JUDAS ISCARIOT REHABILITATED

 

Judas Iscariot has been vilified and hated by the Christians and cursed for allegedly being the close friend and disciple of Jesus who handed him over to the Jews for arrest which led to his crucifixion.

 

JESUS BETRAYS JUDAS AND BETRAYED HIMSELF

 

During the last supper Jesus actually instructed Judas to hurry up and get him handed over. “Jesus said to him [Judas], What you are going to do, do more swiftly than you seem to intend and make quick work of it” (John 13:27). Judas was not a traitor for he was acting under Jesus’ own instructions.

 

Christians explain that this was sarcasm with a view to putting Judas off so Jesus did not mean it. He did mean it for there were more effective things that he could have said. We would have been told if he hadn’t meant it.

 

Others say that Judas was going to do it anyway and Jesus knew that so he did no wrong in telling Judas to do it. But he told him to do it fast which meant he wanted him to have no chance to change his mind. Jesus could have delayed him if he wanted.

 

Jesus betrayed Judas by telling him to sin and to do what would lead him to suicide. Jesus knew him well enough.

 

It is suicide to get yourself killed. Jesus betrayed himself by getting Judas to assist him in the wackiest and sickest ever suicide venture. Jesus would not reply to anything Pilate asked him during his trial for his life (Matthew 27:14) which is as good as admitting you are guilty. Most people would say he deserved to be killed when he did that. He was asking for death. It was suicide.

 

John 17:12 and 18:9 contradict each other. The first says Jesus lost Judas as a disciple to fulfill prophecy and the second says he lost none.  The same prophecy is used to say these contradictory things!

 

The gospels say the Jews had to be secretive about arresting and getting rid of Jesus out of the fear of the people and used Judas to get him quietly then they were getting rid of Jesus quietly. But the Bible says Jesus had a public trial before Pilate and was killed in public which completely contradicts the role of Judas in the Bible. If the Judas story is true there was no public death and if there was a public death there was no truth in the Judas story.

THE ARREST IN THE GARDEN

According to the gospels, following the last supper, Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane and his apostles slept around him. Judas came along with a cohort of soldiers to get him apprehended. Judas betrayed him with a kiss and Jesus was taken while the apostles were allowed to go free. None of this happened.

 

The gospels say that Jesus was good. He knew the soldiers were coming for they had torches with them and would have been noisy for there were a lot of them. His refusing to escape or hide up a tree makes him out to be suicidal which the Bible makes out to be a terrible sin. He told them they were doing wrong and he encouraged it by letting them walk all over him. If Jesus was virtuous then he was not arrested in the Garden. He was not betrayed. He did not need to die a horrible death. The Bible says it was optional so he could have just dropped dead in the street or died under the wheels of a carriage.

 

The gospels say that the authorities did not want to arrest Jesus at festival time for it was too dangerous because there were too many of his supporters in town (Matthew 26:4,5; Luke 22:6). If so, the arrest is a pack of lies. And this is proven by them having him arrested at that very time! If they wouldn’t and couldn’t arrest him at festival time then why did they do just that? Why didn’t they even try to hide the fact that they arrested him?

 

Why did they arrest the disciples as well and then let them go when Jesus asked them according to the John gospel? That makes no sense if they didn’t want the disciples giving out bad publicity and maybe rousing a crowd to demand the release of Jesus.
  

If the Jews didn’t want to arrest Jesus at festival time both because it would insult the people to have their idol apprehended during a feast of their religion and because Jerusalem would be full of his defenders then what did they and Judas wait until Passover time for? They couldn’t have picked a bigger time.

Jesus was arrested while the disciples were allowed to get away. He was arrested on political and religious charges. Nobody arrests the ringleader and lets those who colluded with him go. The assistants are worse than their leader for without them the leader is nothing. And the gospels say the reason Jesus was taken in the Garden was to prevent the public knowing in case there would be sedition but the disciples would tell. Secrecy and the desire to keep the capture low-key was the reason Judas had to betray Jesus at that particular time (Luke 22:2,6). The disciples would have been taken in for questioning and compelled to testify against him. They would have for Jesus had berated them earlier for their selfish attitude concerning him and told them they would let him down. The story is so absurd that one gets the impression that if this story originated with the apostles that they made it up to make it seem as if they had been there that night. But maybe it is just absurd for made up tales often fail to manage to cohere.

 

It is impossible to see why the gang had to be armed to the teeth to arrest a harmless prophet who thought he was a king in a quiet place.

 

In the original Greek, the band of men who came to take Jesus was called a cohort. Cohort was the Roman term for a group of at least six hundred soldiers (page 76, The Messianic Legacy). This huge number contradicts the assertion that they intended to take Jesus quietly for the large crowd would draw attention.

 

If Jesus had been so popular that secrecy was needed then they could have held a secret trial and jailed or executed him and said nothing and they would have.

 

Jesus reminded the gang that they never touched him in the Temple and were about to arrest him now meaning that they could have before and didn’t (Matthew 26:55). He is puzzled why they are bothering now and so are we! When they got him in the Temple and when they were so keen to get rid of him they could have discreetly kidnapped him and faked evidence that he had gone into seclusion or something for he had been known to go to the desert for long periods. There was no way a man claiming to be Christ and who was hated by the leaders would have been allowed his freedom. To suggest that Jesus was free in the Temple and even allowed in to teach proves that the gospels are lying. Surely this proves that there is no evidence for the arrest. It cancels the evidence. The arrest would have happened at the start of the ministry and not then. The men did not know Jesus when they needed Judas to identify him so he was not preaching in the Temple at all.

 

The men would have needed Judas to show them which man was Jesus if they knew Jesus like the apostles say. Could it be that the man in the Garden was a look-alike who had been put forward in a conspiracy to die in Jesus’ place? It looks like something was up.

 

So the Jews feared the people. What about Judas? Why didn’t he fear them?

 

Judas had to identify Jesus to the cohort by kissing him. But Judas could and would have done it discreetly for if they were worried about the crowds Judas would have been in big trouble if he were seen as Jesus’ betrayer.

 

Peter cut the ear off the High Priest’s servant, Malchus. What a strange thing for a man who panicked and ran off later to do. A man who Christians say was a coward. Peter would not have tried to take on a crowd of men. He would not have asked for trouble. He would have been arrested as well for it. If he was arrested then the story that he denied Jesus three times out of timidity is false. Why was Peter not jailed for assault? He would have been if the story were true.

 

There are so many incredible stories in the New Testament that you need very strong evidence to believe them. The Gospellers should have been scriptwriters for Days of Our Lives or Santa Barbara. The evidence is not good enough.

 

When the arrest is fraught with problems and impossibilities, why should we believe that Judas really betrayed Jesus?

 

THE TRAITOR THAT WASN’T

The New Testament alleges that Jesus’ bursar, the apostle Judas Iscariot, betrayed him. Judas had colluded with Jesus’ enemies, the priests and the elders who wanted him to surreptitiously apprehend Jesus with a view to having him executed (Matthew 26:4). For thirty pieces of silver, Judas planned to take them to Jesus so that they could apprehend him. He left the upper room of the last supper to inform the mob where Jesus would be after. Later, Judas was overcome with unbearable remorse and killed himself. Jesus obviously must have told him where he would go after the supper! And Jesus is upheld as innocent!

 

All of this is as improbable as the pope getting the Turin Shroud dry-cleaned.

 

The Jews did not need Judas to lead them to Jesus. Had they no spies? They could not have depended so heavily on Iscariot in case he was a plant for Jesus. When they were going to lay hands on Jesus despite the people they did not need Judas to betray him for that reason or any other.

 

Nor would they have paid him before he did the job no matter what Matthew 26:14-16 alone maintains. He could have ran off with the money and exposed the corruption of the Jews from another country.

 

The Jews did not weigh thirty pieces of silver to give to Judas for minted currency was used then. Pieces of silver had been out of circulation since three centuries previously. If you want to believe the pieces were really the Argurions or Staters each of which were worth only three Roman denarii each then you are going to be disappointed. 30 Argurions or Staters were what a man would be paid if his slave was killed by a beast, it was the slave’s value. The Jews would not have paid out so little for a man they wanted dead so badly and Judas could have milked them for many times that amount if they needed him as much as the New Testament would have us believe. The story does not add up.

 

A more serious problem is that Matthew regarded the thirty pieces of silver to be the fulfilment of a prophecy that was not about Judas at all or even a prediction. It suggests that Matthew invented many of his stories to make them fit the prophecies. He needed Jesus to be sold for the silver to make the event fit the prophecy. All Mark says is that Judas schemed to betray Jesus because he was promised money and so does Luke so Matthew was fibbing.

 

Christians following Matthew 27:7 say that the Jews bought a field they named the field of blood with the money when Judas threw the money back at them after a fit of remorse for betraying Jesus.

 

Acts says Judas bought the field and burst open on it and there was blood everywhere.  So according to Acts it was called the field of blood for that reason.

 

Some think they bought the field and then he bought it.  That sounds a bit of a stretch.  There was not much time and surely Judas had other things on his mind?

 

Christians say it was called the field of blood both because it was paid for by the Jews with Jesus' blood money and because Judas spilled his bloody innards all over it.

 

Neither scenario is believable for nobody advertises that they are corrupt by buying a field with blood money and ending up with it being called the field of blood.  And Judas was not important enough or popular enough to have his death commemorated by having a field in memory of his gruesome death for gruesome death was routine in those days.

 

The Matthew gospel says the Jews bought the field with the dirty money because they could not put it back into the treasury for it was blood money. It was money paid to get Jesus. Even though Jesus was arrested over the money the Jews claimed they could not put him to death and there was no guarantee, according to the gospels that Pilate would execute him. Clearly then it was NOT blood money. If you pay somebody to rob a bank and somebody gets killed the money you paid was not blood money for it didn’t guarantee anything.

 

The Jews would not have been so scrupulous especially when their God had said that it was a duty and a sacred thing to murder anybody who became a heretic like they said Jesus had.

And why did they not give the money to charity or divide it among themselves?

 

Some think that the Jews would not have been embarrassed to have a field named after the bloodshed of Jesus. But why commemorate somebody they wanted to forget and why advertise their corruption and abuse of temple funds?  The gospels say they felt they had to do what they did to Jesus to save the nation and because he was a troublemaker and a blasphemer so they would not have been ashamed of what they did to Jesus but naming fields after Jesus would have been something shameful. The author of Acts realised this and that was why he thought Judas would have bought the field. His Judas obviously was not suicidal when he did that. So when he says Judas fell in the field and burst open we must put this down to a miracle or freak accident because the way he relates his story tells against the view that his account can be reconciled with the gospels that say that Judas hanged himself in despair. Another thing that supports this is that Luke would have told us if Judas hanged himself. You don’t say somebody fell in a field and burst when you mean they hanged themselves and fell. Luke says Judas fell headlong which was not very likely to happen to a hanging man who if he will fall will not fall headlong for his head is furthest from the ground and the gospel of Luke never mentions the suicide. Probability is against the Christian solution to the contradiction but they don’t care about probability.

 

FINALLY

 

The story of Judas is fraught with lies.  This man is slandered by a faith that claims to believe in innocent until proven guilty.

 

The story of Judas was made up to fit the alleged prophecies about betrayal that are in the Old Testament. Many early Christians positively rejected the tradition that Judas betrayed.

 

The lies make it so hard to believe that Judas really did what the gospels accused him of. The trial is more important than the betrayal of Jesus. If the trial story is suspicious then we can be more suspicious of the betrayal.

   
WORKS CONSULTED
 
Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible, John W Haley, Whitaker House, Pennsylvania, undated
Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol 1, Josh McDowell, Alpha Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1995
Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch, East Sussex, 1995
In Defence of the Faith, Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1996
In Search of Certainty, John Guest Regal Books, Ventura, California, 1983
Jesus and the Four Gospels, John Drane, Lion Books, Herts, 1984
Jesus Lived in India, Holger Kersten, Element, Dorset, 1994
Jesus the Evidence, Ian Wilson Pan, London 1985
The Bible Fact or Fantasy? John Drane, Lion Books, Oxford, 1989
The Encyclopaedia of Bible Difficulties, Gleason W Archer, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1982
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln, Corgi, London, 1982
The Jesus Conspiracy, Holger Kersten and Elmar R Gruber, Element, Dorset, 1995
The Messianic Legacy, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln, Corgi, London, 1987
The Metaphor of God Incarnate, John Hick, SCM Press Ltd, London, 1993
The Passover Plot, Hugh Schonfield, Element Books, Dorset, 1996
The Resurrection Factor, Josh McDowell, Alpha Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1993
The Resurrection of Jesus, Pinchas Lapide, SPCK, London, 1984
The Truth of Christianity, WH Turton, Wells Gardner, Darton & Co Ltd, London, 1905
The Turin Shroud is Genuine, Rodney Hoare, Souvenir Press, London, 1998HoarHo
The Unauthorised Version, Robin Lane Fox, Penguin, Middlesex, 1992
The Vatican Papers, Nino Lo Bello, New English Library, Sevenoaks, Kent, 1982
The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus Raymond E Brown Paulist Press, New York, 1973
The Womb and the Tomb, Hugh Montefiore, Fount – HarperCollins, London, 1992
Verdict on the Empty Tomb, Val Grieve, Falcon, London, 1976
Who Moved the Stone? Frank Morison, OM Publishing Cumbria, 1997
Why People believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer, Freeman, New York, 1997