This essay will discuss what motivated Judas to betray Christ.
A certain New Testament scholar by name of Bart Ehrman has been opining on the Gospel of Judas ("GJud"). In the course of his book, Ehrman investigated Judas as historical traitor: to start with, what did Judas betray?
Here, Ehrman points out that the Pauline letters have nothing to say about Judas. (Ditto the possibly-contemporaneous letters attributed to Jude, 1 Peter, and John.) First in the canon to note Judas are the canonical Gospels.
From their stories Ehrman (plausibly) explains that to betray Jesus, it wasn't sufficient to kiss him out in the dark of Gethsemane. Ehrman has for at least the last decade held (and I believe him) that Jesus taught secret teachings: that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah King of the Jews, and that Jesus had promised his followers that they would be his regents upon his victory. It was this teaching which enabled the Romans to convict Jesus as claiming the seditious title "I.N.R.I.", Iesus Nazor-something Rex Iudaeorum. This was a more dangerous secret and so a more likely betrayal.
Ehrman assumes that our Gospel of Mark was first in the canon. But Mark has nothing to say about what was in it for Judas, beyond a sack of silver. For that, the Christian must resort to Luke, who says that the Devil made him do it; or to John, who says that Judas was a crook and also a willing agent of the Prince of Darkness. Ehrman therefore cannot answer what was Judas's true motive.
This question can be answered, with some inspiration from Ehrman's colleague John Dominic Crossan. First, one must rearrange the source material a bit.
Evan Powell showed in his 1994 The Unfinished Gospel that Mark was reacting to another Gospel, which Powell associated with chapters 1-20 of our "Gospel of John". John 1-20 knew that "Judas son of Simon" was the traitor but used this knowledge in a series of intercalations involving "Simon Peter", serving to discredit Peter before that one's followers. Mark's aim (with or without John 21's source concluding his gospel, as Powell proposes) was to excuse Peter's conduct in the face of such allegations.
Given Mark's aims, Mark shares parallels with John in places. One such is Mark 14 / John 12. First, a woman comes to Jesus and anoints him with oil. Certain of Jesus's disciples complain about the waste of silver (Mark 14:5 / John 12:5). Then, Judas betrays Jesus for silver (Mark 14:11; likely alluded to in John 13:29).
Here, John made an explicit connection by casting Judas as the disciple who complained. Mark's connection is only with the dispute with Jesus over the silver. The parallel is fuller in John (except for the traitor's payment); this supports Powell's thesis, over this part of John 12, that it was Mark's source.
If one adopts Powell's sequence: then Mark accepted Judas's role as common ground among Christianity; even John had to admit that Peter wasn't the main culprit. But Mark didn't want to dwell upon Judas, because to do so would have reminded his audience of John's repeated attempts to associate Judas with Peter.
I agree with Crossan's Who Killed Jesus?: in that none of Jesus's followers knew who, exactly, betrayed Jesus; and so their ensuing Gospels made up a name for the likely suspect. This source did find the archetypal name "Judas" for Jesus's final nemesis. Upon the name "Judas", even Mark and John agree.
However this Judas, in the canonical four, was further modified "Ischariot". The traitor wasn't just a Jew, but a Sicarian Jew - a man of the terrorist fringe of what British comics have labelled the "Judaean People's Front".
Contra Evan Powell, the name "Judas Ischariot" must precede John's Gospel. Where coterminous with the Egerton fragment, John amended his base to cast all Jews as the problem. If John had concocted Judas's name, then he would have related it as an unqualified "Judas" / "Judas son of Simon", or else would have qualified the name in a "Judas Smith" sort of way. Either John was telling the facts or else John's source had concocted the name.
Also, John's motive for Judas's crime is characteristically dual: Judas as greedy cheat, Judas as agent of darkness (13:30) against Jesus's light. If one follows my thesis, that John's amendments further followed the Johannine theme of Light and Dark: then John 13:30's emphasis on Judas sneaking out into the night would be a Johannine touch to the prior narrative.
In the shared Passion source of Mark and John: it was "Sicarian Jew" who betrayed Jesus, and he did it for money after an argument.
I propose that the first composers of "the Gospel of Jesus" had an inkling of how the Romans had found out Jesus's messianic secret.
Certain Sicarians had infiltrated Jesus's movement, thinking that this might be a vehicle for their aims. When they found that Jesus was not keeping up a war treasury, they argued against him. They decided that Jesus was not living in a world which they understood, and so left his movement.
Around the time of the Jewish War, politically moderate Jews struggled with extremists like the Sicarii for leadership of the movement. When this war ended in calamity, the moderates turned upon the extremists and blamed them for everything. As Josephus had done on behalf of the Pharisees, so the evangelists did on behalf of the Christians.
The evangelists suspected that at least one Sicarian Jew had siphoned funds toward Sicarian activities, and that this or that one had gone on to betray Jesus's movement.
The early Christians pinned the betrayal of Jesus upon an archetypal "Judas Ichariot". The pre-Johannine Passion's narrator took this understanding and linked it to his rival, Peter. Then Mark tried to exonerate Peter from Judas's taint. John, who was for his own reasons also a dissident from the Peter / Mark understanding, took on the rival's critique and added his own reflections.
Of all the above factions, only John intended to attack all Jews. The first Christians focused their ire upon the treacherous and corrupt extremists in their ranks, and then fell to attacking each other.
Any thoughts? e-mail me :^) zimriel@sbcglobal.net
The first version of this project was written 17 Sept 2006 as a blog post. In 18 Sept, turned it into a separate essay. 17 July 2007, cleaned up some language.