Judas Iscariot
The short answer
Judas Iscariot was one of the twelve disciples Jesus chose. He walked the same roads as Peter and John, heard the same teaching, and even kept the group's money. Yet the Gospels remember him with the same grim phrase: the one who betrayed Jesus. For thirty pieces of silver, he led the authorities to Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane and identified him with a kiss. When he saw the outcome, Matthew tells us, he was seized with remorse, threw the silver back into the temple, and took his own life.
The obvious explanation for the betrayal is greed, and the money is certainly part of the story. But greed alone doesn't explain a man who gave up everything to follow Jesus in the first place. A deeper reading, and the one William Barclay offers, is that Judas's real failure was presumption. He would not accept Jesus as he actually was. He wanted a different kind of Messiah, and he tried to force Jesus into that mold. His tragedy, in Barclay's words, is that of someone who believed he knew better than God.
The New Testament also lingers over how Judas's story ended. In Acts 1, Peter stands up among the believers to explain that Judas's place among the Twelve must be filled. Luke interrupts Peter's speech with a parenthesis for his readers: Judas acquired a field with the reward of his wrongdoing, died a gruesome death there, and the place became known in Jerusalem as Akeldama, the Field of Blood. Peter's audience in the upper room already knew all this. Luke includes it because his readers, like us, were not there—and because the church has always understood that the story of Judas is not a footnote but a warning.
What scholars say
Barclay answers the question of what actually went wrong in Judas—not simple greed, but the refusal to accept Jesus as he was and the attempt to remake him. Bruce then explains a puzzle in Acts 1: why Luke pauses Peter's speech to describe Judas's death and the naming of the field, details Peter's own hearers would not have needed.
“However we look at it, the tragedy of Judas is that he refused to accept Jesus as he was and tried to make him what he wanted him to be. It is not Jesus who can be changed by us, but we who must be changed by Jesus. We can never use him for our purposes; we must submit to be used for his. The tragedy of Judas is that of a man who thought he knew better than God.”
“Before Luke reproduces the actual texts from the Psalter which Peter cited to establish his point, he inserts a parenthesis in order that his readers may understand the background of Peter's remarks. Peter did not need to tell his hearers in the upper room what had happened to Judas, nor can the words of verse 19, "that field came to be called in their speech Hakel-dama," be part of Peter's direct speech. But when Luke visited Jerusalem in A.D. 57, he was probably told the story of Judas's death, and he inserts it here. Judas, he was told, bought a field with his ill-gotten gain. But he did not live to enjoy the fruits of his shameful act, for he fell and sustained a fatal rupture.”
What it means for you
It is comfortable to treat Judas as a monster, someone entirely unlike ourselves. Barclay's reading removes that comfort. Judas's sin began not with hatred of Jesus but with a plan for him—a determination to make Jesus serve his own vision rather than submit to Jesus's. That temptation is very much alive. Whenever we recruit Jesus to endorse our politics, our ambitions, or our grievances, we are trying to change him instead of letting him change us. The story of Judas asks each reader a quiet, uncomfortable question: am I following Jesus as he is, or the Jesus I have made?
In context
Judas appears in all four Gospels: named among the Twelve, criticized for his handling of the money, bargaining with the chief priests, and betraying Jesus with a kiss. Matthew 27 records his remorse and death by hanging. Acts 1 picks up the story after the ascension, as about a hundred and twenty believers wait in Jerusalem. Peter argues from the Psalms that Judas's office must pass to another, and Matthias is chosen. It is here that Luke pauses to explain, for readers far from Jerusalem, how Judas died and why the field he bought was called the Field of Blood.