Even more significant in the gospels than Mary Magdalene is Judas. Like her, he is strangely absent from the rest of the New Testament. Apart from Luke’s ridiculous story of his death in Acts 1:18 – a story that contradicts the one in Matthew 27:5 – he isn’t mentioned anywhere else. You might think that’s to be expected, given he’s the disciple who betrays Jesus in the gospels. His name must have been anathema to early Christians.

We might expect, however, that when Paul is describing the Lord’s Supper for the very first time in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, he might, when he gets to the part where he says ‘on the night he was betrayed’, have mentioned the name of the betrayer. It would seem the natural thing to do. Unfortunately, the word ‘betrayed’ (prodidomi) doesn’t appear in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 or anywhere else in the epistles. The word Paul uses is paradidomi, meaning ‘handed over’, a handing over by spiritual agents (God himself?) not a traitorous human. Judas is in fact absent from Paul’s description of the Lord’s Supper, a revelation he claims to have received directly from the heavenly Jesus, who neglects to include Judas and all the other disciples too. Nor does Paul call the event ‘The Last Supper’; that name would come later. Read 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 for yourself and see. Bart Ehrman also addresses the problem here.

Bizarrely though Judas does turn up, sort of, in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, when Paul is quoting a creed thought to originate in the earliest days of the new faith. Because it is considered so early, this creed is greatly valued and frequently cited by apologists. Never mind that it contradicts the later gospel sightings of the Risen Jesus (see the previous post). Here’s what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:5: ‘(Jesus) appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.’ Then to the Twelve? What Twelve? As Simon Peter, wasn’t Cephas one of the Twelve to begin with? Maybe they weren’t the same person after all.

More significantly, the Twelve, at least according to the later gospels, originally included Judas. He was one of Jesus’ inner circle. And according to Matthew 27 and Acts 1 he killed himself almost immediately after betraying Jesus. He wasn’t around to see the Resurrected Christ. Yet according to Paul and the early creed all of the Twelve saw Jesus alive again. Either Judas wasn’t one of the Twelve and the gospels are wrong, or he was and he didn’t betray his Master after all, remaining alive for his reappearance. (Just to be clear, the Twelve at the time of the resurrection appearances did not include Judas’s replacement, Matthias (Acts 1:23-26). Matthias doesn’t become one of the Twelve till after Jesus has returned to Heaven (Acts 1: 9).

So, Judas isn’t mentioned as a Jesus’ betrayer by anyone other than the gospel writers, decades after the supposed resurrection. He isn’t mentioned by name at all. The only possible reference to him is in 1 Corinthians 15:5 where he’s still one of the Twelve and sees the resurrected Jesus. It couldn’t be could it, that Mark, reading Paul’s description of the Lord’s supper mistook, or deliberately misinterpreted, the phrase ‘was handed over’ to mean ‘was betrayed’ and constructed his story about the duplicitous Judas accordingly? Why, yes it could.

Conveniently, ‘Judas’ is the Greek form of ‘Judah’, the kingdom of the Jews who, so far as early Christians were concerned, rejected Jesus as the Messiah. Judas is a symbolic character in a literary work, representing those foolish Jews who turned their backs on salvation and so ‘betrayed’ the true Messiah.