Posted at the BSA by Michael Waddell – Feb 23, 2025. All the text below is by Michael followed by two links to Bart’s realted posts. Below that is a Claude.ai Response.
All four of our gospels recount that Judas, one of Jesus’ twelve apostles, betrayed Jesus. However, I suspect that Judas is a literary creation of Mark, and that no apostle by that name existed. Here are my reasons.
- Paul, our earliest Christian source, never mentions Judas. Now it’s true that Paul doesn’t mention a lot of things… but Paul does mention Peter and James, for instance. And he does mention that the Lord’s Supper occurred “on the night he was handed over” (the Greek is παρεδίδετο, which could mean “he was betrayed” or “delivered” or even “abandoned”, so translations differ). This would have been a natural place for Paul to mention Judas if he knew of him. Further, Paul is often in conflict with those who knew Jesus in life, and he was keen to use any argument he could come up with to support the view that he was not inferior to the other apostles. If he had known of a tradition that an apostle betrayed Jesus, it would have been an obvious thing for him to mention.
- Bart says: The absence of Judas from the writings of Paul, of course, does not matter much for my thesis. Virtually everything from Jesus’ life is absent from Paul. But since Judas is mentioned in Mark, in an independent source of Matthew, and another for Luke, and yet another for John – and since his act of betrayal, if that’s what it was, passes the criterion of dissimilaritly, I think we can say he existed. From the post linked below where Bart also says he agrees the Paul does not mention Judas.
- Tellingly, Paul does mention that after his resurrection, Jesus appeared “to the Twelve”, which would have been an odd thing to claim if he thought one of the Twelve had betrayed Jesus.
- The sayings in the hypothetical Q source never mention Judas. If you think Q existed, this would be a reason to date Judas traditions late. Further, a passage attributed to Q recounts Jesus predicting that the twelve apostles would sit on twelve throne judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Since Q would have to have been written in (or into) Greek after Jesus died, the fact that it mentions all 12 disciples being glorified indicates that the idea of a betraying apostle was not yet current.
- On the other hand, scholars like Goodacre posit that Matthew expanded Mark, probably including some sources of his own, and Luke used both, leaving no need for Q. Even in this case, though, the verse about “12 thrones” does not seem like something Matthew would have invented, since it clearly goes against Matthew’s claim, inherited from Mark, that one of the twelve would betray Jesus. (Incidentally, this is why Luke changes it to “you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes” rather than “on twelve thrones”.) So whether Matthew was using Q or some other source unknown to Luke, either way that means that a pre-Matthean tradition preserved a statement that all twelve apostles would be glorified.
- Despite the importance that Judas would later have in Christian tradition, Mark only mentions him in three places. First, he mentions him in a single verse when listing the names of the Twelve. Then he mentions him in a two-verse section that says Judas sought to betray Jesus, though no motive is given, and so he went to the chief priests of the Jews. And finally there is a three-verse section that says Judas arrived with a bunch of armed Jewish leaders and he kissed Jesus to indicate that he was the one for the Jewish leaders to arrest. Mark gives no other information about this character. To my mind, that final scene — that a crowd of Jewish leaders would need Judas to kiss Jesus so that they would know who he was — is both a masterfully evocative literary description and a completely implausible historical account.
- When gospels besides Mark provide information about Judas, they contradict each other a lot. (See Judas’ various motives, for instance, and manner of death.) They seem to me to be creatively expanding on Mark’s picture, rather than preserving reliable independant tradition. Note that Papias does this as well, preserving an absolutely absurd tradition about Judas’ death that contradicts all Biblical accounts.
- Bart’s comment in relation to the last few bullets – Judas figures too prominently in too many layers of our traditions to be a later fabrication. I give all the data in my book on Judas, but here let me just say that there is unique and shared material about Judas in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – so that his existence passes the criterion of Multiple Attestation with flying colors.Moreover, if early Christians wanted to invent a villain responsible for Jesus betrayal there would have been no good reason that I can see to make him one of the twelve. Quite the contrary, the idea that one of Jesus’ own disciples turned him over to the authorities (however one construes the term paradidomi) is widely and rightly, I think, thought to pass the criterion of dissimilarity. Jesus had no more authority and control over his own closest disciples than that? He couldn’t keep even them in line? What kind of authority figure is that?
- The Gospel of Peter is a fragmentary gospel with a wide range of proposed dates. Some scholars think it’s a first-century document, though I doubt that. Regardless, when Jesus is crucified, the text says “But we twelve disciples of the Lord were weeping and sorrowful; and each one, sorrowful because of what had come to pass, departed to his home.” That clearly indicates that this author thought all twelve remained faithful.
- Judas was a fairly common name, but it also simply means “the Jew”. Mark was writing at the horrific end of the great war between the Romans and the Jews, during which the Jews were utterly crushed. Mark clearly wanted to show that Christians were loyal to Rome, unlike the Jews, despite the fact that Jesus had been a Jew executed by Rome for making messianic claims. This was a tall order. Like all four gospel writers, Mark used several techniques to shift the blame for Jesus’ crucifixion from the Romans to the Jews. If he had wanted to invent a character who was really to blame for Jesus’ death, naming him “The Jew” seems like the obvious choice. Personally, I think the Romans arrested Jesus, which is why he was tried by a Roman prefect and executed by Roman crucifixion for the political crime of claiming to be king of the Jews. But Mark masterfully avoids this unpleasant conclusion, describing a follower named “the Jew” turning Jesus over to Jewish leaders so that their unwitting Roman puppets would do their dirty work.
Now I don’t know for sure; maybe Judas was a real person. But I think all the evidence can easily be explained by Mark’s literary motivations. The fact that other early Christians thought all “The Twelve” were faithful just adds to the evidence for me. Note, though, that Bart Ehrman disagrees: See his blog post at https://ehrmanblog.org/judas-iscariot-what-we-can-say-with-relative-certainty-i-think/
See Bart’s followup post: What Did Judas Betray, and Why Did He Do It? February 15, 2023
8/5/2026 – Claude.ai’s Response to the Prompt: Do any critical bible scholars believe that Judas the desciple was an invention to transfer the guilt for Jesus’ crucifiction to the Jews from Rome? Cite all sources in line.
Based on critical biblical scholarship, this is a minority position, though it does have some notable defenders. The evidence is mixed:
Scholars Arguing for Judas as Literary Invention
John Shelby Spong argues that Matthew invented the character of Judas to serve as a stand-in for the entire Jewish people, shift the blame for Christ’s death from the Romans to the Jews, and allow Christians to escape Roman persecution of Jews. Spong suggests the Judas character was “a totally fictional character, a totally literary character created by early Christian Church in the ninth decade for sole purpose of shifting blame for Jesus’ death away from Romans who were certainly responsible for it, and placing that blame on the backs of the Jewish people”. ChqdailyChqdaily
Spong notes that Paul says nothing about Judas in his letters, arguing that it would be possible to tell Jesus’s history to a convert without mentioning Judas if the character had not yet been invented. He also points to the symbolic name “Judas”—the Greek form of “Judah,” the name for the entire Jewish state—combined with “Iscariot,” which he traces to the Greek word sicarii (meaning “assassin”). ChqdailyChqdaily
Aaron Saari similarly argues that Judas is a literary invention of the Markan community meant to undercut the authority of the Twelve, entering the Christian story around 70 CE through the Gospel of Mark. buecher
The Scholarly Consensus Position
However, mainstream scholarly consensus differs. Both Bart Ehrman and John P. Meier note that the scholarly consensus holds that “Jesus chose [Judas] as one of the Twelve, and he handed over Jesus to the Jerusalem authorities, thus precipitating Jesus’s execution”. Bart D. Ehrman
Ehrman argues that Judas’s betrayal appears in multiple sources (Mark 14:10-11, John 18:2-3, Acts 1:16, and possibly 1 Corinthians 11:23) and that betrayal by one of Jesus’s handpicked disciples is not something an early Christian author would likely invent, as it doesn’t put Jesus or the movement in a flattering light. Bart D. Ehrman
The invention-for-blame theory remains a minority scholarly position, with most mainstream scholars accepting Judas’s basic historicity while acknowledging that the Gospel accounts contain legendary embellishment.
