Does not he to whom you betray another. . . know that you will at another time do as much for him?
--MICHEL EYQUEM DE MONTAIGNE (1533–1592)
To say the truth, so Judas kiss’d his Master,
And cried, “All hail,” whereas he meant all harm.
--WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616)
When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself.
--ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER (1904–1991)
Judas was the son of Simon (John 6:71; John 13:2, 26), surnamed Iscariot (a man of Kerioth). His name is uniformly the last in the list of the apostles, as given in the the first three Gospels. The evil of his nature probably gradually unfolded
itself till “Satan entered into him” (John 13:27), and he betrayed our Lord (John 18:3). Afterwards he owned his sin with “an exceeding bitter cry,” and cast the money he had received as the wages of his iniquity down on the floor of the sanctuary, and “departed and went and hanged himself” (Matthew 27:5). He perished in his guilt, and “went unto his own place” (Acts 1:25). The statement in Acts 1:18 that he “fell headlong and burst
asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out,” is in no way contrary to that in Matthew 27:5. The sucide first hanged himself, perhaps over the valley of Hinnom, “and the rope giving way, or the branch to which he hung breaking, he fell down headlong on his face, and was crushed and mangled on the rocky pavement below.”
Why such a man was chosen to be an apostle we know not, but it is written that “Jesus knew from the beginning who should betray him” (John 6:64). Nor can any answer be satisfactorily given to the question as to the motives that led Judas to betray his Master. “Of the motives that have been assigned we need not care to fix on any one
as that which simply led him on. Crime is, for the most part, the result of a hundred motives rushing with bewildering fury through the mind of the criminal.”
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