Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Did Judas Iscariot actually exist or was he made up? By Bart Ehrman over the years on the blog, whenever I've posted something about Judas Iscariot, as in my last post, I've had readers ask me whether he was a real person or, as some folk have it, he was made up by Christian storytellers who wanted to explain how Jesus ended up in the hands of his enemies.
[00:00:26] Often it's pointed out that Judas sounds like Jew. Did Christian storytellers come up with the Jew who betrayed Jesus in order to make a theological point?
[00:00:35] I have a definite view about that.
[00:00:38] I think he was a real person, actually one of Jesus disciples and the one who betrayed him to the authorities, leading to Jesus arrest and crucifixion.
[00:00:49] Why should I think so?
[00:00:51] The following explanation is based on the discussion in my book the Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, published by Oxford University Press in 2006.
[00:01:00] I start with the question of historical evidence and what counts first. In general, what kinds of sources of information do historians look for when dealing with persons such as Jesus or Judas from the distant past?
[00:01:15] The best sources, of course, will be from the person's own time, preferably a contemporary who actually knew the person.
[00:01:22] If you have a lot of eyewitness accounts, you're in relatively good shape.
[00:01:26] If the accounts are not actually by eyewitnesses but by later authors who knew eyewitnesses, that's not as good, but it's still not so bad.
[00:01:35] If they are by later authors who talked with people who once knew someone who claimed to have once heard an eyewitness, well, that's not nearly so good.
[00:01:45] What historians want are lots of contemporary reports. If possible, it helps if these reports are independent of one another.
[00:01:53] If you have two sources of information about a figure from the past but one of those sources got information from the other one, then in effect you don't have two sources but one.
[00:02:03] If you have two independent sources, that's obviously better than having to rely on one, especially if these sources corroborate what the other has to say.
[00:02:12] Moreover, it's useful if the sources of information are not overly biased in their reporting.
[00:02:18] If a source has an obvious agenda, and if the information that it conveys embodies that agenda, then you have to reconstruct the real historical situation, the actual historical data that lie behind the slanted accounts.
[00:02:31] In short, historians want numerous sources close to the events themselves, which are independent of each other, yet which agree on the information they provide while not being biased in their reports.
[00:02:44] How do our sources of information about Judas stack up against this wish list?
[00:02:48] Unfortunately, not as well as we might hope.
[00:02:52] We might hope for 10 sources from Judas lifetime that all talk about him. We don't have that. Of course, we don't have it for virtually anyone who lived at that time. But still we do not have any eyewitness accounts to Judas activities.
[00:03:08] Our earliest Christian source, the Apostle Paul, never mentions Judas. Now for those of you who think he does, check out my next post.
[00:03:16] The Gospels of the New Testament are therefore our earliest accounts. These do not claim to be written by eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus, and historians have long recognized that they were produced by second or third generation Christians living in different countries from Judas and Jesus, speaking a different language, Greek instead of Aramaic, experiencing different situations and addressing different audiences.
[00:03:41] Even so, there are reasons for thinking that what they say about Judas is in very rough outline, probably historical. At least a couple of key points.
[00:03:51] The first of our Gospel accounts is Mark, written something like 40 years after Jesus death.
[00:03:57] Matthew and Luke both use Mark as a source, but they also appear to have used independent sources of their own for what they tell us about Judas.
[00:04:06] The Gospel of John probably did not rely on the other three gospels for his stories. And so it's an independent account of Judas.
[00:04:14] That means that we have accounts of Judas in a number of early gospel sources. We have Mark, we have M a source for Matthew, we have L a source for Luke, and we have John.
[00:04:26] There's also a tradition about him independently inherited by the author of Acts.
[00:04:31] Moreover, we have an account of Judas in the writings of Papias, perhaps 120 to 140 CE.
[00:04:38] That's not based on what we have in the New Testament. So here is yet another independent source.
[00:04:46] Later traditions, such as those found in the Arabic Infancy Gospel or the Golden Legend are many centuries removed from the events they narrate and are obviously highly legendary.
[00:04:58] But the Gospel of Judas itself is much earlier than these, and its author shows little evidence of having used the New Testament Gospels for constructing his account. Although he does appear to have known the account of Judas death from the Book of Acts. So he had possibly read Luke as well, and maybe the other gospels. That we can't say for sure.
[00:05:15] In short, we do not have eyewitness accounts of Judas, but we do have a rather large number of independent sources that all speak about him. And to the same effect.
[00:05:26] He was one of Jesus 12 disciples and the one who betrayed him.
[00:05:31] That is significant for historians if the same basic tradition about Judas that he was a disciple who Betrayed Jesus is found in more than one independent source, then that increases the likelihood that it's a historical datum, since the sources that attest it could not have made it up, given the fact that it's found independently in different sources, that is. It's hard to explain how many different sources know about Judas without having gotten their information from one another, unless the tradition about him was very, very early.
[00:06:06] One reason for thinking the tradition is actually historical is that the very heart of the tradition about Judas does not appear to advance the agendas of the sources that narrate them.
[00:06:15] It seems unlikely that a Christian storyteller would concede that Jesus had no more charismatic authority than that that he couldn't those who are closest to him, that not even all those who knew him well actually believed him.
[00:06:29] That wouldn't seem to serve the Christian agenda of promoting the incredible person of Jesus very well.
[00:06:35] This kind of consideration is sometimes called the criterion of dissimilarity. The idea that if a view is dissimilar to what people telling would want it to say and against what they would want it to say, then it's more likely to be authentic.
[00:06:52] The same consideration does call into question a number of details various sources give us about Judas, such as portrayals that are so much like what some Christian storytellers would say that it's not clear that they will be historical.
[00:07:05] For example, Judas is sometimes denounced as a stereotypical Jew in sources that are otherwise anti Jewish in their tone, where he's portrayed as a money grubbing, God denying, demonically inspired Christ killer.
[00:07:19] This kind of portrayal does not appear to be disinterested.
[00:07:23] Moreover, in the one source named after him, the Gospel of Judas, he is portrayed as the one follower of Jesus who at least has an inkling of who Jesus was, one with knowledge.
[00:07:35] But the Gospel of Judas advances a Gnostic understanding of the world and our place in it, and it uses the memory of Judas to promote that understanding. Gnostics argued that they were the ones who knew the truth. The word gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis, which means knowledge.
[00:07:51] And so this gospel appears to be using Judas to advance its agenda. And it's probably not reliable as a historical source, however interesting it is for understanding how later Christians portray Judas.
[00:08:03] When all said and done, there is frustratingly little information about Judas from antiquity that we can trust as historically authentic.
[00:08:10] But that should not lead us to despair of saying anything about him.
[00:08:14] He appears at least to have existed based on the surprisingly widespread attestation of stories about him and the criterion of dissimilarity.
[00:08:22] Moreover, what little firm data we do have about him is illuminating sometimes in ways that scholars have failed to notice.
[00:08:30] My view is that we can infer a lot from what little historically reliable information is available to us.
[00:08:37] If we are looking for the bedrock of historical fact about Judas, then a critical examination of our sources yields at least three pieces of information.
[00:08:46] One his name was Judas Iscariot, two he was one of Jesus's 12 disciples and three he betrayed Jesus by turning him over to the ruling authorities. And I'll have more to say about all that in posts to come.
