Everyone has their favorite and the options are well known to anyone who has put the least work into looking into the matter. Modern scholars have come up with other explanations that I don’t need to go into here. All four Gospels account for the betrayal differently, and all four were probably just guessing. In John’s Gospel Judas is himself called a devil, and so here one might infer that he does his act of betrayal because he has some kind of inherent mean streak. Luke puts a different spin on the matter and indicates that Satan entered into Judas prior to the betrayal, so in this more theological account of his motives, the Devil made him do it. That’s explicitly what Matthew’s Gospel indicates, that Judas turned Jesus over out of greed. Mark, our earliest Gospel, does not speculate on Judas’s motives, but does indicate that after he turned Jesus over he was handsomely paid for it. If you can’t accurately describe my motives in writing this particular blog thread the way I have – and I can assure you, you don’t know my motives (and even if I *told* you, you couldn’t be sure! Who knows what I might say or why!) – then you can’t come close to knowing what might have motivated a virtually unknown figure whom you not only have never seen or heard, but about whom you are poorly informed from sources which themselves had no possible access to knowing Judas’s motives.Īnd so, the Gospels don’t actually help us much here. The reality is that any discussion of motive is almost entirely speculative.

The question of Judas’s motives for his act has intrigued Christians from the time before our earliest sources and continues to intrigue scholars today. In my previous post I indicated that there are several things we can say with relative certainly about the historical Judas Iscariot (and indicated why I think we can be pretty sure about all of them): he really existed, he was one of Jesus’ twelve disciples, he was therefore an apocalyptic Jew from Palestine, and he really did hand Jesus over to the authorities to be arrested.īut what is it exactly that Judas did that led to Jesus’ arrest, and why did he do it? Here we move from the grounds of relative historical certainty to issues of probability and speculation.

Trial of judas iscariot show