Loading...In my last post I indicated that I would write, next, on what it was, in my opinion, that Judas betrayed. It is commonly thought, based on the NT evidence, that he indicated to the authorities where Jesus could be found apart from the crowds. Maybe that’s right, even though, as I indicated, I do have some doubts about it. Even if it is right, there may be more to it than that. I think the following data are worth bearing in mind, leading to the resolution of the question that I prefer. (At first these data may not seem relevant: but hang in there for a minute!)
- There is nothing to indicate that Jesus publically proclaimed himself the messiah or, more specifically, that he ever publicly announced that he was the King of the Jews during his lifetime. You find Jesus accepting the title messiah in the later Gospels, but the first time it becomes a public issue, in our earliest account, Mark, is at Jesus’ trial in 14:61-62. And never is the King of the Jews a term Jesus uses of himself in the Gospels during his public ministry.
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I know it’s impossible to speculate what someone living 2K years ago might or might not have written, but wouldn’t Peter have used this inside info (of being a future ruler) as a trump card in his argument(s) with Paul on who to eat with in public … sort of like “hey dude in a few years from now you’ll be kissing my uhmm … ring”. (I know I would have, but then again I’m not Pope material). Or maybe he did and that’s why Paul doesn’t talk about who won the argument.
And would Pilate have even wasted lumber on someone who was a relatively unknown from nowhere. Based on Jesus’ unknown profile, would Pilate have even cared if Jesus claimed that he came from Mars and ruled the solar system? He must have received lots of reports of nut cases who thought they were a king. From your perspective how likely is it that based only on a witness from nowhere that a suspect from nowhere would be perceived of as a threat to Rome (or maybe Pilate was just having a bad day and Jesus had bad timing).
Buy the way, thanks very much for your recent posts and I’m definitely in for buying your upcoming book.
Yes, I think Pilate would have been quite happy to make a public example of anyone who was making exalted claims for himself in the face of Rome.
Is it possible Jesus might have been labeled a Zealot trying to overthrow Rome?
Some scholars have thought so, starting with Reimarus in the 1770s!
Prof Ehrman
Sorry to chase rabbits but how certain is it that John wasn’t aware of Mark (or Matthew or Luke for that matter)? He certainly didn’t make use of Mark the way M and L did but since knowledge of Mark had been so widespread as to be available to the disparate communities that produced M and L is it reasonable to assume John had no awareness of prior gospels?
Thanks
My sense is that most books weren’t known in most Christian communities. It was a world before mass communication! The marvel is that Mark was known to both Matthew and Luke.
Then the question would be how any of Jesus’ followers found out what Judas had done. If Judas went to the authorities and told them what he knew, then he could have just kept his mouth shut afterwards. Why would the Temple authorities or Pilate or anyone else have informed Jesus’ followers of how they had found out about his secret teaching?
It’s possible in principle that Judas actually betrayed Jesus in two ways, first by telling the authorities Jesus was calling himself king and second by physically leading some soldiers to arrest him. But if you accept that Judas did the latter, then there seems little reason to suppose he did the former. And if you think Judas only betrayed Jesus in the first way, then I don’t see how it would have become known Judas had betrayed him at all.
Well, they may have noticed that Judas was no longer among them and had killed himself, for starters!
do most real scholars (i exclude the fundamentalist here because they dont seem to use the proper historical method) acknowledge that yeshua was crucified for being “king of the jews’? is there any serious opinion that he died for blasphemy against the Pharisees or does everyone now agree he annoyed the Romans.
for that matter how strong is the consensus that he was an apocalyptic prophet? on this matter as i side note i dont see how good serious scholars can be genuine Christians. I know Prof Metzger was great scholar but if he believed the christain doctrine that jesus wanted to be killed to save us from god (who is also himself) didnt that affect his judgement on assessing the who was the real historical yeshua (an apocalyptic prophet, Wisdom Sage, ect)
Sorry to write a paragraph of questions Prof Ehrman
Yes, it’s almost everywhere held that this was the charge against Jesus (no one thinks it wsa for “blasphemy” in the eyes of Pharisees). There is a strong majority opinion that Jesus was an apocalypticist, but that is not *as* widely held.
Nothing would please me more than to see eye-to-eye with you about what you perceive to be New Testament “history.” The more I read, however, the less confidence I have in your conclusions, much less your rationale for reaching them.
When you speak of “historical traditions,” and then proceed to say, “…whatever Paul did or did not know about the matter…Jesus was betrayed by one of his own, Judas Iscariot,” and “In my judgment this tradition passes all of our standard criteria for establishing authentic tradition from the life of Jesus,” I can’t help but notice how much your Christian skirt keeps showing.
Let’s face it, historical traditions, whether oral or written, rarely reflect events as they actually happened. And in this respect the canonical gospels are no different. They were a byproduct of historical prejudices and a producer of ongoing anti-Jewish animus, of which the Judas subplot is only one example. In fact, the label “betrayer” is misapplied (especially now that his gospel has seen the light of day), since the word “Iscariot” implies “to hand over,” or “to deliver up.” Worse yet, the name Judas points to “all Jews” – everyone descended from the “House of Judah.” Naming Judas as the “bad guy betrayer” not only served to condemn one man for one transgression, but an ENTIRE PEOPLE – and not for just for a few fleeting moments, either, but FOR ALL TIME!
Moreover, when you say, “The traditions about Judas are multiply attested in numerous independent sources,” I would suggest that in this context there are no independent sources. All of them rest upon one another, starting out with Paul, carried on by the anonymous writers of the Synoptic Gospels, through what amounts to the second Lukan Gospel of Acts, on to John’s theological narrative, each one sharing common threads of cultural and counter-cultural animosity.
Multiple attestation is a theory about truth that is false. It is rests precariously upon a foundation of insidious lies repeated often enough until they become perceived as truth over time. It is the kind of truth used by early Church Fathers and carried on most effectively by Hitlerian propagandists.
In some ways, Dissimilarity is even worse, at least in this instance, as you frame it. Your summation is much too much to swallow, especially when you suggest this “does not appear to be the kind of tradition that a Christian storyteller would “make up.” What seems apparent is that your argument is tailor made by Christians for Christians. And when you ask, “…why wouldn’t it be made up?” the answer is not even minimally convincing. It bespeaks of Jew bashing in the extreme. Remember, we are not talking here about just anyone among his closest disciples, but the keeper of the purse, the most greedy of the bunch and a scoundrel possessed by Satan named JUDAS which is synonymous with JEW from THE HOUSE OF JEWS, as it were!
P.S. Can’t bring myself as of yet to read this posting, so I’m pasting my reply to yesterday’s post here. DCS
You cannot possibly say that everything on Judas goes back to Paul, since he says nothing about Judas. Is there anything in Mark that betrays knowledge of Paul’s letters? Luke and Matthew builds on Mark, but develops the material in contradicting directions. So your house of cards doesn’t hold. Furthermore, everybody in the Gospel stories are Jews, so you cannot accuse the synoptic Gospel writers of anti-Judaism, because one of the Jews is a greedy traitor. If I’m not wrong, the Old Testament have lot of Jewish characters displaying seriously sinful behavior, but these stories are written by Jews.
No, I don’t think much of anyting on Judas goes back to Paul. It is debated whether Mark knew Paul’s letters.
Mystery religion Greek-speaking Jews?
Wow!! I would never have thought that…..but then why would I…I just had the theological betrayal. Now it make sense from the gospel of Judas….Those were the secrets of the new kingdom…Wow!!
A thought: If Jesus really did think of his future title as “King of the Jews” (and I don’t doubt it), it’s one of many reasons why sensible people should see the narrowness of his worldview, and reject the idea of his being “God.” It might have been acceptable for a divine overlord to place his twelve apostles in charge of the twelve tribes of Israel in the future Kingdom (assuming there had ever been twelve tribes, which is doubtful)…*if* the *other* peoples of the world would have *their own* comparable governors. But in that Utopian concept, the divine overlord would have to think of himself as King of something much more universal than “the Jews.”
But why would Judas have betrayed the messianic secret? Why would he have wanted Jesus to be killed?
There’s no discord mentioned between Jesus and Judas beforehand, is there?
That’s the question I dealt with a couple of posts ago.
You mean the ‘More on Judas’ post? But I don’t see a potential rational answer there as to ‘why would Judas want to betray the messianic secret’? Or are you referring to your suggestions of ‘because of the money’, ‘because of Satan’ and ‘because he was a devil himself’?
But none of these are rational, probable answers as to why Judas would have wanted to betray the messianic secret, are they? He must have had some kind of motivation for this betrayal?
The most probable (?) answer then seems that he might have thought that he’d force Jesus to finally reveal himself that way and bring on the Kingdom?
Because, excluding the supernatural, Judas had to have a rational reason for his actions, no? The only other alternative left is that he was crazy. But that’s not a satisfying one either.
I think there are lots of alternatives. I mention three of them in my earlier post. But there could be others.
Not to make this tedious again but two of those three alternatives (because of Satan, because of being a devil) can already be discarded in a rational approach, no?
Yet if there was a historical, non-supernaturally influenced betrayal by Judas there must also have been a historical, non-supernaturally influenced reason for Judas spilling the messianic secret? Judas must have thought something like: I am going to tell the others about the messianic secret because xxx …
Well, I would certainly discard them. But those are the biblical answers, not the ones given by historians (I give historical suggestions as well)
If Jesus taught his disciples he was the king of the Jews, how come Mark does not record Jesus claiming it in private?
Would the claim to be the Messiah be understood by 1st century Jews as claim to kingship?
Well, he does in Mark 8 at Peter’s confession, more or less.
I’ve read on one of your books that you do not consider the author(s) of the gospel of John dependent upon any of the synoptic gospels because there is not the kind of literal word-for-word dependence as we find between Matthew and Luke and Mark. But there are other ways in which the Johannine tradition and author(s) could have been more indirectly dependent upon the gospel of Mark or another synoptic gospel and obviously the author of John was a creative theologian in his own right. See, for example, the work of CK Barrett and Frans Neirynck, no slouches when it comes to exegetes. Likewise, because of a few rather significant overlaps between Q and Mark, the latter seems to be dependent upon some Q-like traditional material. Some (but not me) even argue that Mark is dependent upon Q. At least the multiple attestation between Q and Mark is weakened. Not to mention competing theories that weaking the certainty of the Q-hypothesis.
That ‘the title “King of the Jews” is not a title ever used by the early Christians for Jesus, so far as we know,’ can also be considered a pretty good indicator that this might have been a view developed by Mark or his community or somewhere in the tradition history that Mark relied upon. All we really know is that Paul earlier did not use this title and later Mark did.
Of course I appreciate efforts to develop multiple likely scenarios in constructing plausible historical views of Jesus, but I think the criterion of multiple attestation is over confidently applied. The real historical Jesus may simple be lost to history. But I do think your reconstruction is historically quite plausible. Just my humble opinion on methodology.
Yes, these are all debated issues!
Robertus,
You might be interested to know that Hebrew Matthew (original Matthew) has “King of ISRAEL” on the cross, as it does five lines later in both Hebrew and Greek, not the received Greek “King of the Jews”. Creeping antiSemitism, perhaps…
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/146815656X/ref=cm_cd_asin_lnk
But there weren’t twelve tribes at that time. The ten northern trades had been asymilated by the Assyrians some 800 years earlier. Did they believe that these lost tribes would somehow be reconstituted when the Kingdom came?
Yup!
But what are the reliable facts here? The interrogation by Caiaphas is guesswork made by the gospel writers. There was some sort of hailing of Jesus at the entry into Jerusalem, the crowd shouting ‘Hosanna’ and ‘Son of David’. Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom very soon to come, publicly in the temple area. He made annoying things relating to trade activity and money exchange. That would be enough to make both the Temple priests as well as the Roman authorities, aware of another Messiah pretender. They wouldn’t need Judas to tell them more. If so, Jesus could simply have refused to answer, rather than the Markian “I am”. My guess is that Jesus was picked up by the guards, brought into a quick interrogation to make sure they had the right person, and promptly sent off to the Romans. They already knew he was a troublemaker.
But hte question is why he was executed for calling himself King of the Jews….
If Judas had reason to fear for his life, and if that was his motif, it means that at least the Jewish authorities already knew a lot. The incidents in the temple area would amount to no more than a severe beating, like Paul reports he experienced himself. So Judas just wanted to get out of the already existing deadly peril and he could do that by pinpointing the nightly location.
Is there a difference between “King of the Jews” and a Messiah ? According to Mark the crowds hail him by shouting “Hosanna” and appraising the arrival of the kingdom of David. Isn’t that close to a situation in which he is publicly recognized as someone claiming to be the Messiah? So that he himself betrayed the “messianic secret”, if it ever existed.
The handing over of J. to the Romans was simply a clever move, avoiding protracted formal proceedings, quickly taking the air out of the balloon.
The messiah *could* be seen as a king, but not necessarily so. And a Jewish king was not necessarily the messiah.
He never did. Why do people keep saying that? He said “YOU say so”, when asked.
Bart, I know you’re the expert, but …
… per your construction, Jesus taught his disciples that he was “King of the Jews”, but never publicly proclaimed this. So, Pilate found out about Jesus’ teaching through Judas. If I’m following you, Pilate had no interest in Jesus before Judas approached him. But Judas (1) somehow got an audience with Pilate or someone close to Pilate, and (2) got Pilate or someone close to Pilate to believe his story, or at minimum to take the story seriously enough to arrest Jesus and try him. This seems fantastic to me. How could a nobody like Judas have gotten Pilate’s attention, particular during the Passover season when Jerusalem was swollen by hundreds of thousands of Jewish pilgrims? Moreover, even if we assume that Judas somehow got Pilate’s ear … did Pilate arrest every unknown Jew accused by a single eyewitness of sedition?
Couldn’t be. No sane law enforcement official arrests anyone upon a single person’s testimony, in particular when there’s no evidence apart from that testimony that a crime has been committed. So … since Jesus WAS arrested, there must have been some corroborating evidence at Pilate’s disposal. For example … if Judas said that the guy claiming to be King of the Jews was ALSO the guy who turned over the tables of the Temple money lenders, that might have raised a few Roman eyebrows.
My sense is that Judas betrayed the information not to Pilate (no way he could get an audience with the governor himself!) but with the local Jewish authorities who were interested themselves in having Jesus removed from public view.
I like the way you use the Jesus Seminar criteria of multiple attestation and dissimilarity to determine the likelihood of historical reliability. I assume that Jesus would keep his being the “King of the Jews” a secret in order to avoid being killed. Is that the way you see it?
These criteria were around long before the Jesus seminar!! I can think of a variety of reasons for Jesus not to proclaim his identity publicly; maybe it was to avoid trouble. Maybe it was out of humility. Maybe it was because like other teachers he liked and preferred to keep the “real message” secret instead of public. Or maybe some other reason….
Bart – It’s sad to see you lend credence to “stories” as though they amount to historical truth. Your methodology may be new, but it still amounts to the same old slander of someone who has been falsely and unfairly accused of a betrayal that never happened.
“Betray” means to become disloyal or unfaithful to another person, or to a cause, using treachery and deceit. Hence, it is synonymous with “traitor. After Judas Iscariot, the word is most often used to describe Brutus for betraying Julius Caesar, or Benedict Arnold for turning against George Washington and the American Revolution. But it is only the quintessential Jew who bears the title for himself and a WHOLE PEOPLE, based upon the flimsiest of accusations.
Here’s what Edwin Freed has to say in the Oxford Companion to the Bible:
Accounts of Judas are varied, inconsistent, and influenced by theological opinions
of the writers, the belief in the fulfillment of scripture, and the idea that God brings
death to ungodly persons (2 Macc. 9.5-12). It is therefore difficult to assess the
historicity of Judas and his action. Why, for example, does Mark not mention the
the name of Judas in the story of the traitor (14.17-21)? Yet all sources list him as
Jesus’ betrayer. Perhaps as tradition grew the name of Judas became more infamous
and the details of his demise more appalling.
Amen to that! I would add that the weight of tradition, plus so-called multiple gospel attestations, make him about as real as Satan and Beelzebub, or Iago and Richard III, or any other literary personifications of evil. He is merely the artful creation of religiously biased anti-Jewish authors, a product of literature, not history!
It is this sort of venomous claim you have chosen to support, thereby adding a pseudo-scholarly sense of verisimilitude. 🙁
Bart – If Jesus really claimed to be the King of the Jews, to my modern sensibilities this sounds like the guy was a lunatic (shades of C.S. Lewis). Were 1st century world-views so different that a rational man would come to believe this about himself?
I’m not sure it makes Jesus loony. He was a man of his time and he had strong religious convictions about God’s intervention in the world, to happen soon. Doesn’t make him crazy!
Depends on the definition of crazy, I guess 😉
Well, Schweitzer thought he was schizophrenic, and I think so, too. By that I mean the biblical character, not necessarily the flesh-and-blood human being, whoever and whatever he may have actually been.
I don’t understand why anyone says Jesus said he was 1) “king of the Jews”, or 2) “Son of God”, or “Messiah”. He never says “I am King of the Jews”. He tells Pilate, “You have said so”, and at least in Matthew, he says the same thing to the high priest about being the “Son of God”. In Mark he says “I am” to the high priest, but this is suspect in the first place, because at the time no Jew would associate that term, “Son of God” with the Messiah. John has merely, “YOU say that I am King’ to Pilate. Jesus never calls himself either of these things.
Why isn’t this (very compelling) view of what Judas betrayed mentioned by the Gospel writers? It seems more theologically significant than simply saying he did it for money or the devil made him do it. Did the Gospel writers not know the details of Judas’s betrayal and thus tried to come up with their own explanation?
Great question. My hunch is that they wanted to belittle Judas (just wanted the money) and make him evil. And maybe they *didn’t* really know what he betrayed….
Bart,
The motive became more and more evil with time. Mark has the priest *offering* cash. Matthew has him *asking* for it. John and Luke have Satan completely taking him over! This is suspicious to say the least. As each gospel is written in turn, Judas gets more and more evil. This is not history, but invention.
Bart, somewhat off-topic: isn’t the Judas story actually a big problem for believing Christians? If getting betrayed wasn’t part of Jesus’ plan then why did he select Judas in the first place? Being God and stuff he must have known that Judas would betray him later on, no? Yet if he didn’t know then how could he have been God and does this mean that God’s original plan was sabotaged?
Or do you think that Jesus actually WANTED to be executed because he believed that this would, for whatever reason, trigger the End of Times and the start of the Kingdom of God?
It’s hard for me to tell if you’re asking a question about historical events or about the stories of the Gospels. Those are two different things! Historically I don’t think Jesus was God, or claimed to be God, and I don’t think he knew (let alone wanted) Judas to betray him. And I don’t think he wanted to be executed. But the Gospels have their own stories to tell that do not simply give the history as it really happened.
Ok. And yes, I think I mixed the historical and the religious there …
Gerd Lüdemann has an article titled, Why the Church Invented Judas’s “Betrayal” of Jesus.
He mentions: “They chose the disciple Judas, from Kerioth in southern Judea.
After all, who could better symbolize the Jewish people (Judas/Judea/Jews) – the collective
scapegoats for the church, accused from the beginning for their role in Jesus’ death?”
His belief is that Judas was not a historical person and the name was used as another way to blame the Jews for Jesus’ death.
Please share your thoughts on this idea.
We’re not sure what Iscariot means (whether “man of Kerioth” or something else); and yes others have also thought that Judas was an invented figure, made up as a kind of anti-jewish polemic. I don’t think so myself, but I can see the attraction of the view. I lay out my views of the matter in my book on the Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, where on top of other things I give a historical sketch of what I think we can know.
Bart. New to the page, thanks for your work. In your opinion how do you think Jesus would have arrived at the conclusion that he would be king if he wasn’t necessarily mad? Thanks for any help.
I suppose in the same way that Mitt Romney thought he’d be president! With an apocalyptic twist. (Then again, among my friends, if Romney had won, that would indeed have brought the apocalypse. 🙂 ) But my point: if one is convinced that God is soon to intervene in history, one isn’t necessarily crazy. (Lots of otherwise sane people continue to think that today); and being king is no different from being a ruler in any other political system. In this case, of course, it would be an eternal kingship: but that’s what apocalypticists expected, and they all weren’t crazy!
Thanks for the reply Bart. I guess, perhaps, he thought that because of the work he was doing as a prophet that this earned him that reward. This might just be my own, culturally biased, view but I can’t help but think that, even if he wasn’t mad, he would have to have been a quite deluded, and perhaps egotistical, person to think that, had he not really had a divine encounter. Thinking that god has chosen you, to me, seems like it would either be true or very narcissistic. Unless of course, it was a very common, almost expected, claim to make.
I guess, given what you say he preached. This suggests a high level of delusion anyway!
What are your thoughts of Gary Greenberg’s book The Judas Brief where he believes that Judas was a close companion of Jesus and he represented Jesus in the negotiations between Pilate and the high priest? And that this action started as handing Jesus over to house arrest but over time became that he betrayed Jesus to his death and Judas is forever a scoundrel.
Haven’t read the book. But it sounds, well, a bit speculative. (As you know, there is nothing of any of this in our only surviving sources).
Hey Prof Bart, I’d love to hear a deeper dive perspective on Mark 14:61-62. Seems to me that Jesus is openly confessing to being the Messiah. Wondering your perspective and if there is anymore to the story. Thx
He’s definitely openly confessing to be the messiah. It’s the first time in the entire Gospel, a kind of climax — since Mark himself, and his readers, have seen it all along, but no one else has (except arguably the woman who anoints him)