeless remorse, horror, and despair. Perhaps none of these explanations throw much light upon an enigma so dark as the motives that drove Judas to his fatal treachery, and it may be doubted if these motives were any less obscure and confused than the motives that sway the human heart usually are. Had his avarice been so deep-seated he would never have had any measure of the grace of the disciple, for surely Jesus must have seen the possibilities of good as well as evil in the young disciple whom he attached to himself. But, spite of outward and at first genuine enough enthusiasm, carnal selfishness was deeply rooted in his nature, and when the manifestation of Christ ceased to be attractive to him, as Neander says, it became repulsive, and more and more so every day. The immediate occasion which turned his last remnants of affection into violent hatred may well have been some sharp reproof, some faucied slight or estrangement that came suddenly, and hurried his hot heart to action which, when too late, he was bitterly to repent.
The treachery of Judas has given rise to a long series of psychological studies which are conveniently enumerated in Winer's Biblisches Realwörterbuch (3d ed. 1847-48). In Daub's Judas Ischarioth (1816-18) a short preliminary investigation of the crime opens up a discussion of evil in relation to good. See also the Lives of Jesus by Neander, Strauss, Renan, Noack, Hase, Keim, Farrar, and Edersheim; the essay by De Quincey, Stier's Words of the Lord Jesus, Tragedies by Elisa Schmidt (1852) and Dulk (1865); and Robert Buchanan's ballad, Judas Iscariot.