Judas Iscariot: The Only Man In Hell
There's no Easter without this guy.
He’s the reason for the season: that’s right, Judas Iscariot, a key power player in the events of Holy Week. Today is Holy Wednesday, or Spy Wednesday, and it’s the day that Judas met up with the Pharisees and made his deal for thirty pieces of silver. Without Judas turning traitor there wouldn’t be a Holy Week. In fact there may not even be a Christianity.
One of the fun things about learning the history of Christianity is realizing that there is no out there, edgelord-adjacent theory about Christ and his followers that someone did not very seriously have back in the 2nd or 3rd century. You think you have a weird, edgy angle on Christ et al? Bad news, some guy wrote a fake gospel about it in the year 300.
Take the idea that Judas is a vital part of the Christ story and not quite the heinous figure we are led to believe. This is the premise of Jesus Christ Superstar, not only my favorite Holy Week story but also my favorite musical. In that show Judas betrays Jesus out of fears that his master is going to get a lot of people killed in Jerusalem with his rhetoric; at the end Judas accuses God of being the real killer:
My mind is in darkness now - my God, I am sick! I've been used!
And you knew all the time!
God! I'll never ever know why you chose me for your crime
Your foul, bloody crime!
You have murdered me! You have murdered me!
And with that, Judas hangs himself.
This feels modern, but it’s actually kind of ancient. There exists a Gnostic Gospel of Judas, which we can date to at least the late 2nd century but may be older, that is from Judas’ POV and claims that Jesus wanted the betrayal - Judas was acting on instructions. The Gospel of Judas also says that the other 11 apostles misunderstood all of Jesus’ teachings, and only Judas grokked the true gnostic nature of what Christ was trying to say.
It kind of makes sense to think that Judas was just playing out a role ordained by God. Most of the Gospels offer reasons for his betrayal - Luke and John give him “the devil made me do it” defense, while Matthew lays it at petty greed. Mark, the earliest Gospel from which Luke and Matthew heavily borrowed, is mum on motive - but it is impossible to imagine how Jesus didn’t know what Judas was going to do, if Jesus is who Christianity claims he is. In fact Jesus does know in the Gospels, and he calls Judas out in all four. I like Matthew’s the best:
"The Son of Man goes, even as it is written of him, but woe to that man through whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would be better for that man if he had not been born." Judas, who betrayed him, answered: "It isn't me, is it, Rabbi?" He said to him: "You said it."
Incredible deployment of “you said it” here.
But if Jesus knew that Judas would betray him, why did he promise Judas a seat in Heaven? In Matthew Jesus talks to the Twelve - including Judas - and says to them:
And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me in the regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
This offers a theological conundrum. You have three options here:
Jesus at this time did not know Judas would betray him, which is a challenge to most Christologies that see Jesus as God
Jesus was lying, which is a really huge problem, or
Jesus knew Judas would betray him and that this was destined and that he would be rewarded in the end for it. Imagine telling your Evangelical cousins that one.
The real answer is probably more prosaic; this section is likely carried over from earlier Christianity when they had not yet made Jesus into God. Jesus never says he is God, not one time. There are verses where he talks about oneness and calls God his father, but he never explicitly claims to be God or the messiah. At any rate, in early Christianity they likely understood Jesus as a man (or, as some early Christians believed, a man who became God upon his death) and so he would not have known Judas was gunning for him.
Judas ends up killing himself, everybody knows that. He killed himself via hanging, like in Jesus Christ Superstar. Except that he also killed himself by falling. I shit you not - the New Testament offers two competing versions of how Judas died.
In Matthew Judas, overwhelmed by guilt, goes to the Pharisees and tries to return the silver. They refuse, he throws it on the ground and then goes and hangs himself. They used the money to buy a field to bury him in; it was a field of red clay that had been used by potters, and it was known as Potter’s Field. And that’s why we call graveyards for the poor and unknown Potter’s Fields.
But Acts of the Apostles, which is the sequel to Luke, Judas has a much, much, much wilder death. It’s not even clear it’s a suicide:
Now this man purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.
He exploded! His guts came out! Holy shit!
You may notice that in this version Judas buys himself the field. The two versions cannot reasonably be harmonized, but plenty of Biblical literalists sure have tried!
If Holy Week is a great story, Judas is the great antagonist, or maybe the antihero. His role in the drama is so complex, so psychologically rich, that I can’t help but be powerfully attracted to him and his struggle. There are, of course, a thousand reasons why Judas may have betrayed Jesus - he may have just been sick of the guy yapping in parables all the time! - but I like to imagine that he had a good reason, and that he was, as Matthew says, wracked with guilt for what he had done. In fact, it seems plausible to me that Judas never imagined that one little peck on the cheek in the garden would condemn Christ to death.
In the end what Judas gets is a name that is synonymous with betrayal (this is used to great effect in Jesus Christ Superstar when Jesus, furious with Judas after the Last Supper, spits at him “You liar - You Judas!”) and a very unique place in Catholic theology. He’s the only person in Hell.
The Catholic Church canonizes people as saints, which means they’re definitely in Heaven. These are people the Church guarantees are with God. Everybody else - well, we like to think so, but nobody has proof. As for who is in Hell, that’s a different story. The only person the Church has officially affirmed is in Hell is Judas Iscariot, placed there by Pope Pius IV in 1564 when he affirmed the Council of Trent, which said that Judas was suffering “eternal perdition,” and that he would forever “despair of mercy.”
Poor old Judas. Good old Judas.