Why did Judas betray Jesus?

What each Gospel says

In every account Judas Iscariot is “one of the twelve,” chosen with the others and sent out to preach. Two days before Passover the chief priests want Jesus seized quietly, away from the festival crowds. Judas offers them a way.

Then one of the twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, “What are you willing to give me if I deliver him to you?” So they weighed out for him thirty pieces of silver.

Why he went is where the Gospels part ways:

• Mark, the earliest, gives no reason. Judas goes to the chief priests, and only then do they promise him money (Mark 14:10–11).
• Matthew makes money the opening move: Judas names no price, but he asks for one.
• Luke names a power behind him: “Satan entered into Judas” (Luke 22:3).
• John calls him a thief who kept the common money box and helped himself (John 12:6), and says at the supper that the devil had put the betrayal into his heart (John 13:2).

Thirty pieces of silver

Thirty pieces of silver was not a fortune. Exodus sets thirty shekels as the payment for a slave gored by an ox (Exodus 21:32), and in Zechariah a shepherd is insulted with the same wage: “they weighed for my wages thirty pieces of silver” (Zechariah 11:12). Matthew wants that echo heard. Scholars suggest the coins were Tyrian shekels, the silver the Temple used. In Mark, Judas goes to the priests right after a woman at Bethany pours out perfume worth more than three hundred denarii, about a year’s wages (Mark 14:3–11).

What readers have proposed

Because the Gospels leave gaps, readers have filled them for two thousand years.

• Greed, the oldest answer, drawn from Matthew and from John, where Judas grumbles that the perfume should have been sold for the poor (John 12:4–6).
• Disappointment. Some modern writers imagine a Judas who wanted a messiah to drive out Rome and turned on one who would not fight. No Gospel says so.
• A plan. The Gospel of Judas, a second-century text known to the bishop Irenaeus around AD 180, whose Coptic copy was published in 2006, makes Judas the one disciple who understands Jesus. Its first editors read the betrayal as a task Jesus gave him; other scholars dispute that reading.
• Destiny. John’s Jesus knows early on: “one of you is a devil” (John 6:70). Christians have long debated how foreknowledge and free choice fit together.

The kiss

The arrest comes at night, among the olive trees of Gethsemane, by torchlight. Judas brings an armed party from the chief priests, and he has agreed on a sign.

Now he who betrayed him had given them a sign, saying, “Whomever I will kiss, that is he. Seize him, and lead him away safely.” When he had come, immediately he came to him and said, “Rabbi! Rabbi!” and kissed him.

A kiss was how a disciple greeted his teacher. That is what makes it cut. Luke gives Jesus the line that named it forever: “Judas, do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?” (Luke 22:48). The Greek verb usually translated “betray,” paradidōmi, simply means to hand over. Judas hands him to the priests, the council hands him to Pilate, and Pilate hands him to the soldiers.

What his name came to mean

“A Judas” is a traitor, and the kiss of Judas is any betrayal dressed up as affection. Dante put him in the lowest pit of hell, in the mouth of Lucifer, beside Brutus and Cassius, the men who killed Caesar. Medieval painters gave him red hair, which no Gospel mentions, and often a money bag; such images later fed caricatures of Jews. For his end, told two different ways, see how Judas died.