When we hear the name Judas, we invariably think of the most notorious
7. JUDAS: THE NON-LEARNER
When we hear the name Judas, we invariably think of the most notorious man in the Bible: Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve disciples and the eventual betrayer of Jesus. Actually, Judas – the Greek form of the Hebrew name Judah – was an extremely common name in first-century Judea and there are numerous individuals with that name mentioned in the New Testament, with the name itself occurring thirty-six times. There was an otherwise unknown Judas in the genealogy of Jesus (Luke 3:30); Judas, the brother of Jesus (Matthew 13:55); Judas the son of James, one of the twelve disciples (Luke 6:16); Judas called Barsabbas, a companion of Paul (Acts 15:22); and a number of others.
However, none of these individuals comes to mind as quickly as Judas Iscariot. His name is synonymous with betrayal; but what can we learn from the fatal error and sin of this man? Sad and distasteful as it may seem to focus on his memory, it is preserved – like everything else in the Scriptures – for our benefit and learning (2 Timothy 3:16–17).
The Names Behind the Name If we are to learn what the New Testament wants to teach us regarding Judas, we must start with the man's name. The name "Iscariot" is not a second name. The Hebrew Ish Kerioth (written in Greek as Iscariotes) means "Man of Kerioth," referring to a city of that name in Judah (Joshua 15:25). This is important because it labels Judas as an outsider, the only one of the twelve who was not from Galilee, but from the area of Judah – a fact which is biblically significant, as we will see.
The name Judas itself is the Greek form (Ioudas) of Judah – the name of one of the twelve sons of Jacob and the Israelite tribe descended from him. In New Testament times it was also the name of the southern part of Palestine which was called Judea by the Romans. Because of this background, Judas' name was directly equated with the identity of the inhabitants of Judea – the Jews themselves.
Once we realize the connection between the name Judas and both the patriarch Judah and the Jewish people, we better understand the symbolic nature of Judas' betrayal of Jesus from a biblical perspective. In the Old Testament story of the precocious Joseph, the young son of Jacob who was hated by his other brothers, it was Jacob's son Judah who
convinced his brothers to sell Joseph into slavery for twenty pieces of silver (Genesis 37:27–28). In the Gospels we see the later Judah (Judas) acting out this same role in selling Jesus into the hands of the Jewish religious leaders for thirty pieces of silver. This significance would not have been lost to the earliest Christians who knew this story well as part of their Jewish heritage. And this is especially true as the Old Testament tells us the selling of Joseph was allowed by God to bring good to his people, just as the selling of Jesus was also allowed in order to bring good to God's people.
Even more fundamentally, as a symbol of the Jewish people themselves, Judas represented those who hated, rejected, and wished to destroy Jesus. This attitude toward Jesus of many of the Jews of his day is the reason why John's Gospel tells us "He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him" (John 1:11 CSB). Judas' attitude toward Jesus was representative of the way the Jews themselves saw and unwittingly rejected their own Messiah (Mark 6:1–6; etc.).
Anatomy of a Non-Learner But if it is clear how Judas became a symbol of the rejection of Jesus, how did that rejection come about in the heart and mind of a man who spent some three years listening to the teaching of the Son of God and seeing that teaching lived out perfectly from day to day? We do not know at what point Judas began to turn against his Teacher, but it is clear that over time his rejection of Jesus – and Jesus' message – must have grown steadily stronger. The more Judas heard and saw of the truth, the more he must have learned to put it aside and not apply it to himself. The more he did that, the more Judas' heart was hardened and eventually became a fertile ground for the growth of evil itself. And that is something from which we ourselves can learn.
We tend to not see how Judas' sin might apply to us personally, because we focus only on his betrayal of Jesus. But the betrayal itself was based on a subtle but long-standing problem of denial and rejection that can apply directly to us. Do we ever put aside a truth when it is given to us? Do we ever conclude that some aspect of the way God teaches us is inconvenient, or something that we decide to deal with later? If and whenever we do not embrace, accept, and act upon any part of God's way of life, we too can begin to dull our spiritual sensibilities. When that happens, we, like Judas, can eventually become a non-learner – a person
who may hear the words but who is increasingly unlikely to live by them (James 1:23–25).
Eventually, in Judas' case, this gradual process of hardening led him to become what the apostle John called the "son of destruction" (John 17:12 ESV) – a term that interestingly is used only one other time in the New Testament: of the Antichrist (2 Thessalonians 2:3 ESV). These are extreme cases, of course, but the Bible clearly holds up Judas as an example showing how the disciple must never partially learn – that partial learning becomes non-learning and non-learning can lead eventually to failure and destruction (Hebrews 6:4–8).
On the other hand, whenever we read the story of Judas or hear his name, we can determine that we will never make that same mistake – that with God's help we will wholeheartedly accept and act on truth as it is given to us. That, sadly, was a lesson Judas never learned.