Judas Iscariot, The Twelfth Apostle

Judas Iscariot

Of the many aspects surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus that are illuminated in The Urantia Papers, the betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot has to rank as one of the most incredible insights available in this unprecedented narrative.   While biblical scholars continue to write hundreds of books wherein they muse and conjecture over the motives behind Judas’ betrayal, The Urantia Book lays out a starkly lucid portrayal of the inner workings of Judas’ mind and his ultraindividualistic personality, a tragic man increasingly isolated and bitter as his many psychic, emotional, and spiritual troubles conspired against him, ultimately leading to the most infamous act of betrayal in the history of our world, Urantia.  From The Urantia Book:

Judas Iscariot, the twelfth apostle, was chosen by Nathaniel.  He was born in Kerioth, a small town in southern Judea.  When he was a lad, his parents moved to Jericho, where he lived and had been employed in his father’s various business enterprises until he became interested in the preaching and work of John the Baptist. Judas’s parents were Sadducees, and when their son joined John’s disciples, they disowned him.

When Nathaniel met Judas at Tarichea, he was seeking employment with a fish-drying enterprise at the lower end of the Sea of Galilee. He was thirty years of age and unmarried when he joined the apostles. He was probably the best-educated man among the twelve and the only Judean in the Master’s apostolic family.  Judas had no outstanding trait of personal strength, though he had many outwardly appearing traits of culture and habits of training.  He was a good thinker but not always a truly honest thinker.  Judas did not really understand himself; he was not really sincere in dealing with himself.  Andrew appointed Judas treasurer of the twelve, a position which he was eminently fitted to hold, and up to the time of the betrayal of his Master he discharged  the responsibilities of his office honestly, faithfully, and most efficiently.

There was no special trait about Jesus which Judas admired above the generally attractive and exquisitely charming personality of the Master.  Judas was never able to rise above his Judean prejudices against his Galilean associates;  he would even criticize in his mind many things about Jesus.  Him whom eleven of the apostles looked upon as the perfect man, as the “one altogether lovely and the chiefest among ten thousand,” this self-satisfied Judean often dared to criticize in his own heart.  He really entertained the notion that Jesus was timid and somewhat afraid to assert his own power and authority.

Judas was a good business man.  It required tact, ability, and patience, as well as painstaking devotion, to manage the financial affairs of such an idealist as Jesus, to say nothing of wrestling with the helter-skelter business methods of some of his apostles.  Judas really was a great executive, a farseeing and able financier.  And he was a stickler for organization.  None of the twelve ever criticized Judas.  As far as they could see, Judas Iscariot was a matchless treasurer, a learned man, a loyal (though sometimes critical) apostle, and in every sense of the word a great success.  The apostles loved Judas;  he was really one of them.  He must have believed in Jesus, but we doubt whether he really loved the Master with a whole heart. The case of Judas illustrates the truthfulness of that saying:  “There is a way that seems right to a man, but the end thereof is death.”  It is altogether possible to fall victim to the peaceful deception of pleasant adjustment to the paths of sin and death.  Be assured that Judas was always financially loyal to his Master and his fellow apostles.  Money could never have been the motive for his betrayal of the Master.

Judas was an only son of unwise parents.  When very young, he was pampered and petted;  he was a spoiled child.  As he grew up, he had exaggerated ideas about his self-importance.  He was a poor loser.  He had loose and distorted ideas about fairness; he was given to the indulgence of hate and suspicion.  He was an expert at misinterpretation of the words and acts of his friends.  All through his life Judas had cultivated the habit of getting even with those whom he fancied had mistreated him.  His sense of values and loyalties was defective.

To Jesus, Judas was a faith adventure.  From the beginning the Master fully understood the weakness of this apostle and well knew the dangers of admitting him to fellowship. But it is the nature of the Sons of God to give every created being a full and equal chance for salvation and survival. Jesus wanted not only the mortals of this world but the onlookers of innumerable other worlds to know that, when doubts exist as to the sincerity and wholeheartedness of a creature’s devotion to the kingdom, it is the invariable practice of the Judges of men fully to receive the doubtful candidate. The door of eternal life is wide open to all; “whosoever will may come”; there are no restrictions or qualifications save the faith of the one who comes.  This is just the reason why Jesus permitted Judas to go on to the very end, always doing everything possible to transform and save this weak and confused apostle. But when light is not honestly received and lived up to, it tends to become  darkness within the soul. Judas grew intellectually regarding Jesus’ teachings  about the kingdom, but he did not make progress in the acquirement of spiritual character as did the other apostles. He failed to make satisfactory personal  progress in spiritual experience.

Judas became increasingly a brooder over personal disappointment, and finally he became a victim of resentment.  His feelings had been many times hurt, and he grew abnormally suspicious of his best friends, even of the Master.  Presently he became obsessed with the idea of getting even, anything to avenge himself, yes even betrayal of his associates and his Master.

But these wicked and dangerous ideas did not take definite shape until the day when a grateful woman broke an expensive box of incense at Jesus‘ feet.  This seemed wasteful to Judas, and when his public protest was so sweepingly disallowed by Jesus right there in the hearing of all, it was too much.  That event determined the mobilization of all the accumulated hate, hurt, malice, prejudice, jealousy, and revenge of a lifetime, and he made up his mind to get even with he knew not whom; but he crystallized all the evil of his nature upon the one innocent  person in all the sordid drama of his unfortunate life just because Jesus happened to be the chief actor in the episode which marked his passing from the progressive kingdom of light into that self-chosen domain of darkness.

The Master many times, both privately and publicly, had warned Judas that he was slipping, but divine warnings are usually useless in dealing with embittered  human nature.  Jesus did everything possible, consistent with man’s moral freedom, to prevent Judas’s choosing to go the wrong way. The great test finally came. The son of resentment failed; he yielded to the sour and sordid dictates of a proud and vengeful mind of exaggerated self-importance and swiftly plunged on down into confusion, despair, and depravity. Judas then entered into the base and shameful intrigue to betray his Lord and Master and quickly carried the nefarious scheme into effect. During the outworking of his anger-conceived plans of traitorous betrayal, he experienced moments of regret and shame, and in these lucid intervals he faintheartedly conceived,  as a defense in his own mind, the idea that Jesus might possibly exert his power and deliver himself at the last moment.

When the sordid and sinful business was all over, this renegade mortal, who thought lightly of selling his friend for thirty pieces of silver to satisfy his long-nursed craving for revenge, rushed out and committed the final act in the drama of fleeing from the realities of mortal existence— suicide.  The eleven apostles were horrified, stunned.  Jesus regarded the betrayer only with pity.  The worlds have found it difficult to forgive Judas, and his name has become eschewed throughout a far-flung universe.

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It may be helpful to believers, in this and in future ages, briefly to review the causes of Judas’s downfall in the light of the Master’s remarks and in view of the accumulated enlightenment of succeeding centuries.  From The Urantia Book:

As we look back upon this tragedy, we conceive that Judas went wrong, primarily, because he was very markedly an isolated personality, a personality shut in and away from ordinary social contacts. He persistently refused to confide in, or freely fraternize with, his fellow apostles.  But his being an isolated type of personality would not, in and of itself, have wrought such mischief for Judas had it not been that he also failed to increase in love and grow in spiritual grace.

And then, as if to make a bad matter worse, he persistently harbored grudges and fostered such psychologic enemies as revenge and the generalized craving to “get even” with somebody for all his disappointments.

This unfortunate combination of individual peculiarities and mental tendencies conspired to destroy a well-intentioned man who failed to subdue these evils by love, faith, and trust.  That Judas need not have gone wrong is well proved by the cases of Thomas and Nathaniel, both of whom were cursed with this same sort of suspicion and overdevelopment of the individualistic tendency. Even Andrew and Matthew had many leanings in this direction; but all these men grew to love Jesus and their fellow apostles more, and not less, as time passed. They grew in grace and in a knowledge of the truth. They became increasingly more trustful of their brethren and slowly developed the ability to confide in their fellows.

Judas persistently refused to confide in his brethren. When he was impelled, by the accumulation of his emotional conflicts, to seek relief in self-expression, he invariably sought the advice and received the unwise consolation of his unspiritual relatives or those chance acquaintances who were either indifferent, or actually hostile, to the welfare and progress of the spiritual realities of the heavenly kingdom, of which he was one of the twelve consecrated ambassadors on earth.  Judas met defeat in his battles of the earth struggle because of the following factors of personal tendencies and character weakness:

1. He was an isolated type of human being. He was highly individualistic and chose to grow into a confirmed “shut-in” and unsociable sort of person.

2. As a child, life had been made too easy for him. He bitterly resented thwarting. He always expected to win; he was a very poor loser.

3. He never acquired a philosophic technique for meeting disappointment.  Instead of accepting disappointments as a regular and commonplace feature of human existence, he unfailingly resorted to the practice of blaming someone in particular, or his associates as a group, for all his personal difficulties and disappointments.

4. He was given to holding grudges; he was always entertaining the idea of revenge.

5. He did not like to face facts frankly; he was dishonest in his attitude toward life situations.

6. He disliked to discuss his personal problems with his immediate associates;  he refused to talk over his difficulties with his real friends and those who truly loved him. In all the years of their association he never once went to the Master with a purely personal problem.

7. He never learned that the real rewards for noble living are, after all, spiritual prizes, which are not always distributed during this one short life in the flesh.

As a result of his persistent isolation of personality, his griefs multiplied, his sorrows increased, his anxieties augmented, and his despair deepened almost beyond endurance.

While this self-centered and ultraindividualistic apostle had many psychic, emotional, and spiritual troubles, his main difficulties were: In personality, he was isolated. In mind, he was suspicious and vengeful. In temperament, he was surly and vindictive. Emotionally, he was loveless and unforgiving.  Socially, he was unconfiding and almost wholly self-contained. In spirit, he became arrogant and selfishly ambitious. In life, he ignored those who loved him, and in death, he was friendless.
These, then, are the factors of mind and influences of evil which, taken altogether, explain why a well-meaning and otherwise onetime sincere believer in Jesus, even after several years of intimate association with his transforming personality, forsook his fellows, repudiated a sacred cause, renounced his holy calling, and betrayed his divine Master.